AADL Talks To: Argus Camera's Art Parker

Tue, 10/23/2012 - 4:32pm

In this episode, AADL talks to Art Parker, an avowed “Townie” who spent nearly 20 years with Argus Camera. During its heyday in the 1940s and 50s, Argus was one of the largest employers in Ann Arbor and one of the most prestigious and well-known camera manufacturers in the world. Art talks about his family’s long history with Argus and the company’s social life that included Christmas parties, teen dances, summer camp, scholarships and profit-sharing.

Transcript

• [00:00:00.24] DEBBIE: To begin our conversation, we'd like you to introduce yourself, tell us where you're from, and tell us how you got into Argus camera.
• [00:00:07.73] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Well, my name is Arthur Parker, Jr.-- because that has the relevance. I am a long-time resident of Ann Arbor, often referred to as a townie. I was raised and schooled in Ann Arbor. My father taught at the University of Michigan, but he also was responsible for patents on Argus camera. The C3, which was a very famous camera. My dad had a patent on the rangefinder. At the time, we got $0.10 for every camera that was made, and they made over $2 million of them. Unfortunately, he sold the patent to them much earlier on than that, so we didn't really reap all the benefits of that.
• [00:00:53.38] But then he left the university and went into private business, and ultimately was one of the chief engineers at Argus cameras. And I was just a youngster. I had just gotten married in 1950, and I needed a job. And I was able, through my father's influence, to get a job at Argus in the industrial engineering department. And that led on to 18 years of service there before things went south at Argus, unfortunately, and I left to go over to Thetford, the maker of Porta Pottis, and ultimately to Wolverine Sports, where I worked for the athletic director at the University of Michigan for the rest of my career.
• [00:01:40.23] DEBBIE: So what year did you leave Argus?
• [00:01:42.96] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: 1969.
• [00:01:44.82] DEBBIE: So that was before their final move down to--
• [00:01:47.55] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Yes. Yes. We were still all on 4th Avenue. The building one, which is on the east side of 4th Street, had, by that time, been purchased by the University of Michigan. And we were left with the building on the west side, which was the newer of the buildings. It was constructed during part of the Second World War. And we, at that time, also owned the brewery building, which was to the south of it. That was the formally Ann Arbor Brewery. And Argus owned that for a while. In fact, our customer service department was in that, which is where the Durksons, who you interview, worked-- Dershams, rather, I should say. Art and Elwyn worked there.
• [00:02:35.65] DEBBIE: Now, describe a typical day. Describe your job duties and what a day was like at Argus.
• [00:02:42.36] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: When I was in the industrial engineering department, part of what we did was time studies. That was to check on the workstations to make sure that the jobs were timed. And in those days, they had an incentive program. So the person, the more they produced, the more they could make in addition to their base pay. So time studies were a part of that function.
• [00:03:05.49] From that, I moved on into the personnel department and ran the suggestion program, which was a very successful program. That's where employees made suggestions. If they were worthwhile and saved money, the employee was rewarded for that.
• [00:03:21.45] DEBBIE: The Dershams mentioned that, that that was quite generous.
• [00:03:23.61] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Yes. And then that morphed on into the personnel work, because that was an offshoot of the personnel department, and I then switched over into the personnel department, and ultimately, over time, I became the personnel manager there.
• [00:03:37.26] DEBBIE: So were you personnel manager when you had to start downsizing?
• [00:03:43.68] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Our total count at one time was 1,354 employees. And I know that because I was the one that had to make the employee count each month. And when I left, there was 180 people. So unfortunately, I was the one who usually held the door open for all of those that left, and that was not a happy time, because it was, hands down, the best place in Ann Arbor.
• [00:04:17.38] DEBBIE: Now, tell us why it is the best place to work in Ann Arbor?
• [00:04:20.37] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Well, because of the way they treated their employees. Our health insurance was superior to any place. In fact, they used to call it the baby factory because we paid great maternity benefits. Also I can remember that when it came time for the community chest, which it was called at that time-- the annual fundraiser for the charities in Ann Arbor. Argus and their employees gave more money than all the rest of the businesses in Ann Arbor combined. That was typical of the way they did things.
