#21 The pain of disappointing one’s parents

Parents want their children to stand on their shoulders and become successful. My dad barely graduated from Fenger High School during The Great Depression, taking an eleven dollars a week job he considered himself lucky to get -- grueling work shoveling out blast furnaces at U.S. Steel.

When his mother was hit by a trolley car, my mother ran her clothing store on 63rd and Halsted for her, my dad working there after he got home, exhausted, from the steel mill. After my grandmother recovered, my mother pressed my dad to open their own clothing store. It was the heart of The Great Depression and he thought she was out of her mind to try starting a business. But she persisted.

They rented a tiny shop and bought third hand clothes at Maxwell Streets’ open-air market. My mother resewed buttonholes and replaced zippers on the worn clothes. They’d match a pair of pants, a suit jacket and a vest and sell it for two or three dollars.

When they at last succeeded in pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and had built a mini-clothing empire of six Chicagoland stores, my father’s fondest wish was for his sons to join him in the business. I tried it for seven years, but it wasn’t for me.

My dad thought I was crazy to give up living in a 47th floor apartment in Chicago’s luxury Lake Point Tower and driving a Mercedes so I could bang my fingers against a typewriter. My mother was distraught that I was cutting the chord by moving to L.A.

I hated disappointing them, but I hated the clothing business more. It wasn’t my true path. I was a writer.

#20 My moment

To put it into context, you have to understand where DIC Entertainment was at this time. Jean Chalopin had some success in Europe. But America isn’t Europe. He was an outsider and one with a thick French accent. He was charming and handsome, but he was still what used to be called “a foreigner”. And there was a lot of competition out there from other small independent studios who desperately wanted to create series that would be ordained by one of the trinity – ABC, NBC and CBS.

Jean and Andy had given birth to their small studio and, incredibly, they had a network series that could give their young company credibility. But to get that credibility and greenlights for more television series, they had to demonstrate that they had writers who could deliver top quality scripts.

I’d written a couple of scripts for television. But I wanted more. I wanted much more.

A few years later, as Bud Fox would wait to be shown into Gordon Gekko’s offices in Wall Street, he looks into a mirror and says, “Well, life all comes down to a few moments. This is one of them.” Jean and Andy thought they were rolling the dice by bringing this young, relatively untried writer into the offices of one of the three most powerful executives in Children’s Entertainment. But they were wrong. They weren’t rolling the dice.

The dice had already been rolled, and the dice had come up ‘seven’ before we even walked into Judy Price’s office because she loved my work.

I was Jackie-poo and I had arrived.

#19 The Great and Powerful Sorceress of CBS

You would have thought we were approaching CIA Headquarters at Langley. Andy gave his name to the guard at the guardhouse. The guard gave Andy a pass card for his dashboard. We parked and I followed Andy toward the entrance to CBS’ headquarters.

Then we went through the entrance doors. Suddenly, I felt zero nervousness. Suddenly, I felt like I’d grown five inches taller and packed on twenty pounds of muscle.

As Andy and I walked along the corridors of power that lead to the executive offices, I thought about how this was exactly what I wanted. Well, maybe not ‘exactly’. I never thought I’d end up writing for children’s television. But television and motion pictures were where I wanted to be and now that’s where I was at. So it was exactly where I wanted to be at.

The receptionist said hello to Andy. Cool that she knows his name, I thought. We walked through a set of glass doors and Judy’s secretary said hi to Andy. Really cool, I thought. She pressed a button on the intercom. Andy stayed standing. And in that instant I knew how the meeting was going to go down. I could have scripted it. I was born for this moment.

The doors opened, we walked into her office, Judy Price stood, held her arms held out wide toward me, a big smile on her face as she declared, “Jackie-poo!!!”

I smiled back. Yeah. I knew how it was going to go down. I could have scripted it…