Today we interview Marc Bokoff, from the class of 1987. A management major, Marc came to the station as business manager under then-GM Larry Barron, before becoming general manager himself. He took over the station in the midst of the station changing from a block format to the much more tighly programmed CHR format it still has today.
As GM, Marc and the staff faced backlash for this change, leading accusations of racial bias and subsequent protests. We get his perspective (through his 37-year-old notes) of having to shut the station down for the evening, the negotiations, personal threats he received, and the eventual resolution to the protest. Following the event, Marc stepped down as General Manager, partly due to concerns over his own personal health at the time.
Marc reflects on how these experiences at WJPZ profoundly impacted his professional life. Despite majoring in general studies in the business school, he gained invaluable hands-on experience in business management through his work at the radio station. This experience became more educational and instrumental than his formal business studies, equipping him with skills in advertising, marketing, budgeting, and negotiation.
After graduation, Marc briefly joined his family's supermarket business before venturing into the travel industry, where he has been for over 35 years. He discusses the various adaptations and changes he had to make in his business, especially with the rise of internet travel services and the impact of world events like COVID-19 and geopolitical conflicts. He emphasizes the importance of adaptability and resilience, drawing parallels between the challenges he faced in college and those in his professional life.
Despite some trying moments, Marc is grateful for the skills and experiences gained at WJPZ, which have significantly shaped his career and personal growth. He highlights the station's role as an educational incubator and its impact on students beyond those interested in broadcasting careers.
The WJPZ at 50 Podcast Series is produced by Jon Gay, Class of 2002, and his podcast production agency, JAG in Detroit Podcasts.
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Jag: Welcome to WJPZ at 50. I'm excited to get to know today's guest because he's someone that I don't know that previously, from the class of 87. He was there at a very pivotal time as the general manager, I should say, at a significant time in this agent's history, and also excited to hear about what he's been up to since and what he's doing now as a travel enthusiast myself. Marc Bokoff welcome to the podcast.
Marc: Hey, nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
Jag: So take me from the beginning. Where did you grow up? How did you find Syracuse? And then Z 89?
Marc: I grew up in Eastern Connecticut, Southeastern Connecticut specifically. And I went to a private high school where, we didn't have a radio station.
I searched colleges with my college advisor and ended up getting into Syracuse because it had the quickest path for me to get to the management school. I came in as a human development and family studies cause that's where the retailing program was in 87. There was no Whitman school back then. So I came in that way because my family was in the retail grocery business and that was where I was headed after college.
So I came in via the retailing program. And then as I got my studies together, I applied to the business school, got in and finished my college career, graduating from the Syracuse university school of management. That's how I got into Syracuse. And I have to say, 40 years in retrospect, it was really a good time.
I wasn't the fraternity guy, and honestly, that's how I got to WJPZ. As I said, I wasn't a radio person, I'd never been on the radio before, it was never anything that I knew much about, but I was a management person and the station had management roles. And my junior year, I ended up as the business manager before I was the general manager, I was the business manager.
Jag: Marc, did you come in straight as the business manager or did you work your way up to that role?
Marc: No, I came in straight as the business manager. I had no previous contact really with the radio station at all. I listened to the. Interview you did with Rusty, and I was not a great DJ. It wasn't my forte and he pointed that out aptly, but I loved it.
So they put me on overnights. I did 4AM to 7am and I was glad to do it because it was fun. And it was something that I wanted to do. And then I got involved as the business manager, cause that's where I thought I could really provide the most benefit mutual benefit, I might add, me at the radio station and the station, I don't know, I assume it's the same today, but back then we were not allowed to sell advertising.
It was a sponsorship and there was this fine line between advertising and sponsorship. To keep us in compliance with the FCC as a not-for-profit radio station and how you wrote copy and how you sold to the, in air quotes, the time to the local businesses was a pretty critical piece. And as you probably may or may not know, but the station received most of its funding through student government association up until my tenure, when that went away.
And we used the most of that money for equipment, rest of the money we needed to get sports people to away sporting events, we needed to get reporters out on the beat, we needed to pay for ASCAP all of the expenses that go along with running a radio station had to be generated through sponsorships.
That's where that, the rest of that money came from. So that was a critical part of the station's infrastructure. And then from there, and I did that under Larry Barron, rest in peace, was the general manager during that time. And then I became the general manager right after Larry.
Jag: I think it's really interesting to hear your perspective on this because so many folks came in, I want to be on the air.