• [00:05:02.72] They had an annual Christmas party for the children, which was just a spectacular affair. Every August or September, we would survey all the employees to find out how many children there were, what ages they were, and what sex they were, and then a committee would go and buy presents fitting that number. Then we would rent the Michigan Theater and we would have a live show. And Mr. Hoag who was very wise and had been running those theaters for years told us, we don't want to do an hour of cartoons. Kids don't have an attention span. So we would have two or three cartoons, and then we would have-- well, one year, we had Soupy Sales. He came and did the show on stage, there.
• [00:06:03.58] And then after that, the kids marched out and all their presents were arranged by age and sex groups, and they all got-- and they were not cheap presents. A lot of times in those days, we were spending $15 to $25 each on the toys, and at that time, that was a fair amount of money.
• [00:06:30.10] DEBBIE: That's a real perk.
• [00:06:31.26] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Yes, it was. It was a wonderful affair. And yet, we had done it so many times that we could do it all in an hour or an hour and a half. And we'd do it on a Saturday morning. And the other thing that made it a great place to work is that we acquired the rights to Independence Lake, which is just north of Ann Arbor. And it belonged to the Godfrey family. And Mr. Godfrey had been the chief pharmacist for [? Ebraball ?] and Son, which is one of the old businesses. It's right where the federal building is now.
• [00:07:14.42] But we leased it from them, and we had our lake and picnic area out there. We had lifeguards in the summertime. And it was free to employees.
• [00:07:26.73] DEBBIE: So they could go anytime? It wasn't just like once a week or something?
• [00:07:30.02] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: No. Hey, it was open all time. And we had row boats for fishing and all sorts of things out there. We had a nice pavilion we build out there with restrooms and stuff in it. Then we had what they called teen parties. And we would turn the cafeteria over to the teens, and they would either get a live band or have a DJ come in. And we learned early on to let the kids organize it. And the kids set the rules. And I can assure you their rules were much tougher than adults, but that's what made it successful, because they were the ones in charge. And that was rather typical.
• [00:08:16.26] They also, because of the nature of the business-- and we used to do, probably-- 60% of our business was in the Fall of the year, because the cameras and that sort of associated stuff were Christmas-type items. So vacations were almost a forced issue in some ways, because we would shut down for two weeks, and everybody would take their vacation then, because we just could not afford to let people have time off during the Fall of the year.
• [00:08:49.24] So if there was a restrictive [INAUDIBLE], people didn't seem to be bothered by it too much. But the retirement fund was clearly ahead of any others that were known. I mean, it was an excellent, excellent plan-- Ann Arbor Trust were the people that ran it for us. And employees left with rather handsome sums of money.
• [00:09:19.92] DEBBIE: You even had your own credit union, didn't you?
• [00:09:21.88] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Yes, we did. We had our own credit union. Yep. That joined Ann Arbor Credit Union, which is now in a bank now, I guess-- the follow-on of it.
• [00:09:34.87] DEBBIE: Well, this sounds very progressive-- the employee benefits and all the social things. Who put together all these fabulous ideas? Management or the staff themselves?
• [00:09:50.16] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: I think the management itself. The company really started this Arborphone. And they were just by Summit Street at the bottom of Sunset Drive. And that was the first radio. They made Arborphone radios. And then that was the original AC/DC circuit patent that all radios had to have at the time, so we were licensed to do that. And that became international industries. And that's when they got the building down on Fourth Street. And they made cadet ratios amongst other things.
• [00:10:38.19] And then the president of the company was a man by the name of Charlie Verschoor. He went to Germany on a vacation, and he was enamored with the cameras that he saw there-- the Leicas and that sort of thing. And he was convinced that we could make that sort of thing here. And so he came back with the idea. And the first cameras came out, and it was called the Argus A.
• [00:11:08.25] And that's when my father got involved, because that morphed into one where they wanted a rangefinder or a lens finder on it, and that became known as the AF, which was my dad's initials. And then the C3, which was the bellwether camera, the flying brick, we used to call it because it was square. And it came out as the C2 and was modestly successful. But when my dad developed the rangefinder-- and, mind you, he was still at the university when this happened-- that made the camera sell like it sold. And you see them even now still around.
