Interview Date: Tuesday December 12, 1989
Interview Location: Anaheim, CA
Interviewer: Marlowe Froke
Collection: Penn State Collection
Note: Audio Only
FROKE: This is an oral history with Spencer Robert Kaitz, the first session being taken on December 12, 1989, at the Convention Center in Anaheim, California. Spencer, thank you very much for agreeing to participate in this oral history project for the National Cable Television Center and Museum. We’re grateful.
KAITZ: Delighted.
FROKE: What we’d like to do, as I mentioned earlier, is touch on your general background‑‑a brief biographical sketch, so to speak‑‑and then look at your professional career as it moved ahead in the legal profession and gravitated into the cable television business. And then we’ll look at it a little more in detail, at your career in the cable television industry, and the California Cable Television Association which you head.
Finally, you can identify what you consider some of the highlights of your career, some of the major contributions that you and your family have brought to the cable television field. Undoubtedly, we’ll also be asking you from time to time to speculate about the future. Where is cable going, so to speak.
You’re a native of California. Is that right?
KAITZ: Yes. Fourth generation native on my mother’s side.
FROKE: You have spent some time on the genealogy tables. Or is that something that was done elsewhere within your family?
KAITZ: There was a professor, I believe, at the University of Iowa who did a study of my mother’s family, dating it back to England in the 1600s. I know that from some letters that I found at my grandmother’s house that I still have. The family came from Missouri and settled in northern California in the 1870s. There was an interesting correspondence in the 1900s between the families, around 1900, in California and Missouri.
FROKE: Were they farmers?
KAITZ: Yes. As far back as I can tell, they were farmers.
FROKE: They made that cold northern trek into California.
KAITZ: It was not too cold. It was along the coast and it was warmer than the Midwest.
FROKE: Your birth date was 1948?
KAITZ: Yes.
FROKE: Do you have any brothers or sisters?
KAITZ: I have three sisters, all younger.
FROKE: Do they live in the California area, too?
KAITZ: Yes.
FROKE: Your father was a lawyer and spent a great deal of time in the cable business as well as being active with the state legislature on a number of other items. Could you briefly talk about your father and his career, and how he got involved in cable TV?
KAITZ: My father was born in Russia. The family were leather merchants. They fled the Russian revolution because the story has it that they were marked for extermination as middle class. He grew up in south Boston in a fairly rough neighborhood. It is rougher now than it was then. It was an immigrant neighborhood in those days.
He got a newspaper boy scholarship to Harvard. In World War II, he was a first lieutenant in the artillery. He was in ROTC at Harvard and given an officer’s commission, but because he was an immigrant, the commission was taken away. When war broke out, and we got serious about it, they gave him his commission back. He had quite an outstanding war record. He landed at Normandy at about D + 12. He went all the way through France and Germany, and ended up in Czechoslovakia. Then he came back. He was scheduled to go to Harvard Law School but he got back too late to make that class so he enlisted for another nine months.
Because he was fluent in both German and French, he was promptly sent to Japan where he met my mother. He had a wonderful war record, but he went AWOL to make sure he had a first date with my mother in Japan. The Army commander on his ship announced that he would make sure that he emerged as a private. He was traveling under sealed orders that required that he report directly to General McArthur. For that reason he was not court martialed.
He never regretted that he went AWOL. He came back from Japan after serving as a security officer for the Bank of Tokyo. They had a problem of catching some uncut diamonds on the wife of the previous security officer. That was why he was under sealed orders to arrive and take over that position.
He went to law school and then to work with the legislature. He had, as he told me, several job offers. They were with the district attorney’s office, a law firm, and the legislature. The legislature sounded interesting so he decided to pursue that.
His involvement with cable started around 1960. I’ve heard mention of ’58 and one of ’60 so I’m not sure which date. He was hired to get a bill passed by the legislature to legitimatize the cable franchises that existed in the scattered rural areas of California. Almost all of them were small systems at that time. The bill that he passed is still in the government code. It authorized cities to grant franchises and authorized them to make use of public easements.
In 1960, cable for him was a rather minor client. My father represented the California Real Estate Association, a major entity. And he represented the broadcasting industry. But his largest area of activity in the ’60s was with public employees. He represented over 100,000 county employees through a county employment organization. He was responsible for the passing of landmark legislation in the ’60s that is now called the Meyers Milias‑Brown Act. It was the first collective bargaining legislation for public employees in the state of California. It is still on the books today, pretty much unchanged from the version that he had passed in the mid ’60s.
FROKE: The bill was called the Meyers‑Milias‑Brown Act.
KAITZ: Yes. During the ’60s the cable industry continued to grow and problems continued to proliferate. In the ’60s, the major difficulties cable faced were efforts to put them under the Public Utilities Commission. The theory was that cable was some sort of rural necessity and should be regulated as a public utility. Their opponents wanted to create translators that were state supported as a more efficient way of bringing television to rural areas. There was no opposition by the cable industry really to subscription supported translators. There was great opposition to locally financed translators that would essentially be supported by taxes and therefore would undercut cable.
There were some long and bitter battles in the legislature. Throughout this time, there was a steady although not dramatic increase in systems, and it became clear that there was a need for greater organization in the industry. Occasional meetings and unpaid volunteer positions and other things began to be a liability as the problems increased in magnitude.
My mother became the de facto secretary/treasurer of the cable association. My father was put on a retainer as general counsel. He also provided an office and staffing for the organization. He worked out of his house by and large in those days.
FROKE: Your mother’s name was Idell?
KAITZ: Yes.
FROKE: You mentioned that he had met her in Japan. What had brought her to Japan?
KAITZ: She was a member of the military government team in charge of teaching Japanese women that they weren’t chattels, but in fact were equal under the law‑‑American law‑‑being established by General McArthur. Women had the right to vote, a right to property and a right to self‑respect.
FROKE: So she was in the women’s movement very, very early.
KAITZ: My mother never thought of herself as being in the women’s movement. I think it’s interesting to recognize what an enormous gap existed. My mother would have thought of herself as a conservative and in the ’60s was not an enthusiast of the women’s movement. On the other hand she came from an American culture and also a western U.S. culture. The west was the place where my grandmother got a degree. It was from the University of California in 1920. In fact she got her master’s degree there. So she and my mother and other western women thought of themselves as conservative and not part of the women’s movement, but they assumed that they would have the opportunity for education, that they would have the opportunity to hold whatever job they aspired to. It was, therefore, an interesting situation. My mother was really not an early women’s libber but simply a western version of a liberated woman. What she saw in Japan she found to be beyond comprehension.
