SWNOVELS The Christmas Box Miracle: Chapter 9
Some people were born to work for others. Not in a mindless, servile way—rather they simply work better in a set regimen of daily tasks and functions. Others were born of the entrepreneurial spirit and enjoy the demands of self-determination and the roll of the dice. Much to my detriment, I was born of the latter spirit.
THE CHRISTMAS BOX
KERI ANDIWERE MARRIED midway through the campaign. Now, with the campaign over, I was again unemployed. Instead of looking for a job, I decided to pursue a dream. One of my campaign duties entailed working with college newspapers. I decided to publish my own. I called it the Collegiate.
From my past newspaper experience I believed that every paper needed a cartoonist. Seeking better talent than myself, I approached a former cartoonist for the U of U Chronicle named Evan Twede. Evan was no longer a college student but now the co-owner of a successful new Salt Lake advertising agency. He agreed to provide two cartoons a month. He didn’t need the pittance I offered him, he simply wanted the opportunity for creative expression.
At best the Collegiate was a hand-to-mouth existence. But I earned at least as much as I would waiting tables, and it provided me a unique educational experience as well. I learned to run a business, as well as manage a staff. I caught an employee embezzling from me and made him pay me back. And I learned firsthand the power of the press. When the university was about to shut down Newsbreak, a campus news broadcast program that had produced some of Utah’s most successful television journalists, I ran a cover story on the proposed closure with a cartoon drawing of a television set with an ax raised above it. The headline read, “Will the Ax Fall.” It saved the program.
Still, after a year of publishing the Collegiate, I decided I had had enough. I was just going to close down my paper when, on a whim, I decided to see if anyone would buy it. I ran a classified ad offering the paper for sale for seven thousand dollars—a number I had pulled out of a hat. I had two calls and sold the Collegiate within a week.
That same week I visited our cartoonist, Evan, to tell him that I would no longer require his services. He seemed much more interested in the amount I had made from selling my paper than in my decision to close it down. That weekend he called me at home to offer me a job. He and his business partner had just broken up the agency and he was looking for a business manager for his new firm, Evan Twede Advertising. I told him I would take the job if I could stay in school. He agreed.
As the agency grew, school grew painfully tedious. Moreover, what I learned in school about advertising seemed mostly outdated and largely irrelevant. I endured only two more quarters before I dropped out.