• [00:11:55.50] DEBBIE: Now did they approach your dad or did he come to them with the idea?
• [00:11:58.39] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Well, he had done consulting work for them on a variety of things. And that's ultimately why he went to work them, although in the interim he had worked for Westinghouse Naval Ordinance during the war and commuted to Detroit during that time. But after the war, then he went to work for Argus and stayed there. And he passed away while he was working there.
• [00:12:24.58] DEBBIE: So you think the management fostered the--
• [00:12:28.08] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Yes, I do. And one of the chief architects of that was Robert Lewis. He was hired from out east. I think he was in Connecticut. But he came here as president of Argus, and he was very, very forward-looking in that respect. And a lot of these ideas were his or encouraged by him.
• [00:12:57.44] And I can remember we had a thing called the Rumor Board. I don't know if the others mentioned this. But if you heard a rumor-- because crazy rumors go around all the time. Oh, there's going to be a big layoff. An employee could write that on the Rumor Board, and we'd check that thing two or three times a day. And we'd get the rumor down, we'd run down the answer and post the answer. And the promise was that we would post it within a day, and usually within hours.
• [00:13:30.29] And that tended to diffuse a lot of hysteria over what things might be happening. And you know how rumors are. But it was typical of the type of thing that they did. I always felt it was very enlightening-- enlightened, I should say. I'm trying to think of some of the other things that we--
• [00:13:53.13] DEBBIE: Now, getting back to the social activities, who came up with the dances and all the bowling and golf leagues and that? There are just amazing in the Eye.
• [00:14:04.72] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Well, except that that was fairly common amongst employers. King Seeley, of course-- they were the big gorilla on the block. They were the number one employer, along with Hoover Ball and Bearing. But they all had bowling teams. They all had basketball. There was an industrial basketball league. In fact, someplace-- I was going to try to get it to you folks, but I couldn't find it. I had an old basketball uniform-- the jersey and the pants and the whole nine yards. I know it's there. I'll have to find it. But I'm pretty sure I have that down there.
• [00:14:45.96] And they had softball. Of course, softball, at that time, was not as heavily a woman's sport as it is now. There were a lot of leagues in Ann Arbor, and ours had a team in the league. But they were just about anything-- golf-- anything that somebody wanted to get sponsored. They were in for that.
• [00:15:08.24] DEBBIE: Now, I was really impressed with how women were treated in that era as a working person. A lot of women didn't work out of the home at that time, but from the scanning we did of the Argus Eye, there were--
• [00:15:26.34] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Well, of course the assembly work was pretty much dominated by female employees because it was always thought that their dexterity was better, although I don't think that's-- I don't think anybody had researched that. I think that just is something that happened. But we had had Grace Radford, at one time, was the personnel director there. And that was long before that sort of thing was popular [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:15:54.46] So there was a lot of females in executive jobs at Argus-- in purchasing, a variety things I can think of. Well, I remember when-- you probably have heard of Red Berenson, the Michigan hockey coach. Well, he was a kid coming to school here at Michigan to play hockey, and had just gotten married to his young wife. And she came down and applied for a job, and I hired her to work in the purchasing department, and she became one of the chief buyers in the purchasing department before he left school to go on to his career in professional hockey.
• [00:16:38.45] But they didn't have any qualms about promoting somebody. I can remember a good friend named Margaret [? Hardiet. ?] She was one of the chief buyers there. So they didn't seem to have a problem with that. That was more based on your talent.
• [00:17:00.02] DEBBIE: That's pretty progressive for the 1950s and the '60s.
• [00:17:01.63] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: It was, at the time, if you look back on it. And part of that made you a bit sheltered when you were growing up in Ann Arbor. You didn't realize that this wasn't going on everyplace else. And we simply just considered it a matter of fact. It was the way things went.
• [00:17:22.08] DEBBIE: Do you stay in touch with many of the former Argus employees?
• [00:17:25.73] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Not as much as I'd like to. And, of course, we're getting a lot of empty saddles in the old corral these days. I mean, you grab the obituary section of that thing that they call dot com. Our papers, they're gone.
• [00:17:46.90] Which reminds me, I forgot to mention the Argus Eyes.
• [00:17:50.37] DEBBIE: We love those.