FROKE: Your mother was of that time period when many of the advances of the women’s suffrage movement were being solidified and being made practical and realistic.
KAITZ: I think that’s true, but I think it’s something even more than that. The women on my Mom’s side of the family were very strong personalities and they ran businesses and they went to college. My grandmother was described as the backbone of the Presbyterian Congregational church in Cloverdale. In their self‑image, they never saw themselves as second‑class citizens even though they were not of an age where they frankly wanted to break some of the molds in which women were placed. For example, my mother became a school teacher because that was a traditional thing that women did and I think that, in essence, she was a generation behind women of the ’60s and ’70s who with the same talent would have become a lawyer like my father. She represented the triumphs as you say of the early elements of the women’s movement and the role of women in the west. I don’t think she had attitudes that were as aggressive as later became prevalent.
FROKE: We’ll get into this in more detail at a later time but it would be a most appropriate thing to mention at this point that the values that your mother held were recognized by the cable industry with a major award which is presented by the cable industry to a woman who has made a major contribution to the cable industry.
KAITZ: I think that, of course, came out of the role she played in the formation of the organization. Bill Bresnan and other people recognized that it was my mother who was actually the organization builder in the sense that she made a career of getting to know the members of the organization, making sure that the organization gave good service to its members. She was responsible for much of the growth of the Western Cable Show. She managed it in a practical manner. She was in that tradition of women who were pushing their way into the workforce and being recognized for their competency.
FROKE: As you look at the cable industry in detail, you find that husband‑wife combinations are quite common.
KAITZ: It’s interesting to me that you should mention that because the Kaitz family relationship with CCTA was, in fact, a family relationship. In the ’60s, for example, my sisters and I used to participate in conventions and we would help out with mailings. I did clerical assignments. It was very much the tradition of a small family business that was the California Cable Television Association. My sister and I were behind convention registration counters. It was a very personalized kind of service that was given to everybody.
FROKE: So the growth of the Association in a sense mirrors the industry itself‑‑the family cable systems? The Ma and Pa type operations that were characteristic of the early cable systems.
KAITZ: I think that’s a very profound observation, Marlowe. Up through the ’70s, cable was primarily a family operation. There were some systems that were owned by larger operations like TelePrompTer which was one of our major members in those days. But even with them you still had people who generally were with the company a long period of time and lived in the community for a long time. Today we have a cadre which moves from one system to the next. Their experience grows. The business in the old days had a very personal flavor to it.
FROKE: A few additional details … You mentioned the context of your mother’s work in Japan. How did she get the position that she held?
KAITZ: Again, I think it was typical of what happened to women. She went into teaching because …
FROKE: Did she go to Japan as a teacher?
KAITZ: No. She went into teaching and got a degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where my grandmother had gone before her, and where I went to school as well. Then when the war came along, they didn’t need teachers, they needed engineers. My mother was quite talented in artistic activities. In fact my grandmother’s master’s degree was art. She essentially became an engineer. She did the accident reports for Pan American Airways, for four years, which involved drawing all the detailed diagrams of broken parts and evaluating the evidence brought in as to why the accident occurred. She was essentially working as an engineer when this position opened up. I actually don’t know why she applied for a job with the State Department. I think basically it was an interest in travel and seeing new sights, if I know my mother well.
FROKE: In the evaluation of her application, they undoubtedly saw the educational background, the professional applications, and saw a beautiful match in terms of working with women in Japan.
KAITZ: Her background was, of course, a teacher. A professional who had been out in the work force on her own for many years.
FROKE: Your father completed his law degree at the University of California at Berkeley?
KAITZ: Yes.
FROKE: So your mother’s University of California and your father’s University of California, and your grandmother and so on. And you were, too.
KAITZ: Yes. And all of my sisters. One sister went to Berkeley and the other two went to Davis.
FROKE: What are the names of your sisters?
KAITZ: Carolyn Caligiuri, Patricia Pascoe, and Gwendolyn Morris.
FROKE: Was it a given based on your close family relationships that you would go on and be a lawyer?
KAITZ: It was never anything that was said. My father was supposed to become the doctor for his family, coming out of a traditional European style family. He resented that. In fact he was born to a Jewish family and was apparently pushed so hard by his family that he left Judaism and became a Congregationalist at Harvard which was rather unusual. He refused to have anything to do with medicine after World War II because he said he had seen enough blood. He kind of broke the mold and went away. I think for that reason he was always very careful not to encourage me into any particular type of career. But he did involve me in the business.
FROKE: And you felt comfortable with it?
KAITZ: I felt comfortable. I remember going to school and saying that I’m either going to be a doctor, a lawyer or a professor. I didn’t really focus on anything more than that but I migrated toward political science courses and writing courses and didn’t spend as much time in the science courses although my specialty in high school had actually been science, so that I just evolved toward law.
FROKE: Both your B.A. and your L.L.B. degrees were from the University of California at Berkeley?
KAITZ: Yes.
FROKE: You met your wife at Berkeley?
KAITZ: Yes.
FROKE: And she is a lawyer, too?
KAITZ: She is a lawyer, also.
FROKE: Her name is Roberta, I believe.
KAITZ: Yes. Roberta Marchisio. Roberta is a graduate of Vassar. I thought she was distinctive because she was one of the very attractive female law students and there weren’t too many female law students in those days. Most of them seemed to be trying to become more male than the men. Roberta was one of the few exceptions to that. We got along very well.
FROKE: Is she practicing law now?
KAITZ: She runs a business and does some legal practice in conjunction with that. Her history is that she went to work in the district attorney’s office and had a successful career there. Two anecdotes illustrate that.
The men used to keep track of how many trials they would win and they had a lot of drunk driving cases which actually are rather hard to try because the jury tends to be a bit sympathetic towards somebody who’s had a drink or two and often times the defendant is very appealing. He hasn’t done anything wrong other than being picked up. People become partial to the defendant and forget just how terrible the consequences of drinking and driving can be.
One day they were tallying up the wins and somebody figured out that Roberta had the best record in the office. She had twelve wins, two ties and no losses so they named her “Killer.”
About 1978 I had started a real estate business because when I first went to work for the Association, I did not want to be full time. I had this vision that if I worked only for a trade association I’d end up like a government bureaucrat. Having listened to so many cable operators complain so bitterly about government bureaucrats and people who had never made a payroll, I knew that I didn’t want to be one. I wasn’t exactly sure what they were but I knew I didn’t want to be one. I went originally part time with the Association.