I came for Newhouse. I want to be communications, but you coming into the management side. That's what brought you to Syracuse and then so many people we've talked to in the podcast and then have gone through the halls of WJPZ, you found something that was applicable to what you wanted to do career wise at this radio station that wasn't necessarily the on-air piece, but it was something that you were looking at differently off the air.
Marc: Absolutely. It was great for me because I didn't end up doing an internship in college. I had a very narrow singularly focused plan, which we may talk about a little bit later, that didn't exactly materialize. So I went to college with an idea and never ended up with an internship. The closest thing I ever had to an internship was all the business.
Experience that I got working at WJPZ, a young college student, and it really did as, and it has held me in very good stead because I've been in business for myself since the day I graduated from college. And I was a general studies major in the business school, which meant I was doing a little bit of everything in the business school.
I wasn't concentrating in finance or accounting or anything else. So I had smatters, my degree had smatterings from all places. Today that's probably an entrepreneurial program that the University's business school offers that it didn't offer then. So yeah, you're absolutely right. It was definitely, that's how I got to the station.
I was not a huge music junkie necessarily. I didn't have any engineering background per se. I had a business background and thought I could contribute in that way.
Jag: You become a general manager. You succeed Larry Barron as the general manager. Let's get into it. what happened? I know you mentioned off air before we started recording that we're happening to recording this November 16th, which coincides almost the anniversary of a lot of the stuff that happened as you were general manager.
And we've had it referenced in other podcasts, but take me through what happened through your mind's eye and your memory as far as the sit in and everything related to that.
Marc: To back up, the decision that precipitated most of what happened before I became general manager. And I knew I had inherited something.
I didn't know I was going to inherit quite what I inherited, but I inherited a big change. And in the spring of 1986, there was already a lot of rumblings on campus about, people being unhappy with the changes that were made to the format of the radio station.
Jag: This was tightening the format and becoming more of a straight top 40 station as opposed to more of a future hits format. Do I have that right?
Marc: Yeah, tightening is a pretty liberal word. We went from a block station to a contemporary radio station with a clock. Almost overnight. So it was a pretty, we, it wasn't overnight for us, but it was definitely overnight for the community and the students and they let us know it.
And we took a lot of that. He, Larry took a lot of that. He initially in the spring of 86 with student government and in reading some of the materials, because as I said to you, I have a scrapbook that's really thick, that goes back now, 37 years. 37, 38 years. And I reread a bunch of stuff that, a lot of us who were in our late teens and early twenties said to the media back then.
Jag: This is show prep, by the way, for this podcast.
Marc: Yeah, it's interesting. I haven't looked at this stuff in quite a while, so it was interesting. The incestuous nature of student government and WJPZ at that time was crazy that the president of SGA was on our board. We went before them for money. The conflicts that existed and ultimately, by the way, the president of SGA at that time resigned because of that from our board.
He resigned from being the chairman of our board because of that. Anyway, we had started in the spring, over the summer, as you can imagine, it was relatively quiet. It was the one summer in four years that I spent in Syracuse getting ready for the fall. And in the fall, we made some changes. There were two programs that we, as a station, decided were still after the format had been changed.
It was still part of the programming and they were still block programming in nature. And the two programs that were blocked in nature were geared at a black audience. They were run and DJed by two African American DJs. And when that happened. And by the way, as an adult today of 58 years old and look at what goes on in the world immediately, what happens today happened then.
So we haven't come very far because immediately it became a racist issue. It was immediately. And even though many people said it wasn't, it was, it immediately became that way. And ultimately the student Afro American society. Who was at that time under the leadership of Karen Mason, she'd been elected in the spring.
They staged a sit in at the radio station on November 4th, 1986. They got access to the station by a station DJ, who was black, and sympathetic to their desire to get onto the property. And he opened the doors and he allowed the sit in to happen. Now, in retrospect, I will say the fear of what might have come of that was far greater than what did in terms of physical safety and all of that, I think, in retrospect, from what we've been seeing lately in the streets here.
We happen to be doing this in November. there's a lot of demonstrations happening across the country and the world. And some of them have turned violent. This was pretty peaceful. In retrospect. 37 years later, looking at it, it was pretty peaceful. But we didn't know that.
And we were afraid. And we actually locked ourselves into the senior staff office, which meant we couldn't get out. The only way because the other side of the office was a locked set of doors that led to the Good Food store. That was a health food store on the other side of Watson Hall. And that door ultimately was opened by the university people to get us out of there.