• [00:17:51.99] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Argus Eyes. That was my job, was overseeing the publication of the Argus Eyes. And along with a gal named Tess Canja. And Tess went on to become the head of AARP.
• [00:18:11.71] DEBBIE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:18:13.68] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Her husband was a diver or a swimmer here at Michigan. But Tess-- I think she's retired now, but I remember seeing that and-- well, that's not a name you'd miss, because she and I worked together on the Argus Eyes, which is a good publication.
• [00:18:30.61] DEBBIE: We were really curious about the column Ask Andy. Who's Andy?
• [00:18:36.72] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: That was just a-- Abby.
• [00:18:41.09] DEBBIE: Oh. So who really answered the questions?
• [00:18:44.33] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Well, there was a group of us who had to. And if you're going to offer that, you better be prepared to answer the questions. And some of them could get sticky at times, but I had to answer it. And it stayed a non-union shop for-- despite the fact that the UAW and other major unions were in the area-- I think largely on the basis of the benefits and everything were better than a good many of the union jobs.
• [00:19:24.01] Now, they did have an election for the tool room-- [INAUDIBLE]. The tool and dye makers and the maintenance group did form the union. And I used to have to negotiate with them. And, I mean, it wasn't acrimonious at all. I mean, we all knew each other pretty well, and we'd get down and get things settled without a lot of things.
• [00:19:51.87] But I remember the guy from the UAW International used to get really mad, because he said, now, I know what you guys are going to do. You're going to give all these benefits that these guys are negotiating on to the other employees, and they're not going to join up. I said, well, that means they don't have to pay dues.
• [00:20:13.23] DEBBIE: Did the personnel department oversee the scholarship program? One of the things we noticed about Argus Eye is that every year there were wonderful scholarships given to the--
• [00:20:22.44] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Well, the personnel department didn't really oversee that. There was a committee that was formed representing various people-- like Mr. Lewis, of course, was involved and the executives were involved in it. But there was some employee involvement in it too. But there were nice scholarships. And again, I think just part of the typically enlightened way they saw things at the time.
• [00:20:49.45] And Mr. [? Aries ?] was the Chairman the Board of Directors, but he was also a head mogul at King Seeley. And King Seeley had UAW, and they always had kind of an acrimonious relationship. And the [? Aries ?] family was the one that-- one of the sons built [? Lance ?] [? Down. ?] It was a big builder in the area. And the other son had Trilex Corporation in Wayne.
• [00:21:30.51] But Mr. [? Aries ?], he was a character. I was just a kid at times, and I had to sometimes chauffeur him around when he was-- and the reason he had a chauffeur was he had a terrible habit of forgetting what he was doing and wanted to look something up in his briefcase while he was driving. And that ended up bending some fenders every now and then, so they said whenever he's over here, you have to see that he gets to where he's going. And then the King Seeley people will take over. But that was always kind of one of the humorous things that occurred over the years.
• [00:22:09.12] DEBBIE: Were there a lot of multi-generational families at Argus?
• [00:22:15.10] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Yeah-- I always think about that sometimes weakening a company, but it wasn't that there was a lot of family people that worked there, but it certainly wasn't a dominating kind of thing. It wasn't you hire somebody to the exclusion of somebody else because they were related. That simply didn't happen there. Well, in my case, my father, my brother-in-law, my two younger brothers all worked there at one time or another. A lot of them wouldn't work there in the summertime when school was in, and some, of course, went on to more career-oriented things. But there was quite a bit of that. Well, the [? Crumps ?] we're not-- there was quite a few husband and wife teams that worked there.
• [00:23:09.88] And never, to my knowledge-- and I was in a position to know that sort of thing-- I don't think it ever really resulted in any clash over things, where somebody felt they were getting treated better than somebody else. Because they really worked hard to see that that wasn't the case.
• [00:23:30.86] DEBBIE: Was that a good place to meet young people, like dating? Does it happen much?
• [00:23:36.64] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: No, I don't think that was-- I think it may have been an offshoot of some of the hiring, but I don't think it really was--
• [00:23:42.71] DEBBIE: A lot of marriages that happen because of working together?
• [00:23:47.15] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: You know, not really that many. And I was there 18 years, and I would remember a lot of them. There were some, but not that many.
