Convergence: Communities, Cultures, and Careers
A Keynote Speech by Ben Fong-Torres
(AC Team grabbed his transcript for you!)

Visit Ben Fong-Torres Official Site

     Ladies and gentlemen, you are looking at a loser. Yes, it's true that I've been honored with this invitation to be your keynote speaker. But I was just thinking the other day, while hanging out at my computer, writing these remarks, that my watch is a $49, leather-strapped timepiece from the gift shop at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

     I should be wearing gold. And I could have if I'd only stuck with one of my first jobs out of college: at Pacific Telephone. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I was, at one time, sort of, one of you. It's a scary thought, just before dinner, but it's true. After a year, from '67 to '68, at a local radio and TV station, when the TV writing job got to be frustrating, I got a job at the phone company, at the em-ployee magazine. On one of my first days, a vice president took me on a tour of the public relations department at the company head-quarters at 140 New Montgomery, and, at one point, he stopped, pulled up his sleeve and showed me his gold watch. "Son," he told me, "one of these days, you could have one of these."

     Let's see, 1968 plus 25?�that's since 1993 that I could've been flashing gold on my wrist. But the secret word in that equation is 1968. That was the year that all hell broke loose around this country and around the world.

     Here in San Francisco, we'd already had the summer of love; the civil rights movement, the anti-war marches, the free speech movement, the sex, drugs and rock and roll revolution. My roommates and I were part of all that, and it was weird enough that I'd landed this job with the phone company. Now, looking at this executive's wristwatch and contemplating 25 years in a suit and tie?�I almost freaked out!

     I only stayed a year with this part of Ma Bell's family. There was this little rock and roll newspaper that had started up, called Rolling Stone, and I'd begun to send in free-lance pieces. Just short of my first anniversary at Pacific Telephone Magazine, I got the call to join Rolling Stone full-time, at a healthy salary cut, and I ran from New Montgomery into a new world.

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