Otherwise we would have been sleeping in there. There would have been no way to get out of there. So the fear was very high. And of course the idea that these people came in to the station and, we ultimately had to take the station off the air because we couldn't open a microphone because the noise in the lobby of the hall, the way the station was set up at that time, there was no way for a microphone to be open.
Couldn't even access the DJ booth. So it really was a pretty big day and a pretty big couple of days. And we finally, about a day later through lots of talk, lots of negotiation, and obviously if you talk to some people who were there at the time, some things that I did at the time that I agreed to, I didn't have a hundred percent support for those things.
And now I'm going to go from memory and there may be somebody who knows their things differently, but we agreed to 15 hours of programming that was geared at the black community. Okay. We agreed. no, I agreed that we, I agreed not to discipline any black students who might have been involved that happened to be working for the radio station.
That decision after I ultimately resigned my position, we'll talk about that in a second. After I resigned my position shortly after that decision was unanimously overridden by the senior staff under Rusty Burrell's general managership. They fired two students who were involved. I mentioned the student who opened the door, he was fired.
And there was another student who played music out of order and went against station policy and all that kind of stuff. And he was let go as well. That was something that I said I would not do. And I'd like to believe that if I was still in charge, I would have pushed back very hard and said, listen, I made this promise, we're not going to do that.
In retrospect, I get why, it was done and why they wanted to do it. I'm even quoted in the paper after my resignation, talking about that and let the senior staff made a decision. And it's their decision to make. It's a employment decision, if you will. And so they made it and that was what happened.
Generally, I was very touchy personally. I'm Jewish. Oppression. And by the way, some of what I'll say now is informed by 37 years of growing up beyond that, of course, times in Syracuse, but oppression for Jews around the country, and we happen to be speaking about this at a time where a war is going on in Israel, and all of that.
Oppression for Jews was, is not anything that I'm unfamiliar with and the charges of racism that were leveled at me and Larry Barron, by the way, who also was Jewish was a little unfair that it was convenient, but it was unfair. Decisions were not made on the basis of race. And I'm actually quoted, and I was proud of myself. And my adult self is proud of my college age, immature self. I was quoted two different times in the Daily Orange is saying, listen, if there's racism, we're going to find it. And I'm not going to tolerate it in my administration. Now, if it happened previously, we're going to root it out and we're not going to allow it.
So negotiating with Karen Mason, who was a very. Intense figure. She was very good, very smart woman, but she used the cards and I'm not a fan of the cards. Let's just get to the facts. Let's come up with a solution. And we ultimately negotiated this, the university, I was an hour approximately, away from asking the Syracuse city police chief who was onsite, the police chief of the city of Syracuse.
Jag: Not public safety. This is Syracuse city.
Marc: The chief of police, Lee Hart, was onsite. And with this ditch effort that we were making at that moment, didn't work. The next thing for me to do was to turn to Lee Hart and said, you take these people out of here and arrest them for trespassing. It was a very tense time. We came to an agreement. We got it. We announced it. The students, I have to say, got up, turned around, and walked out.
Jag: How long did the protest last, Mark? How long were they there, if you recall?
Marc: I think it was about 36 hours. It may have been that they came in. On the 3rd of November, which was a Monday night, I think that year, and we reached an agreement probably sometime late in the evening on the 4th of November or early morning of the 5th.
It was, it blends together at this point. It wasn't any more than two days, the better part of two days. But it was important. And by the way, the university administration, Peter Bagent, who was a sort of a lightning rod figure as a VP or Dean or whatever he was. He, oversaw the student programming on campus.
That was his area. That was his bailiwick. And it was a very nerve-wracking thing for him. He had students against students. It was a bad scene. And in retrospect, again, having already had both my kids go through college and haven't been on college campuses themselves and looking at it as a parent, I can only imagine as a parent felt about all this stuff going on, calling the university, paying tuition back then, which today everybody would say it was chump change.
It was twelve and a half thousand dollars a year to go to Syracuse the last year I graduated. Private university in the United States of America was twelve and a half thousand dollars, today you can't set food on campus for less than 70. So anyway, parents were probably upset and there was all kinds of stuff that the university had to deal with.
So I was sensitive to that as was Karen. She understood that. But we had to resolve this and we did, and I'm happy that we resolved it without violence. Nobody ended up hurt, nobody ended up in the hospital. Now, that all being said, leads me to what happened next, both for the station and for me personally.
Jag: I was going to ask you about that, okay.
Marc: During this whole period, I had received calls at home. I wanna say calls that were scary. My roommate came home one day and played the answering machine and there was a message on the answering machine. You know that if you don't put the programming back, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're coming for you.