I was actually scheduled to be with a law firm. The actual impetus in joining the Association came out of my mother’s death and my father’s despondency over that.
I decided for a couple years I would help my father out, but I didn’t want to be full time so I started a small law practice but primarily a real estate business. Eventually my wife left the district attorney’s office to take over the real estate business because both it and the Association were growing. I complained to her that I was either going to have to leave the cable association or get a partner in the real estate business.
FROKE: She is continuing to manage the real estate business?
KAITZ: Yes, it’s quite a successful business. She has about twenty people working for her.
FROKE: That’s in Oakland?
KAITZ: Well, she owns apartment houses that are scattered through the Bay Area and Central Valley.
FROKE: You have two daughters?
KAITZ: Yes.
FROKE: I would guess that one is about twelve now and the other is about nine years of age. And their names are Diana and Monica. They probably will go on to be lawyers, too.
KAITZ: I think they’ll go on to have a good education. I followed my father’s tradition of not wanting to push them towards any one thing. My wife is bilingual and our interest in education generally combined with her interest in French has resulted in our children going to a bilingual school and getting an exceptional education. Both are fluent in French. Diana, in the fifth grade, was an exchange student to France and found French schools to be rather easy.
FROKE: Where do you live now? Your family home?
KAITZ: We live in Piedmont.
FROKE: Piedmont, California, which is a suburb of Oakland, or don’t you refer to it as a suburb of Oakland?
KAITZ: I like Oakland so I have no problem with it. Some Oaklanders might.
FROKE: You were graduated from the law school at the University of California in about 1971 or ’72 and then took a position as a staff lawyer with a prominent law firm in Oakland.
KAITZ: No, I was with a law firm in San Francisco. In a sense, I was scheduled to go to work with a law firm for them. I had been working for them on my summers and part time during the year, which is the normal progression into a firm. I advised them that I would not be able to go with them for a couple of years because of my Dad’s illness. They were very enthusiastic about the possibility of my coming and, in fact, kept an association up for some years until it became clear that I had finally elected not to join them. It was family reasons having to do with my Dad’s despondency over my mother’s death that caused me to feel that I should to go to work for him for a while.
FROKE: The name of the law firm that you worked for on a short‑term basis was Hansen?
KAITZ: It was Hansen Bridgett Marcus Milne and Vellayes. The name has now changed.
FROKE: Your mother died in 1971?
KAITZ: Yes.
FROKE: Then your father died in about two or three years?
KAITZ: No, my father died December 30, 1979.
FROKE: Your father and mother were so close that your father had a very difficult time recovering from the death.
KAITZ: Yes. It was very hard on him. He just couldn’t get up.
FROKE: During the 1973 through ’80 period, you served as an assistant to him, and working with the California Association, getting your real estate business started.
KAITZ: My father also revitalized during that period. He remarried and after about two years, he was rather well recovered … 1971, ’72 and ’73 were very hard on him.
FROKE: In 1980 you took over as the chief executive of the California Association. Your title now with the Association is president of the California Cable Television Association.
FROKE: Yolanda Barco also asked me to bring greetings to you. She was the first woman to receive the Idell Kaitz award.
KAITZ: She was one of the really important people in the cable business.
FROKE: She regards that as the most important award that she has ever received. She was very, very flattered to receive it.
One of the things that I noted when I was looking through some items is that your father, as a lobbyist, also represented a physical therapist association. Was there any idiosyncrasy about that or did it just happen to be a client?
KAITZ: No, they were a client. He represented a lot of professional and public employee groups. In the ’60s, that was really his specialty. He also represented the marshalls who served as deputies to the court. He represented them actually all the way up to the time of his death in 1980.
FROKE: One title that I also saw for your father was legislative counsel. Was that something different from his relationships as a counsel for the cable people, the broadcasters, and so on?
KAITZ: I think that would just be a title that was used. My father was the classic family businessman. But he turned into a profession as opposed to a shopkeeper. He had very, very strong personal ties with the businesses that he handled, and he had what I thought we could call a nurturing relationship. That’s why his relationship with cable, both his and my mother’s, was so significant at the time, a time when the industry was fragmented and many people in it weren’t really sure whether they were in as a career or just in it for a short time.
Other cable people were very suspicious of their peers and weren’t sure why they should be working together. One of his great contributions was to bring them into a cohesive organization. This came at a time when most people belonged to state and national associations. Professional associations are enormously important. Probably in the next decade they may have more to do with profitability and survival of the cable industry than almost any other factor because of the kinds of problems that are challenging us.
It’s hard at this time to go back and remember that in the ’60s the membership of CCTA was only 50 percent of the cable companies in California. I remember my father, inch by inch trying to get various companies to join, and having a very hard time. He spent years campaigning to get small and mid‑sized companies to join the organization. It required that very personal role. I think many of them ultimately joined because of his personality and my Mom’s personality and the personal friendships rather than a sophisticated understanding of one of the stakes. And yet, what was also interesting was that the people who selected my father had a vision of cable even at that time that at many ways was remarkable. They didn’t simply select somebody who was inexpensive or perhaps somebody who was one of their friends in the industry. They went to a graduate of Harvard, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, who was considered by reputation as one of the best people in Sacramento. They went after a real quality person who I think was quite a bit more expensive than they might have otherwise gone for.
We had an interesting situation where we had a very highly educated, well‑paid professional brought into a small infant industry. The professional at the same time had the patience and interest to nurture it along and build it up and always treated the cable association as if it were his. Every dime was spent as if it were his money, which means that it was spent very carefully.
FROKE: As you have talked about some of the background of your family, and some of the characteristics of the California Cable Television Association, everything is beginning to fit into the pattern. For instance, the Walter Kaitz Foundation. Were you instrumental in founding that?
KAITZ: Yes. When my father became sick in 1979, it became clear to me that he was too sick to expect to go back to the full‑time kind of work that he had had before. My father was a person with a surprising amount of energy. He didn’t seem to require a lot of sleep. At convention time he would get up at seven in the morning and was rarely in bed by two or three. His heart condition was such that it seemed that that was not going to be possible. I was trying to think of something that would be interesting for him, knowing he could stay involved with the association, but might need new interests. I thought of the idea of the foundation initially, frankly thinking about it as something that might be done in relationship to cable legislation. I discussed it with him a couple of times when he was sick.
I should have seen signs of his coming death but, it was a great surprise to me. It shocked me when he passed away.
I had been toying with the idea of a foundation without having any specific purpose in mind. When he did pass away, I put out word to people that rather than sending flowers, which I felt we’d get in some abundance, it would be nice if they could send some money also, and we might think of a use for it.
