An Ingram's Carol

Publishers Reflect on Ingram's Past, Present and Future

Publishers Past and Present: front row: Michelle Sweeney, Bill "Doc" Worley back row: Richard Kappa, Woody Overton, Joe Sweeney and Mike Russell.

On an unusually Spring-like January 2, six past or present publishers of what is now Ingram's Magazine gathered in the elegant balcony room of Frondizi's Restaurant just north of the Plaza. There, for several well-fed hours, they revisited the ghosts of Ingram's past, present and future.

Those present included Richard Kappa, Woody Overton, Bill "Doc" Worley, Mike Russell, Michelle Sweeney, Joe Sweeney, and yours truly, the author of this article. Although they were out of town at the time, Lud Gaines, Bill Dorn, Steve Hedlund, and Beth Ingram filled in some holes in the saga by phone.

Much of what was said has been left--for discretion sake--on the cutting room floor. That which survives would make a lively chapter in an oral history of Kansas City. These veteran Ingram's publishers not only know a great deal about what moves and shakes Kansas City, but they themselves have also helped move and shake it.

Of those present, Richard Kappa was the first to get involved some twenty years ago. At the time of his hiring, Kappa was courting one of the magazine's sales reps and profitably working for a re-publisher of scientific information. When then Corporate Report Minneapolis owner, Bill Dorn, asked Kappa to help him find a local publisher Kappa faxed him a list of likely suspects.

At this moment in the magazine's history, Dorn headed up a five-magazine conglomerate called Dorn Communications. In 1977, he had bought one of those publications, then known as Outlook, from the inimitable Ludwell G. Gaines III. A stock broker in the midst of a self-described "mid-life crisis," Gaines had launched the publication out of the backroom of the popular New Stanley Bar in Westport two years prior. Not until the third issue did Gaines have an office.

"I did not know a thing about publishing," claims the refreshingly humble Gaines. But he did know there was "a great vacuum" in local business news, and he also knew that if he hired "five of the best-looking women" in Kansas City, he might just be able to sell enough ads to fill that vacuum.

Corporate Report staff circa 1981 -- Front Row: Diane McClymond, Office Manager; Cynthia Cassidy, Sales; Kathleen Pemberton, Editor; Dana Decker, Sales; Suzzane Cambell, Sales. Back Row: Steve Hedlund, Publisher; Christopher Seestedt, Sales; Russell Koppleman Art Director; Scott White, Contributing Write; and Michael Sollars, Associate Editor.

Among the people he called periodically for advice was Bill Dorn. On one occasion he confessed to Dorn, "I'm not a publisher," and asked Dorn if he were inter-ested in relieving him of that self-imposed responsibility.

Gaines' timing was fortuitous. Dorn was in the process of creating--or at least contemplating--a national chain of Corporate Reports. He agreed to come down and take a look. When he arrived at KCI, Gaines met Dorn at the gate and escorted him to an aging limousine not quite old enough to be a classic anything. "I bought it at a garage sale," Gaines explained to a startled Dorn.

The limousine notwithstanding, Dorn bought the publication and re-named it "Corporate Report Kansas City." In 1980 he dispatched Steve Hedlund from Minneapolis to serve as on site publisher. For Hedlund, still in his early 30's, the experience was a "heady" one. What most impres- sed Hedlund about Kansas City was just how "remarkably open and accessible" was the power structure. Among his favorite memories were the Executive Round Table dinners he and editor Kathy Pemberton hosted, the precursors perhaps to today's Ingram's Industry Outlook assemblies.

With Hedlund's able help, Dorn brought a measure of professionalism and organization to the proceedings. Dorn credits "sales whiz" Janet Tupper as the one person who helped make the magazine profitable as well.

It was Tupper who put Dorn in touch with her then beau, Richard Kappa, after Hedlund had headed back to Minnesota to publish Twin Cities Magazine. With Kappa's list in hand, Dorn came to Kansas City in 1985 and interviewed several of the better prospects without success. Afterwards he met with Kappa at the New Stanley, which now served only as the magazine's after-hour hangout.

"I know one person I'd like to hire," Dorn told Kappa, "but I don't think he'd work for me." When Dorn told Kappa that the "one person" in question was Kappa himself. Kappa answered, "You're right."

In Kappa's case--indeed in the case of each of the other publishers assembled--cooler heads did not prevail. Kappa took the bait as did the rest, and all are still shaking those aforementioned heads as to why.

Kappa is of the opinion that the classiest and best issue that he published was the one that featured Mike Russell and Doc Worley on the cover. A few years earlier, the auda-cious partners--against all conventional wisdom--had started up a new kind of weekly publication, one that they called the Kansas City Business Journal. In the first few years of its operation in the mid-80's the Business Journal was the rage of Kansas City.

Doc Worley claims that The Star would send a cab driver down to their offices on Friday mornings to pick up a fresh copy of the weekly and find out what was going on in Kansas City.

"You'd go out to dinner on Saturday night," adds Russell, "and by then everyone had read it and was talking about it." One could forgive the entrepreneurs a bit of hyperbole, but hyperbolic they are not. For that brief shining moment, the Business Journal was that popular.

The way Kappa figures, for him to have the "chutzpah" to put the mugs of his competitors on the cover of what was then Corporate Report was a sign of some class and confidence.