Oh, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're, gonna, oh yeah. It was nasty. My roommate had his car keyed outside Watson Hall. I was threatened on more than one occasion. My sister's birthday is November the 8th. And so she was at GW and after this all ended. She had a birthday that year, my parents went to GW to visit her for her birthday, and they called me and said, why don't you come?
And I'm like, yeah, so they convinced me, I flew to Washington and had, spent that time that weekend, that following weekend, right after this ended with, my family. I was a mess. I had heart palpitations. I thought I was having a heart attack on two different occasions. By the way, my dad was a cardiac patient.
So anything like that was real sensitive. The family, they begged me to get out of this. They're like, why do you want to do this? Why do you need to be involved in this? They begged me to get out of this and I resisted them fairly strongly for a while, but then it just became clear from a health perspective and, there was a chance.
That I wouldn't graduate on time.
Jag: Because of this or because you were tied up by all this stuff. Sure.
Marc: I was a senior and, in all fairness, probably wasn't the strongest academic student that existed in the management team with WJPZ. I was a lot better at that side of things than I probably was at the book side of things in retrospect.
You don't have time to study your head is elsewhere. You're worried about who's going to be knocking at the door or what they're going to call or yell or scream or threaten. So you just, things happen. And I was worried and they were worried I wouldn't graduate on time. And as is, I didn't get my actual diploma until 1988, because I had to take a summer class.
I walked with my class, but I had to take a summer class. And I did, and that was the end of that. But the point is this affected my senior year academically in a pretty significant way. And so before it could do it anymore, I offered my resignation to the senior staff, I believe it was November 12th, 1986. And I actually went back and I have for you, just, I know we're at a podcast, you can't see.
Jag: Oh my goodness. I can see on the podcast. It is loose leaf notebook paper, handwritten.
Marc: Okay. This is a handwritten four page. I don't want to say it's a speech because it's just, if you've ever were in the senior staff room, it's a small office. When you have a senior staff meeting, 20 people jam themselves in there.
Everybody sits on desktops except the GM has a chair. Yeah. You've got all these people in front of you. So I was sitting at the desk and I gave this speech about what happened and where we were headed and how we would have to go there without me. And some of this, obviously this was discussed with some of the staff in advance, but the senior staff, but the general staff was pretty surprised and felt, most of them felt like it was a pretty bad thing.
Got this card. It's still in my stuff.
Jag: Okay. It is a woman in a bikini. Okay. On the cover.
Marc: That says congratulations with all kinds of sports balls on the front. And it's signed inside by, I don't know, must be 25 or 30 people.
Jag: The congratulations card, not a condolence card, I should point out.
Marc: And, look, generally speaking, in retrospect, I feel good that most people felt that I was out there doing what I was doing in the best interest of WJPZ
and the notion that we had this, and again, as a non-radio guy, okay. Never had the advantage of having Rick Wright as a professor, I didn't get that education from a broadcasting perspective that everybody else got Impossible to think of Syracuse and WJPZ without Rick Wright. And so I didn't have that advantage.
I fully appreciated the. Educational incubator, if you will, that WJPZ was geared at being. When I was on campus and I read an editor letter to the editor recently in the old stuff, somebody wrote, Oh, we lost WAER. Now we're losing WJPZ. So historically AER. As everybody knows, was a student station and the university took it over.
And it's now a university owned property.
Jag: We referenced that in, Tommy Giarosso's podcast. He walked through that with Sean McDonough and all that stuff. As far as taking over by the university and now, you've got a couple of years later, JPZ having just gone to the FM dial is now being more tightly formatted and not that traditional block programming station, so you can understand why somebody who was there in the late 80s would feel that way, but to your point, Marc, this is an educational radio station, and for that many years afterwards, we had to teach, we've taught students for 50 plus years, how to run a radio station.
And then you've got the issue that comes up next of getting away from SGA funding, that's into this too, right?
Marc: That happened. And, October of 86 before the sit in, as I said, it happened in the spring, but early fall, the tensions were high with SGA, they're funding us, by the way, to give your listeners an idea, I read a statistic in my information, 3 dollars and 70 cents of the student fee at the time went to WJPZ per student on campus.
And under a dollar per graduate student fee went to WJPZ on campus. So between students, graduates and undergraduates, JPZ got around four bucks a student. Go figure that out. All right. Our last allocation from the student government association was a little over $40,000. Okay. Because as you might imagine, as the business manager, I was heavily involved in the budget and presenting to the finance committee.
