David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…And of course, not the Disney of 45 years ago. Of course at the Capital Cities. It wasn’t even Capital Cities, yet. Let’s rewind all the way back. Who is Bob Iger? He was born in 1951. It’s odd. When you look at him, he looks like a 50 year old. He’s 68. He is in incredible shape. He was born in 1951 to a Jewish family in Brooklyn. I believe when he was five, they move to a working class town on Long Island called Oceanside. Bob’s father was a World War II veteran. He had been in the navy in World War II and he was a mid-level admin in New York City. He was Mad Men. He was Don Draper. The parallels are so apty and Bob talks about this in the book. His father suffered from depression, which was usually stigmatized back then from a lot of reasons. I imagine no small part having been a sailor in the Navy during the war, and he even underwent electric shock therapy to treat it. All that said, he did instill in Bob a love of both music, literature, and a very, very strong work ethic. Bob was not a great student in high school, but he was a hard worker. He went to Ithaca College for college and he worked his way through school working at the local Pizza Hut. To this day, famously, Bob does not eat any carbohydrates except for pizza. He loves pizza. It was his dream in high school to become a network news anchorman. He wanted to be like Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and the like, so when he graduated in 1973 from Ithaca with a degree in television and radio, he worked briefly as a weatherman for the local cable TV station there. He was not particularly talented on that side of the camera, unfortunately, but we all have strengths and weaknesses. Fortunately, though, does not take Bob long to figure this out. In 1974 the next year after he graduates, he gives up on the dream of being in front of the camera, moves behind the camera, and he also moves back closer to home to New York City where he joins ABC, which then was an independent company, just ABC, at the bottom. He was basically a gofer on television sets for soap operas, game shows, he was cleaning the sets, fixing them up, getting there at 4:00 in the morning, getting ready for a recording, all of the stuff, for $150 a week. And literally when you say gofer, he was the guy that when they would say, “We need two hours to do this thing. Go hang out with the talent so that we can tell you to tell him to come back when we’re ready.” That was his job.…

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