What really, of course, started the foundation off as a serious enterprise was that while I received a lot of $100 and $200 checks, a few months later, Bill Daniels called up and said, “I want to make a contribution of $25,000. That was a much bigger number than had ever occurred to me before. Shortly after that, Ralph Sweat, who was then the president of Times‑Mirror Cable, called up and said the Times‑Mirror Foundation at my request has agreed to contribute $30,000; $10,000 a year over the next three years. I think Ed Allen and others had secured from NCTA a $5,000 contribution.
The word of the foundation and the desire people had to do something in memory of Walter Kaitz‑‑even though there had been no mention of a purpose and the foundation consisted only of a bank account at that point‑‑resulted in generous contributions having accumulated to what at that time seemed to be a serious amount of money in the bank. I began spending more effort to think through what kind of foundation would make sense.
In 1980 I didn’t act on that because we were in an extraordinarily busy period. In 1979 we had just passed the first state deregulation bill after a very bitter bruising battle of the legislature. In 1980 we had been shocked to find that the area where we thought we had always been the leaders which was pole rental rates, had suddenly blown up in our face. The PUC, acting on a statute we had passed in ’78, came out with a pole rate that was three to four times higher‑‑actually more like six to eight times higher than we had expected.
In response to that I was back in the legislature pounding the corridors with Al Gilliland, Gail Oldfather and other cable operators, to try to get the legislature to reverse the PUC. It was another unprecedented achievement since no one could ever remember them setting a rate for the PUC and no one could ever remember them reversing a PUC decision. But the result was that. And it was a very hard year. I was suffering from the after‑effects of my father’s death and the trauma of trying to get this legislation passed and having no father to run to, to ask for advice and counsel.
The foundation really didn’t get a good focus of my attention until ’81. In ’81 the cable industry had its first minority chair; Gwen Moor chairing a subcommittee on cable. Gwen was very interested in developing opportunities for more minorities in this growing industry. I could see a very difficult and bitter legislative confrontation occurring which no side would win. It’s very hard to oppose legislation opening up opportunities for minorities and other people, yet, at the same time, that legislation almost always has sanctions and other elements thrown in that are frightening and perhaps even inappropriate. My concerns with the industry and the political battle facing the industry and the presence of this foundation suddenly emerged into a thought: perhaps we could convince Gwen that she should give us a chance to try to solve the problem ourselves. In discussions with her I laid out this idea. She was willing to give it a shot. She admitted that legislation had had a rather spotty record.
There had been all sorts of efforts and programs. The effort to force integration and business had not been successful and resulted in anger and litigation which seemed almost to create a more hostile environment for minorities than before.
She was very interested in the idea that the cable industry would try to integrate from within and that the leadership for doing that would not be foisted on the industry. There would not be some group attacking cable nor some legislative rules. The impetus would, in fact, be made up of the leadership of the industry working within their own companies in an organized fashion to develop opportunities for minorities. The industry embraced the concept that it wanted to be the first media industry that could say that its executive suites had people in them that mirrored those that subscribed to the service.
FROKE: The purpose of the foundation that you developed is very, very close to the emphasis that your father placed on human services. Was he himself involved in minority rights?
KAITZ: He was involved in it in the same way that the foundation is. In other words, he saw it as part of his job. I think the best answer to the question would be to say that there were really two themes that ran through my father’s life, both of which you need to understand to see the significance of the foundation in relation to him.
First, my father was an immigrant. He came from a family that had they stayed in Russia, they believed that they would have been shot. The story is that they actually were jailed and it was a poor relative who bribed the jailer with a bottle of vodka that saved them from the firing squad. In a sense it doesn’t matter about the facts of it. The reality is that he and his family felt enormously grateful to be in this country and enormously grateful that people could come from another country, speak no English, and succeed.
FROKE: So he viewed some of the minority problems in the United States within the context of the immigrant?
KAITZ: Yes. I don’t think he made much distinction between problems of immigrants and problems of minorities, ethnic issues. For him, America was the promised land. It was a land where everybody should have an opportunity to prosper. There were a number of resulting views. He was a strong believer in public education. He was a strong believer in equal access to public education. In that sense he was very much part of the tide of concern that swept over the country from Brown v. Board of Education, throwing out separate but equal schools. He had worked for Arthur Breed.
Arthur Breed was a Senator. When the University of California came in for a budget allocation of $100 million, Breed would say, “Couldn’t you really use $120 million? I don’t think this is an adequate request.” Senator Breed was part of a group of people who helped build the University of California by overfunding it. My father’s whole view was that America’s destiny was to be the land where people of all races, creeds, colors, backgrounds would get along and would thrive and have opportunity. He was very opposed to the restrictions on immigration. He was very opposed to any efforts to limit the opportunities for any racial group.
The second thing: in the cable industry he also saw the problem developing of access to the industry for people who weren’t part of the old pioneers to get in. He took an active role in the NCTA equal affairs committee which was chaired by Dick Munro for a while. I think that he felt that there were some political tides that were particularly clear in California because California, will within a decade, be a minority state in the sense of having that kind of ethnic diversity. He saw the political tides present in Sacramento and felt that the industry needed to be aggressive in championing the cause of minorities who had talent and wanted to be in the industry.
FROKE: What is your assessment of the outcome of the foundation today? It’s a new foundation. Five or six years is really not a measure of what can happen. Do you feel optimistic about what will happen in the area?
KAITZ: Yes I do. It’s interesting though. This is an issue that the trustees spent some time on. The foundation mission proved to be much harder to accomplish than any of us thought. I thought with a small or even a part‑time staff we could probably set the program up and get it going. On the one hand, our objectives became larger. We looked originally at placing six people a year in fellowships. Trustees now want to be able to do twenty to twenty-five consistently and want planning for forty.
The task of recruitment was more complicated than expected. As it turns out, you really have to go out and market yourself, developing techniques from the industry that we exist in. Since cable has become so good at marketing, we learned to market ourselves to the industry.
It’s also complex to place people in companies. It requires a strong commitment by the company. There are companies who like to promote from within. It’s not easy to bring someone else in, particularly since we’re only interested in bringing people into the industry who are going into management positions. Moreover we’re bringing people in who don’t have cable experience. Almost all of the people who request or advertise for managers, want to have cable experience.