• [00:23:56.63] DEBBIE: Now, do you remember through your dad-- was he involved with Argus during the war?
• [00:24:02.48] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Yes. He did some work from them during the war, although he had left the university during the [? process ?] of the war and went to work for-- well, it was actually Hudson-- Hudson Motor Car Company-- had a naval ordinance plant out at Nine Mile and [INAUDIBLE] Road. And then that was taken over by Westinghouse. But he specialty was threading and gearing, and they wanted his expertise on gun mounts for Naval ships and that sort of stuff.
• [00:24:34.58] So his connection with Argus only really came towards the end of the war, when things were winding down and they brought him in there. At one time, they made the T-155 Optical Scanner, which would go into tanks. It was a periscope thing that went into tanks so the guys could see from the inside of it. And it was electronically enhanced, which was pretty heavy stuff for those days, you know? And then they made spotting scopes-- a lot of them you still see around, the old kind of [? elbow ?] spotting scope. And in turn this into some of the other devices they made-- range finding devices.
• [00:25:12.60] And ultimately, before things went really sour, we made some scopes for the AR-15 rifle, which is, of course, now they're M-16 or whatever they call it now. But at that time, it was just a-- but they had a sighting thing up on the second floor-- a sighting range up there. They didn't fire any of the guns out there, but they had them in the plant to do that sort of thing. But we made a lot of raw optics. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, we had a hurry-up project on [? Mitron ?] copy lens, which was a lens that looked a super Xerox so that they could take film right away and process it.
• [00:26:06.11] I remember we made those, and it was really interesting to us, because the aircraft carriers [? that were ?] [? on ?] this camera or processor was so big that there was no way to get it down in the ship. So they literally had to cut a hole in the side of the aircraft carrier to push it in there and then weld it back up.
• [00:26:27.97] DEBBIE: Now, were there security issues involved?
• [00:26:30.56] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Yes. We had a full-time guard service.
• [00:26:33.80] DEBBIE: And did you have to ever vet employees if they were going to work on--
• [00:26:37.68] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Yes. There were some things, although most of the stuff was pretty straight away manufacturing, and it wasn't [INAUDIBLE]. Some of the engineering works-- you had to have people vetted, but that was very seldom that we saw that kind of thing. We had government inspectors-- resident inspectors-- on hand, sometimes up to four or five, who were actually working at the plant during these periods of production on these things.
• [00:27:07.32] DEBBIE: Argus seems to be on the forefront of new development, research. What made them go south? What happened to precipitate the decline?
• [00:27:18.14] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Well, the Japanese competition. We knew for a fact-- we could prove for a fact-- that the Japanese were putting cameras in the stores here at less money than what they were charging for them at home, at actually below cost. But when we took our case to the Commerce Department, and they said, well, it's post-war. They're an emerging nation. They just kind of blew us off, and ultimately felt that we just simply couldn't compete with their product-- that this kind of drove ours off the market.
• [00:28:11.28] We were then acquired by Sylvania, and that's when you really lost your identity, because now you became part of a big multinational corporation.
• [00:28:24.89] DEBBIE: Why did they want Argus?
• [00:28:27.28] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: I think they wanted it because of the government work. And, of course, some expansions in those days were just sheer fantasy on a part. Companies had more money than they knew what to do with. would buy everything in sight. But we had a lot of talented people there, and a lot of them, ultimately. became absorbed in various divisions of Sylvania.
• [00:28:52.29] We had a guy who was just a crackerjack computer guy. In fact, he ultimately ended up running the Computer Science program at Saint Louis University in Saint Louis, Missouri. And they were really interested in him. Of course, Sylvania had a data processing operation that was probably as big as this library building at that time, because computers were gigantic.
• [00:29:23.11] But , ultimately they worried of it, and we weren't making profit, and they charged-- I can remember specifically-- we had to pay $60,000 a month corporate prorate for whatever services that the corporation offered us.
• [00:29:43.16] DEBBIE: That's a lot of money.