Says Worley, explaining his own interest in Corporate Report, "We were actually attracted to it because of the fabulous cover. We figured we could run a cover of us every month."

Sure enough, Russell and Worley began to make plans to add Corporate Report to their growing media empire. For Dorn, the aggressive competition from the pair was "daunting." Feeling the heat, he was prepared to sell.

At just about this same time--if the reader will excuse a deviation to the first person--I (Jack Cashill) was negotiating with the Business Journal to start writing a column for that publication.

I had written my first Corporate Report column in 1981 but had been dumped unceremoniously by a new editor, here unnamed, who wanted his or her own stable of writers. When I contracted with the Business Journal in 1986, I wrote a slightly waspish first column on why I preferred to write for the Business Journal than for Corporate Report. So there!

No sooner had the editor pasted up the column, however, than he learned that Russell and Worley--to everyone's amazement--had just bought Corporate Report, the magazine I had just so snippily "dissed." The Business Journal editor called me in a bit of a panic. He needed a new column in two hours. Could I produce one?

Ingram's recent assembly of its past and present publishers will certainly stimulate many fond memories among its current and former associates and the business community alike.

At the time I worked for an ad agency. There, two hours was a leisure cruise. Sure, why not. Not wanting to exploit company time, I left my Fairway office for my Brookside home and took my usual shortcut through Mission Hills. Passing through I got the inspiration for the one column that, for no easily explained reason, would generate more mail than all the other columns I wrote for the next ten years combined.

It read in part, "I see the women every morning as I drive through Mission Hills on the way to work. They walk in pairs, arms pumping like pistons, jaws mashing, hair a flying wedge of sexual indifference." The husbands sent me a score or more of cryptic "attaboys!" The hundreds of letters that the wives sent were, as you might imagine, somewhat less enthusiastic.

In due time, the Business Journal would feel compelled to fire me for an equally mischievous, if true, column on a certain Kansas City business. At the luncheon, both Russell and Worley denied any involvement in said firing and are sticking by their story.

Misters Russell and Worley do take credit--or perhaps "responsibility" is the better word--for hiring Woody Overton as publisher of Corporate Report. They claim they felt sorry for this affectionately described "political hack" when his boss, Tom Eagleton, stepped down from the Senate. Overton takes credit--and here "credit" is the right word--for firing the Corporate Report editor who fired me.

Although not a journalist, Overton appreciated the forum that Corporate Report provided. In fact, all of the publishers appreciated that forum, which is more or less why everyone got involved. Says Gaines, "It was either own a magazine or own a bar." Gaines, in fact, came to own both. His "Rusty Scupper" proved to be as improbable a downtown success as his magazine.

As to Overton, he put the magazine into the kind of shape that made it marketable. The purchaser was the late businessman Bob Ingram. According to Worley, Ingram had hoped to make the magazine into the Kansas City equivalent of Washington's own and then popular Regardie's.

Consultants told Bob and wife Beth that the magazine would benefit from a new name, something a little snappier than Corporate Report. They discussed the identity strategy that had worked for the Forbes family could work for the Ingrams, Although Beth was a "little embarrassed" by the exposure, Bob saw the virtue in using his name and so Ingram's Magazine was born.

In an odd twist of fate, Executive Editor Jack Cashill has found himself as the authority of business in Kansas City and the unlikely patron of Ingram's Magazine.

Local history being somewhat circular, Ingram's soon enough featured none other than Woody Overton on its cover. As Doc Worley observes, Kansas City is the "back scratching capital of America." But to be fair, Overton was then the man of the hour. He had managed Clinton's successful 1992 campaign in Missouri and was soon to be named head of the regional GSA.

Even though he himself had been publisher, Overton was amazed at just how much attention is paid to someone who manages to get his puss on the cover of Ingram's. "It was definitely a high point of my career," says Overton. He only wishes he were then in private consulting practice as he is now to reap the benefits of so much publicity.

In a further bit of circularity, the new Ingram's hired me to resume my monthly column. In time, sure enough, a new editor would more or less force me out, but salvation was around the corner.

"It's very difficult to make money in a slick monthly," says Worley. Although Russell and Worley saw the potential in the magazine and appreciated what Overton had done for it, they know that only one thing could make a magazine like Ingram's profitable.

Observes Russell, "We needed a single dedicated entrepreneur."

That person was not Bob Ingram. Ingram had loved the media business since his days in journalism and yearned to be a publisher. At this latter stage in his career, he could afford the luxury. Indeed, he ran the magazine as something of a public service. He also lent the magazine his name, a level of financial stability, and a tie to business in KC. Ingram was the only 2-term chairman of the Kansas City Chamber of Commerce.

The Sweeneys, who took the magazine over from Ingram after a brief interval in corporate hands, hoped to preserve Bob Ingram's sophisticated legacy but could not afford to run it at a loss. In Russell's estimation, that was just as well. As he sees it, the profit motive provides the only useful logic for any organization that hopes to be successful. When Russell first heard that the entrepreneurial Sweeney was taking over, he knew that the magazine had a future.

Today, the future salutes the past, and the past salutes the future. "I am impressed with the magazine," says Lud Gaines, who has never stopped watching its progress. "It has come a long, long way since I was involved."