We have a lot of obstacles to overcome. Some of the obstacles are obvious ones, but will have quite a dramatic impact. For example, geographical considerations: a company has a job in the northeast and we have a perfect candidate, but a candidate from Southern California doesn’t want to move to the northeast. We have a fair amount of difficulty convincing minorities, in particular, to take positions in the Midwest. There are lots of small systems in the Midwest and the smaller towns of the U.S.
There are not large minority populations in these towns. Those small systems are the training grounds for the kind of managers who will later go on to a Philadelphia or another place. It’s not easy to convince minorities to go to these towns and put their time in.
End of Tape 1, Side A
FROKE: Do you have any statistics at this time on the number of minorities who have been placed and then retained in management positions within the cable industry?
KAITZ: I believe there are about forty to forty-five people currently in management positions in the cable industry who have come through the foundation program. Some of those came through as fellows and others were direct hires. More and more we are finding that we are putting people in direct hire positions.
I think an even harder question is what’s the total effect of the foundation. We knew that cable jobs are not easy to get. People often show up at my office wondering how to get into cable. The fact is that it’s such a desirable industry to get into that every time we ever advertised for a position we’ve gotten 400 plus resumes, and then we never hired off the resumes. We always ended up hiring somebody who applied but also who we knew and knew a lot about. So it was in a sense the popularity of cable that made us feel that it’s important to create a new avenue for minorities to get in.
Once they were in the industry, we assumed that they would, in fact, talk to their friends and there would be a multiplicative effect, bringing more minorities in. I never studied the multiplicative effect although I know personally that the situation works. Fellows like Earl Jones who was manager of Bay Cable in Berkeley brought several minorities into the industry. Ruth Baldwin and others I know came through the program and have, in fact, done just that. I’m rather hopeful that there are ninety or so minority executives as a result of the forty-five who have come in.
We find that their path in the industry is very similar to that of other cable executives. They get raided often by other companies and they move them around a bit between companies. But once they are established in industry with a good reputation, they don’t leave the industry. If they leave at all it’s to a very closely related field. There are a couple who are working now in the movie industry. One is in broadcasting. That is also useful because people come in and out of those businesses. They come from those businesses back into the cable industry. The objective is to create a bigger pool of minorities.
FROKE: We have a similar endeavor on a much smaller scale with our public television station. About twenty years ago we started a minority training program with our public TV station. You mentioned the people who move into other jobs within the industry. WPSX our public TV station has become a hiring source for other programs within the University. Once in awhile you sort of wish that they would stay with you. On the long haul we have some very good friends in the rest of the University community as a result of the program. It’s all a part of the big picture anyway.
You also identified a context for the Idell Kaitz Award, all of the circumstances through which that developed. Do you have any observations about the award and how you personally feel about it at this time?
KAITZ: The Idell Kaitz Award is significant because cable, I think, was an industry that was kind of a crucible in which you could see the changing role of women. It was an industry, therefore, that appropriately recognized women as a major force. In the ’60s, women like my mother and Yolanda Barco and Anne Marie Hutchinson were often found paired up with strong families that were involved in businesses. Carolyn Chambers is another name that comes to mind. Most executives in the industry were still male.
In the ’70s the revolution created by the satellite, the arrival of more programming, resulted in the ’80s in an explosion of positions. The cable industry to its credit did not have any strong male ethic that was anti‑female. It had a strong ethic but it wasn’t an anti‑female ethic. I saw lots and lots of people‑‑in particular a lot of women‑‑hired in that period. As the industry continued to expand and opportunities opened up, we ended up with a number of women as presidents of major programming services, such as Kay Koplovitz.
FROKE: USA Network?
KAITZ: Cable was an industry in which integration of the work force along male female lines worked well. One of the major discussions we had when the Walter Kaitz Foundation was founded was whether we should be targeting women for employment in the industry. We concluded that while there were still not as many women executives that would mirror the population as a whole, frankly there were so many well‑placed women executives and they were so important in the industry that there really didn’t seem to be any discrimination operating.
FROKE: It became a challenge then to recognize those who were performing at a superb level?
KAITZ: It was appropriate to the award like the Idell Kaitz Award to recognize those who were doing well. There were organizations like Women in Cable who were already providing a lot of networking. Frankly, the nicest thing that we were able to say in the early ’80s is that when we look at the Kaitz Foundation, it wasn’t needed to help out women. There are optimists among us who hope that by 2000 it won’t be needed for minorities either.
FROKE: I can only speculate because I can’t pull the dates off the top of my head, but I believe that Women in Cable was one of the first women’s media organizations, preceding the Women in Broadcasting and Women in Advertising.
KAITZ: I don’t know the history of that, Marlowe. Lucille Larkin is someone who you should be talking to. She knows that history intimately. I became involved in Women in Cable very early on and I remain an active member. I think it’s a fine organization.
FROKE: I was thinking as you were talking a while back about your family and the relationships of some of the things that were accomplished in the California Association that were not necessarily in the total tradition of a trade organization, so to speak. You did have within the California Association a Foundation for Community Service Programming. Did that relate to your father’s feeling that cable television had to have a strong local programming sense? What is the historical background of that?
KAITZ: The historical background of that is that it was the product of a piece of legislation that deregulated the industry. The governor’s office, the Governor was Jerry Brown, had people who were very interested in community programming. What they wanted was a quid pro quo. They weren’t opposed per se to deregulation because we had made the case that there would be a great deal of additional programming and a great deal of additional opportunity. They wanted to make sure that the opportunity flowed in ways that they felt were beneficial. They were particularly interested in community programming. The idea was for a cable system to operate a large community closed‑circuit network. They required that a foundation be set up, and they required companies to put fifty cents a year per subscriber into the foundation.
When the deregulation legislation passed, cities looked at the fact that companies could deregulate. They were inclined to work with the companies. The companies, of course, actually hated the idea of deregulating. Even though it was legal and the court challenges were all successfully knocked down, they were all going to need to be refranchised at some point by the city. The legislation served more as a framework for better city‑company relations and for giving the companies opportunity to launch themselves into the modern era of cable where they could afford to make the investment in more plant. That left the foundation underfunded because fewer companies than we had expected actually opted into the program. The result was that the California Association had to come in and provide a great deal of money and staffing support, for we wanted to live up to that portion of our commitment in the original legislation.
There was always some controversy about that. There was a feeling that if you had to subsidize community programming, the communities didn’t want that as much as they wanted some of the other services that were clearly cost‑effective. Whether it’s Cable News Network or Arts & Entertainment, I think what we’ve seen now is that a lot of local programming is doing very well. It is very well‑supported by the community. The companies are very happy with it. At that time there was more controversy. We had just been through a lot of franchising. In the franchising process, there was often a battle where local groups tried to extract as much as they could from the company. So the companies then had a dim view of community programming.