• [00:29:44.28] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Yes, it is, and we weren't really getting a value there, but we weren't in a position to complain. And they ultimately spun it off to a place in Chicago who were kind of corporate raiders. And then they built the operation out of South Carolina, which, to the old timers was sort of blasphemous, because they went there strictly because they could get cheaper labor. And that's offended a lot of us. And once you lost that sense and that image, then things just did not go well from there on.
• [00:30:35.81] And I know after I left and they moved out on South State Street, they had some really acrimonious labor relations problem there, which was sad. It was really, really sad to see that happen to it. It made you feel bad when you could remember how great it was at one time, but times change.
• [00:30:54.64] DEBBIE: Where did you go after Argus?
• [00:30:57.01] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: I went to Thetford Corporation, the people who make Porta Pottis. But then, with my marvelous timing, I landed there right around the oil crisis in '73. And I said, no, this is not the place to be. People are not buying a lot of motor homes these days, and that was their biggest business. And so I had worked for Don Canham, the athletic director at Michigan, in the press box. And he said, why don't you come to work for me? And so I did.
• [00:31:30.14] And he owned Wolverine Sports, School Tech Incorporated, and Olympia Sports was all combined things. But their primary customers were school systems, selling athletic supplies and stuff by mail order. And while Don was the athletic director, that had to be in trust. So several of us managed the function for him while he was-- believe me, he knew what was going on. He's a hands-on guy. But everybody said, oh, it must be tough to work for him. And I said, no, you know, when you're raised in Ann Arbor around coaches, they all holler. Nobody pays any attention to that. You can always run faster or jump higher or one thing or another. It never bothered me. And Don was good to me, and I was there 20 years.
• [00:32:28.04] And then I decided one day it was time to resign and retire. And that's not the end of the story, and I'd like to think there's more to do. Because as I told her, people ask me if I've lived here all my life, and I tell them not yet.
• [00:32:45.66] DEBBIE: Now, did you get tickets to the games out of any of this?
• [00:32:48.94] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Well, I've had season tickets for probably 40 years, and I've never sat in the seats. My family has, but I've worked in the press box for 57 years.
• [00:33:01.67] DEBBIE: You got a better view, anyway.
• [00:33:02.82] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Yeah.
• [00:33:03.59] DEBBIE: What do you think of the new press box?
• [00:33:06.23] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Facility wise, it was like moving from the Days Inn to the Crowne Plaza. But from a press functioning point of view-- lousy. They didn't center things, they moved the statisticians away from us. And we needed them right there, because you're trying to, like, for instance, with Denard, you're trying to keep track of how many yards he's got and then how many carries-- because the phone is ringing constantly from New York and other places, and that's what we have to answer.
• [00:33:40.38] And sometimes it gets humorous, because they'll call and say, who scored that touchdown? This is ABC, right? And they said, yeah. And I said, you guys are carrying the game and you've got to call me and ask me what's on your own network? They were a strange lot of people sometimes, the media and those guys.
• [00:34:04.58] DEBBIE: It sounds like you enjoyed it, though.
• [00:34:06.48] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: Oh, yeah. It's been fun. I've met a lot of luminaries over the years out there. As a matter of fact, Saturday I got to meet the little guy with the t-shirt.
• [00:34:15.57] DEBBIE: Oh, for Oklahoma?
• [00:34:17.48] ARTHUR PARKER, JR.: For Oklahoma, yeah. He was a delightful child, and I can see that he's going to be a nice kid, because his parents were just really, really nice people-- really nice people. Because he told me, he said, I can run faster than Denard. I said, well, we'll be looking to hire you here. It turns out his connection is they have some family in Clarkston, and that's where I think the t-shirt got down there in the first place. But that was one of the fun things that's happened over the years, and all I could tell you-- that's not an Argus thing, but I could tell you a lot of stories about that.
• [00:34:56.62] DEBBIE: Did you get to meet Bo?
• [00:34:58.65] SPEAKER 2: Oh yeah. Yep. Yep. On Fridays, before home games, Don Canham would have a press party out at his office. Now, I've got to tell you his office was 1,200 square feet. [LAUGHING] It had a bar and everything in it. So Ron Kramer, a name you've probably heard of, and Jim Brandstatter, they would be the bartenders. And then all the dignitaries, like Keith Jackson and all of the guys who were covering the games would come out there, and Bo would always come out and make an appearance.