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Class Notes: November 19, 1997
CLASS NOTES FEATURES
William Ballenger '62 lives and breathes Michigan politics
WILLIAM S. BALLENGER '62 has had excellent training for his job as publisher and sole proprietor of the newsletter Inside Michigan Politics. He served one term as a state representative and two as a state senator, followed by a stint as director of the Michigan Department of Licensing and Regulation. And in 1982 he finished second in the Republican primary for a U.S. Senate seat. After the loss, Ballenger was appointed state horse-racing commissioner. "Michigan is the only state with just one racing commissioner," Ballenger says. "You're a czar. I hadn't really followed it before--I was a sports junkie, but I hadn't spent much time at the track. So it was basically a new kind of job for me."
After three years of czardom, Ballenger became a sports columnist for the Detroit Free Press covering horse racing. But in 1987, while still penning his racing column, Ballenger decided to draw on his political contacts and start writing and selling Inside Michigan Politics, a biweekly inside-dope sheet, from his home office in Lansing, the state capital. Now, a decade later, IMP has 1,200 subscribers--"about as big as any state-based political newsletter in the country," he says.
"It's fulfilled my wildest dreams," he says. "I'd always felt that there was a cavernous abyss of ignorance about government and politics as it pertained to Michigan."
Though a lifelong Republican, Ballenger's newsletter--which costs $135 a year--attempts to play it straight down the middle. "One of my main challenges when I started the newsletter," he says, "was to live down my history as partisan Republican and convince Democrats and Independents that I can be objective, and I think I've done that." Indeed, after long considering himself a moderate, Rockefeller-style Republican, Ballenger says that at 56, he's "more like a Clinton Democrat than anything else."
The readership of IMP consists of a small clique of wired-in politicos, reporters and lobbyists--enough for the newsletter by itself to clear $80,000 before taxes, not counting his earning from radio and speeches (mostly campaign handicapping talks, of course). "I have to spend a lot of time on the phone and reading the papers," he says. "It's not the kind of thing where I hang out in the gallery of the state House and Senate, any more than Jim Lehrer or John McLaughlin do. But I can't afford to take too much time off. I'm the chief cook and bottle-washer."
Ballenger grew up in Flint, 50 miles from Lansing. Ballenger's grandfather was an early treasurer of Chevrolet and Buick and then director of a bank; his father was a member of the Class of 1929 and became an executive at the same bank. The banking tradition ended with Ballenger, though; he was an English major, freshman football player, and member of the Triangle Club, touring Europe to entertain U.S. Army troops.
--Louis Jacobson '92
Louis Jacobson covers politics and public policy for National Journal magazine.
Of Henny Youngman, Frank Sinatra, and Rick Nelson
For 30 years, George Hamid '40 was king of Atlantic City's boardwalk
GEORGE A. HAMID JR. '40 used to love the rain. "On a hot summer day on the Boardwalk, when it rained, you had to go inside," said Hamid, who once owned so much of Atlantic City's great indoors that he was called the king of the Boardwalk.
From 1946 to 1975, Hamid filled the New Jersey resort's Steel Pier, the Million Dollar Pier, and eight Boardwalk theaters by presenting nearly every famous name in show business: Henny Youngman ("I booked him so many times I could do his act"), Frank Sinatra ("He did 11 shows for me in one day on Steel Pier"), and Rick Nelson ("We sold 44,211 tickets in one day"). To Convention Hall, which he booked on a regular basis, he brought the Beatles. "When it rained, we'd clean up," said Hamid, now 78.
After he sold all his Atlantic City property in 1975 to run the New Jersey State Fair, he grew to hate rain. "One washout on a Sunday afternoon would cost us $65,000 in lost business," he said. "If it rained all day that would cost us $100,000." Last year, he sold the fair to the Florida-based Reithoffer Shows, he said, "because we had so many washouts, we never had a bottom line." A recent state investigation into charitable telephone solicitations Hamid's company did in relation to the State Fair was concluded out of court.
Hamid, his sons, and grandchildren have reduced their holdings to what was the original family business: a circus. From February through July, with occasional dates in September and October, 50 people and about as many animals of the Hamid Royale Circus wend their way across America, playing state fairs and Shriners' conventions. It has no fixed acts; every year, Hamid puts together a new circus.
"My father started out as a tumbler in Europe," he said. "He worked his way up to the point that he booked the Ringling Brothers circus. Through him, I got to know every cat act in the country. I know every high-wire act, every acrobatic team. I know anybody that has an elephant."
Clowns?
"The woods are full of clowns."
Most mornings, Hamid walks a few miles on the Longport beach, south of Atlantic City. "And when it rains, I don't care," he said. "I stay inside! It doesn't bother me! It's somebody else's headache."
Then he'll work on his memoirs. In the afternoon, he'll drive across the bay to Northfield, where his family runs the circus. "I'm still involved, but I'm more of a theatrical guy," he said. "My kids look at ticket prices and grosses. I think about the people in the audience."
He doesn't like to think of the fact that the city that made him the single most powerful East Coast entertainment impresario outside New York City has changed beyond recognition. Casino hotels stand where Hamid's theaters were. Million Dollar Pier is a shopping mall owned by Caesars. Donald Trump owns Steel Pier, now little more than a flat slab of concrete with amusement rides.
Hamid is also remembered for turning down a 1957 offer from the William Morris Agency to book a young country singer named Elvis Presley in the Warner Theater, whose faŤade still stands on the Boardwalk. "Turning them down was the biggest mistake of my life, but it didn't seem like a mistake at the time," he said. "William Morris wanted the same money for Presley that I was paying Rick Nelson, and Rick Nelson was a name that made girls line up from Steel Pier to Hackney's restaurant at 6 o'clock in the morning. Who was this Presley kid?"
He still talks with Paul Anka when Anka plays Atlantic City, but Hamid said he had no desire to work in the casino-dominated city. "I sold out in 1975 because if I didn't, I would have gone broke," he said. "There was no business on the Boardwalk anymore. Nowadays, everybody wants to do two shows a night in a casino for 10 times what I paid them to do 26 shows a week. And they want free hotel rooms, meals, candy in the dressing room. When I had the piers, they had to find their own hotel rooms."
He remembers exactly what he paid every entertainer he ever hired. "I once got Tony Bennett for $2,000, and I was being generous," he said. "I remember so many of those shows. When Frankie Laine sang, it used to send shivers up and down my spine. And there wasn't a sexier singer than Helen O'Connell.
"But all anybody ever asks me about is the Diving Horse."
--Bill Kent
Copyright 1997 by The New York Times Company. Reprinted by permission.
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