To the credit of the Association, there was an effort to make the Community Service Foundation work. It did, in fact, fund video projects all over the state. It drew up guidelines and handbooks on how to effectively organize communities. It set a model which was a helpful one. The foundation took a cooperative approach at a time when things had been confrontational. In doing so, it got cable operators to become more enthusiastic and community groups to become more realistic.
FROKE: You now feel that Community Service Programming can move ahead pretty much on its own based on the interrelationships of the local cable systems with their communities.
KAITZ: The foundation eventually was in a supporting role. There was lots of community programming going on, and there wasn’t a need for a statewide organization, a statewide network.
FROKE: The foundation itself has been discontinued, isn’t that right?
KAITZ: Yes. I think what we found is that community programming works well where the community really becomes involved through a school district or through organizations which take continuing responsibility for providing programming.
FROKE: Every once in a while one speculates about how things might have moved along more effectively if Ralph Smith had never written his book about The Wired Nation. It raised levels of expectation and demand that sometimes were difficult to work with.
KAITZ: I can’t resist telling a story on that, Marlowe. I have a good friend who is still very active in the industry. Ray Joslin came out to build the cable system in Stockton, working for Amos “Bud” Hostetter and Continental Cablevision. Stockton was built as a model system. It was multi‑channel, state-of-the-art, excellent studio facilities. Amos and Ray really bought the concept that community programming could be an important element. In those days when we didn’t have the satellite distribution‑‑in the early ’70s‑‑we needed programming.
Community programming seemed like a logical place to get programming. You could then convince people that it was sufficiently important that they should subscribe.
Ray put together an excellent studio and set up a slightly more elaborate process than he would have done if he had a little more experience. Anyway he set up a process for working with all the community groups. A huge fight erupted among the community groups, a gargantuan battle in which as he described it, they spent two to three years tearing each other apart over who was going to use the equipment and how they were going to use it, when they were going to use it, during which time nobody put on any programming. The upshot was that he got quite disenchanted with community programming and sold off much of the equipment. Community programming took a giant step back.
FROKE: Could you give me a little background on the origins of the Western Cable Show?
KAITZ: The Western Cable Show was first held in a place called Vacation Village in San Diego which exists to this day. It’s rather more modest than the facilities we’re in today. It was an idea that my mother and father had that there ought to be an annual convention. There had been annual meetings but never a trade show. What was distinctive about it, therefore, was to have a trade show.
After two years at Vacation Village they moved to the Del Coronado. Some people liked the Del Coronado enough that there was almost a move to freeze the size of the industry so that the industry could always be permanently ensconced at the Del Coronado which is a beautiful facility and we now use it for board meetings, but have long since outgrown it. In 1972, Marlowe, we had the first big convention here in the Disneyland Hotel. It’s pretty hard to believe it’s the same industry when you look back at the small size of the industry in those days. Yet, at the same time, there are people who remember those conventions and who to this day are still nostalgic about them because you could see virtually everybody who was anybody in the western cable business and almost all of the national leaders at the Del Coronado.
FROKE: It’s almost of the scale of the National Cable Television Association.
KAITZ: Yes, the Western Show is big.
FROKE: You mentioned it draws about 10,000 people from all over the country. You have about 800 exhibitors.
KAITZ: I think the number of exhibitors may be less than that but the total square footage of the exhibit hall is 300,000 square feet.
FROKE: That brings out the programmers, as well as the manufacturers of equipment, and other services?
KAITZ: Yes.
FROKE: Did your mother and father feel that something like this would have an educational value for the industry as a whole?
KAITZ: There were several motivations. One was educational. In those days the convention was important because there were no training programs within companies. So the convention was sort of a training ground. Today, I think, the role has changed; but in those days it was a training ground. Another problem that my father and other state and national executives continually faced was that the glue that bound the industry was very weak in those days. There were lots of companies off doing their own 500 or 1,000 subscriber system and yet we were facing terrible problems with the FCC, the continual battle with the legislature over whether to regulate as a utility, and other problems.
So throughout the ’60s and ’70s, you see, my father tried to convince the volunteer board to have two day board meetings, and engage them in a number of steps to try and bind the industry together. He wanted longer meetings, and he felt that there would be some social elements where they would get to know each other and thus there would be personal loyalties that would bind them together. Having a convention and seminars was a part of this strategy. My parents started a program of seminars on various kinds of topics such as how to do installations properly, labor law issues, and unionization questions. The Association had an educational role with hundreds of small companies. Now TCI and ATC and others do this internally.
We also had the need to try to bind all of these companies into a cohesive political front so that we could survive.
FROKE: Was there anything in the establishment of the Western Show that dealt with the size of the country itself? There’s the eastern establishment and the Western Coast. Was there conflict between the western leaders and the eastern leaders that played a part in any way?
KAITZ: There was always a strong esprit de corps in California. There was some difference of opinion on some issues. One that I think was the most striking was the pole issue. The California organization became quite expert at the issue of what it cost to put poles in the ground and it developed a very aggressive strategy for dealing with the monopoly that AT&T enjoyed on poles in most parts of the country. At that time you could get a franchise to build your plant in a city but the franchise was worthless unless you could get contact with the poles. Since we didn’t have the legislation or even precedents that we have now, the poles belonged solely to AT&T. Unless the city would allow you to put your own set of poles in, your ability to build the franchise was purely at their mercy.
Originally they were willing to let you use their poles at reasonable fees if you agreed not to carry anything that they viewed as two‑way programming or potentially competitive. Then they became interested in cable as a business. In some famous and well‑documented situations, they simply shut off pole access and began building their own lease‑back system and forcing companies to take those. Well, the up‑shot of that was that there was a strong feeling by many in the industry that we had to make a deal with AT&T coming into the ’70s. The California organization became convinced that a deal at any price was not a deal but was a sell‑out, and that AT&T was sufficiently vulnerable politically that we should hold out for a cost‑based deal.
A great battle erupted in which Strat Smith played a major role between the California board, the national board and some of the other strong state associations like Pennsylvania. The national board wanted to go for what was called the trendline. AT&T said here’s a schedule of rates: we’ll negotiate some compromises. Basically your rates will start at $2.50 and we’ll add fifty cents a year. Under the trendline approach we would have been paying about $12 or $14 a pole by 1980 and maybe $20 a pole today.
