FNP 51 Page 8 opening for me. And he [said], no, we're laying off right now, but if we had an opening, if I was looking for somebody, I wouldn't hire you. I was quick-tempered back then, but I stood up and I said, Mr. Musser, I thought we were friends. And he [said], Tommy Greene, we are friends, but you [have] too much talent to be stamping out hubcaps the rest of your life, and if you get on that assembly line back there, you're going to wind up getting in a rut and you may never leave this place, and I'm not going to do you that injustice. Now, you get out there, and you can find something you can do. He said, but right now, we're not hiring anyway. When I left there, I didn't know if I was mad. At least, I said, well, he's not hiring anyway. So maybe if he was hiring, he would've hired me. Anyway, it's time to move on, I realized, and I thanked him a bunch of times before he died. But he was right. You know, the difference between a grave and a rut is that a grave has both ends closed on you, and the longer you stay in a rut, the closer those ends come. So I tore open a paper grocery sack one night and made a list of a couple of dozen things I wanted to get into, and I can assure you logging and farming [were] not two of them. I put down a short loan business, and I put down a meat-packing business where I would get me a [chain of stores and work] a route. I had a number of different things there. The theater was for sale at that time. The cold storage was for sale at that time. I listed a bunch of them, [about two dozen,] and then to the right, I listed all the items I needed] for each one of them. The meat business, I was going to need a refrigerated truck, you know, [each business needed] different things. [However,] I found office supplies and advertising in every one of the [businesses] that I wanted to get into, every one of these businesses. So, I sat there for a few moments and I said, you know, let's see if I can pick out some trees in this forest. I realized that here's advertising and office supplies in every business that I wanted to get into, and with my warped mind, I said, you know, if I got into the office supply business and the newspaper business, I could buy my office supplies for the newspaper wholesale and I could take the newspaper and advertise my office supply store, and, this, to me, is about as close to perpetual motion as I'm going to get. So, I went in and woke my wife up at three-thirty in the morning, and I shan't forget her reaction. I said, sugar, get up and let's get dressed; we need to head south as far as we can go [before] daylight, and when the stores start opening, I want to start asking some questions, but I don't want anybody to know who we are or where we're from. There was a 100-year-old newspaper in [our] town, a father-son operation. The son, to me at that time, was an old man. I was [only] twenty-five years old, and he was probably fifty, and his daddy was probably seventy-five. He had a degree from the law school at Harvard. They were wise old men, and I was so full of ignorance and energy, I didn't have sense enough to know that I couldn't make it. [Failure never crossed my mind as an option.] P: What was the name of that paper? G: The Madison Enterprise Reporter, founded in 1865. Anyway, first thing [my wife] told me, she [said] Tommy Greene, you can't spell, you don't read, how do you expect to run a newspaper? I said, well, if you'll do the spelling and the writing, I'll do the drawing and