The California organization had very bitter battles with the telephone industry but had become convinced that their cost of the pole was really much less than could be justified. Ultimately the evidence showed that. AT&T had something in the neighborhood of $40 total investment of the pole and it depreciated it out over the years. We insisted on cost‑based pricing.
The national voted at one point to settle. Only by a very narrow vote did they agree that they would not settle until California settled.
I remember going through heated battles. It was quite testy because many of the national leaders had their managers on the California board. Their managers on the California board were united in opposing the settlement that their own bosses thought was crucial. I remember that Don Williams, working for Henry Harris, was in a very hard position. Ray Joslin working for Amos Hostetter had a very hard position, and so on and so on.
The California board kept holding out. Many times we thought we were holding out by our fingernails. The negotiations with AT&T dragged on and on. We would arrive and say, “Look we want to look at your records. We want to know what a pole costs. We don’t think it costs enough to justify these prices. We think you’re using far more of the pole than we are, and you should probably pay more.”
The representative of AT&T responded, “Look, if you want to come rent my office, you don’t ask me what it costs to build this office. Here’s my price. You either pay it or rent some place else.” We’d respond, “Yes, but this isn’t an office. If this were an office situation we could go down the street and rent from somebody else. There’s true competition. In this case there is no competition.” They would say, “Well, it’s our pole and we have the right to charge what’s fair.”
So the battle over the trendline continued. Should the cost of poles be based on simply an arbitrary trendline which was whatever AT&T and NCTA worked out, or should it be based on cost on the theory that the poles, in fact, were a monopoly and therefore had to be treated on a public utility accounting‑type basis.
It went on for years and years and finally the California Association won, basically because people like Amos Hostetter and other leaders began after a while to understand. More than anything, they had to be convinced that we could do it politically.
No one ever disagreed that they would like to pay less rather than more. No one ever basically disagreed that cost‑based accounting wouldn’t lead to lower rates than the trendline. Everyone knew that the trendline was just an excuse for marking the prices up. They had to be convinced that it was realistic to hold out. My father’s success with the California legislature and the success he had in building close ties with other key people in the Congress played a part. Some key Californians in those days were on the Commerce Committee and the Communications Subcommittee. The investigations Subcommittee of the Commerce Committee had oversight over all the federal bureaucracies related to commerce.
I think gradually the industry leaders became convinced that, in fact, it was possible through the FCC and through the Congress and the state legislatures to at least hold our own. Eventually we won cost‑based prices.
FROKE: When did the telephone people in California capitulate?
KAITZ: It was really conducted more through AT&T although there were negotiations with Pacific Telephone, also.
There was a big case brought before the FCC by California and the NCTA. Ultimately, the national funded most of it, but attorney Harold Farrow was actually California’s lead attorney on the issue. Some time around 1970, based on pressure from the FCC, AT&T agreed that its poles would be made available. They moved away from positions of arbitrarily throwing rate increases towards the industry. The pole rates sort of settled in at $2.50 in California and varying amounts in other states. Although then we hit a new crisis. They began to charge astronomical amounts for pole rearrangements.
Ultimately the combination led to California passing legislation declaring that in California it was a public utility service. The next year Jim Worth took a bill to the Congress requiring FCC regulation in those states where the state has not already agreed to regulate.
FROKE: You, from time to time, have suggested that California is something of a harbinger of what takes place in the rest of the industry on a nationwide basis. Certainly the pole attachment issue is a strong indication of that.
KAITZ: Well, but that’s not the only one. In the ’60s we were faced with continual efforts to put us under public utility regulation. In the ’70s we saw other states deal with that. In Connecticut and many of the New England states, there is public utility regulation even to this day although they, have in general modified it so it’s not a true public utility regulation which was what was originally proposed in those states and what was surely proposed in California–true public utility regulation. With the passage of time we forget why we were so upset at the time. I remember the Public Utility Commission coming out and looking things over in the cable industry as they decided whether they were going to take a position to support or oppose. I remember them being horrified to find out that we had marketing budgets. “We’ll never allow marketing budgets! Public utilities aren’t allowed to market. What are all these costs you have? People going door‑to‑door selling cable. We’ll never allow that.” There were expressions of disbelief that we were actually not only marketing but doing the “door‑to‑door knocking on doors in the middle of the night kind of marketing” which they associated with the worst possible abuse.
The minute they made it clear that that was the first thing to disallow and ban, the industry suddenly realized that it was never going to grow if it was a public utility. People spent months camped out in the corridors of Sacramento convincing legislators not to pass public utility bills. I think that was really the first big area in which California slugged it out and finally won. That was, I think, a harbinger of battles that occurred elsewhere.
FROKE: California was not the first of the state associations. I believe West Virginia was first.
KAITZ: Yes. I think Pennsylvania and West Virginia and some of the eastern states are older.
FROKE: I guess it’s between Texas and California as to which is the largest of the cable states.
KAITZ: I think California is the largest. We’re about 4.5 million subscribers.
FROKE: Then I think it’s Texas, and Pennsylvania now is third if I’m not mistaken. You were the leader then in many, many other ways.
KAITZ: One of the reasons the organization was able to be successful was that it clearly had superior resources, more than many of the other organizations. It’s interesting that the dues we have in California haven’t changed any, I think, since 1960. We’ve had a couple of minor adjustments up and down, but basically it’s been 20 cents a subscriber for that entire period.
FROKE: Going to the organization of the association itself, you’ve touched on the very early days when your father was representing the cable interest in California in addition to some other clients that he had. In what year did he become full time as the head of the California Cable Television Association?
KAITZ: It was around 1970, although he always maintained a retainer relationship and actually never did go full time. He maintained some of the clients but he really became Mr. Cable in California and perhaps in the country. He really did pretty much nothing but cable work.
FROKE: I know the influence that the California Association, your father and you have had on the national picture. Going back again to our discussion of the Public Utility Commission …
KAITZ: I think one thing that I should comment on in this history is, of course, about myself and my father. It’s appropriate to accent him. In looking upon California as being such a progressive state, I think it’s very important not to dwell only on my father because we had a very strong board. There was a board with vision. The first vision was to go out and hire this rather expensive lawyer to come in and help them out. Beyond that they had the vision‑‑because they always were the ones who set the policy‑‑they had the vision to understand that public utility regulation would permanently lock them into the little villages and never give them a shot at the big towns. They had the vision to join and to coalesce as a strong organization that provides support for the Western Show. They had the incredible gumption to stand‑off the AT&T and the rest of the cable industry for a period of some years and to insist on cost‑based pricing.
I think that my father was a great catalyst for all that because he understood the mechanisms for binding people together, and he was fighter at heart. He liked to fight. He was good at political fights. He knew how to win them and therefore he wasn’t afraid of them.
You have to understand that no organization works well without a strong board. The leadership that we had on our board, going back to those days, was very strong.
FROKE: Do you recall some of the names of those people?
KAITZ: Yes, I do. Hank Goldstein, Don Williams, and Ralph Swett. And then people who are currently on the board who interestingly were very active then. Gil Oldfather was one of the backbones of the organization who told me that next election he’ll be in for his twenty year pin. Al Gilliland who owned the system in San Jose was a very strong player. We had John Goddard on our board throughout most of the ’70s. Chris Derrick came back on our board a while back as president of Dimension. These were people who had exceptional ability. We had on our board, people who were currently company presidents. Jim Robbins has been on our board and John Goddard, and David Van Valkenburg. Bill Bresnan never served on the board but was a de facto member for many years. Ed Allen had very strong leadership in California and made an enormous difference.
FROKE: Three observations and I’ll make them just for you to second‑guess me. Pennsylvania and West Virginia and Oregon seem to have a place within the history that is primarily tied to the technical side, the first systems, the experimentation of the technology, the Jerrold Corporation, Luther Holtz‑‑people who got into the manufacturing business early. Then you go toward Denver, Colorado, which is something of a financial capital where the financial strategies evolved. You come to California and you begin to look at cable in the sense that it is a part of the social institutional structure.
KAITZ: If Denver is the financial capital and Pennsylvania is the technical capital, California is probably the political capital because the strong point in California was its ability to take a big urban state that was very, very diverse ethnically, fashion an industry out of it and knock down the political and economic barriers whether it be access to poles or the right to use public easements or the opportunity to stay out of utility and other kinds of regulation. It would have been stifling in the urban markets without these political advances.
FROKE: I want to talk some more about that at a later time, but it’s getting close to the time that you were able to allot for this first taping session, and I would like to get a brief description of the scope and the scale of the California Association at this particular time. How many employees? What are your major activities? How are you organized?
KAITZ: It’s interesting, Marlowe. Maybe I could do that by giving you a little history from 1984 because I think it’s an interesting transition. In 1980 we were a family‑run organization. The challenge, as you say, was typical of the industry. The Association went through the same transition that so many companies did of going from family‑run organizations to professional organizations. We brought a new staff in, people with experience, paying relatively good salaries because we knew we needed that kind of talent.
We brought in Dennis Mangess who was a former member of the state legislature and one of the most respected of the legislators. He was a conservative Democrat from the most Republican district in the state held by a Democrat. He was somebody with very strong, pro‑business ties, but also ties with the Democratic Party.
In the ’80s the problems faced by the organization seemed to multiply with the success of the industry. We have just been through another reorganization. What we found was that while in the ’70s we were essentially a one‑issue organization, we would have a crisis–pole deregulation, utility bills, taxation. We would throw ourselves into the crisis.
FROKE: Deal with it on an incident basis?
KAITZ: I think one of the things we need to talk about next time is the organizational methodology, because I think if there’s anything that was distinctively my father’s contribution to the industry it was the fact that he was the forerunner for a lobbying approach which is the key to lobbying–get your members involved. We will need to spend some time on that because he pioneered that in California. In fact the fellow who was the president of the organization for some years, became the chair of the NCTA government relations committee. He brought the techniques to the attention of the entire industry. We were the first state to set up meetings in Washington and have our whole board go with our members to meet with our delegation. That became the model for what is now a very successful NCTA program.
He was the one who insisted that company presidents had to get into the offices of the key legislators and of course that’s been followed up, too. In doing so he was actually a decade ahead of his time. Other industries in the ’80s have built on those kinds of techniques, but Dad was doing that in the ’60s and ’70s. What we now find, Marlowe, in terms of CCTA, is that our challenges are in multiple areas, all of which are in crisis. Concurrently the Washington situation has multiple crises. There’s the Danforth Bill in the effort to re‑regulate. We have telco problem in Washington at the congressional level. At the FCC level there are other crises.
We’ve just been through a huge proceeding in California where we think we did quite well. The phone company arrived asking for de‑regulation, while proposing at the same time to have the Public Utility Commission in California approve a plan to put a $740 million fiber optic network into place, including the $100 million worth of feeder directly to the home in the first four years.
We managed to go from that proposal by the phone company‑‑which everybody at the time said was certain to pass‑‑to a situation in which they agreed to put no fiber into the feeder until it was cost justified and agreed further they wouldn’t do it until they came back to the Commission and proved it was cost‑justified. We now have a property tax battle of awesome proportions. We’re facing an effort to add $2 per subscriber per month in property taxes to our existing bill. As taxation theories we think this is enormously discriminatory. Ironically we have some of the same problems in the U.S. Congress. It seems like the industry’s success breeds a continual effort to knock it down.
We have public relations problems relating to misunderstandings about the nature of the industry. There are proposals for limitations on the kind of service we can provide that we’re having to deal with. We have a state legislature that like the Congress is negative when it comes to cable.
The picture today is radically different from what it was in the ’60s and ’70s where you would spend a year or two on a single problem. Now, the essence of my problem is to manage complexity. Each one of these problems requires concentration and full‑time effort and yet the challenge organizationally is to be able to focus the board effectively on them, but not too long, because then they have to move to the next one, and to focus resources in a reasonable way.
We had to reorganize our staffing, bring in some additional help, bring in more specialization. We just hired a twenty‑year veteran away from U.S. West, a senior attorney from U.S. West, to head our telco efforts.
FROKE: How many staff do you have with the California Association office at this time?
KAITZ: Marlowe, I’m going to have to think and count. Including myself, we have eight professional staff and we have about ten or so support staff.
FROKE: Each of the professional staff is focused on a particular issue?
KAITZ: Yes. Actually it’s rather straightforward. We have one person who handles Washington, D.C., just providing state support. The national becomes a full‑time job with a delegation of forty-seven. Another handles the state legislature, but also the PUC and the state board of equalization. Allen Gardner handles our telco battles. C.J. Hirschfield handles public relations. Bill Winter, our general counsel, handles the property taxation issue. Susan Pegaletti, the newest addition to our staff, is going to be in charge of the Western Cable Show.
FROKE: The industry shows all signs of continuing to grow and continuing to be more complex.
Thank you so much for giving us your time this morning.
KAITZ: Thank you, Marlowe. I enjoyed it and I look forward to the next session, too.
End of Tape 1, Side B