Requesting the money of a station's behalf. So that last, allocation was $40,000. We had received the allocation before all this happened. Cause if we hadn't, we would have lost that money because they weren't, they froze our funds. And this was a little bit of a political game, if you will. Are they going to freeze our funds first or are we going to sever ties with them first?
And as it turned out, it was almost simultaneous. If you look at the, news reporting. But we pretty much came out and said, we had a meeting and we're out. We're not going to take the money anymore. And then SGA voted to freeze our funds. And that was the end of the financial relationship for many years between SGA and WJPZ, which meant.
In order to buy any new equipment and to fund the station and all those other things that we do, sponsorship dollars had to go up and it was a big job for the people who were responsible for getting that money into the station.
Jag: And we actually have an episode where we have the tribute to Larry Barron, where we talk about how Larry's deftness and procedural moves to figure out how this transition and separation would work. And then for 15 years after that, the station was independent. Didn't go back and take university funding again until just after I graduated in 2002 and 2003.
Marc: So it was a very significant move. It allowed the station, the freedom to do what it thought that wanted to do from a management perspective.
And I think that was the big key that a lot of students at the time didn't understand that this was a business. Yes, they invested in this business as a student government and student fee. And this was a business and we ran it as a business. And the business had a model and the model was at the time, CHR was the hottest format in the United States.
And so it definitely was a big deal, but we certainly, I think did as good a job as students who volunteer time and we're out to learn and understand could do in given the circumstances that we had. Now, fast forward beyond graduation for me, I graduate, I go to work for my dad for about a year. I mentioned retail food.
We were in the supermarket business and ultimately after about a year, we closed our business and I was out. What am I going to do next? I got a college degree, I was about to get married by the way and needed to, figure it out. So I ended up buying a local travel agency, long story short, and have been in the travel business for the last 35 years.
I took a short detour 2009 to 2014, where I went back into the food business. I actually owned a kosher grocery store in West Hartford, Connecticut for five years. And I kept my fingers in travel a little bit, but that was like, I was thinking I was going to get back to really what I wanted to be.
I ended up selling that and got back into travel and have been doing it pretty much ever since. What I learned from my dad as a business person was, highly consequential in my ability to run a business and pretty successful business. I might add it humbly say, but what I learned at WJPZ, on the Syracuse campus far exceeded by the way, anything that I learned in business school.
Far exceeded it in the sense that advertising, marketing, budgeting, how to deal with people, interpersonal relationships, human resources, negotiating with An adversary, if you will, what it was at the time was a very adversarial relationship. Today. I wouldn't look at it that way, but it was that all of those things have allowed me to work for myself.
Literally. I have never worked for a corporation. I have always worked for myself since the day I got out of college. And to this day. Good and bad to that, by the way,
Jag: I know that feeling.
Marc: Yeah, good and bad. everybody tells you everything is all perfect one way or the other is full of crap.
So I really learned a lot. And while I wasn't as well-connected post-graduation with the people, because we all went, most of them went into some kind of radio broadcasting. Movies, television arena that I was definitely far removed from, I didn't really offer internship opportunities for young students at JPZ.
So I lost some touch with the station and the people. I went back a couple of times early on, the banquet always came up at a time where I couldn't go for one reason or another, I went and visited the station twice, both of my kids visited Syracuse before, in the college process.
So I think that side of it, I'm probably a lot different than most of the other people that you've talked to, I think. I know, I've actually maintained a little bit of a relationship. I talked a few times a year with Danny Corsun and when I first got out, actually Larry and I met a few times when he was in Atlanta, but generally speaking, I'm Facebook friends with Rusty, but that's probably where my connection with the staff at the time, ends but
it doesn't diminish, for me anyway, the extraordinary opportunity that WJPZ provided to a non-Newhouse based student. I got a lot out of it, and I can tell you that when I do marketing for my business today. I'm probably one of the few independent travel agencies that spend any significant money on the radio.
Jag: Really?
Marc: In the small, independent, non, when I'm talking about Orbitz and Travelocity. Those small, independent travel agencies don't spend a lot of money on newspaper back in the day, by the way, it was newspaper when you were a twinkle in your mom's eye. It was newspaper radio. Those were the two things together that made a good marketing for a business.
Obviously, lots changed, but I still, to this day, do radio advertising. I write my own copy and I record my own commercials.
Jag: Excellent.
Marc: So that's because of the confidence and the ability that I got at JPZ. I don't know anything about production at all. I spent more time watching Chris Bungo and Rocco Macri cut promos and make promos and splice things together and make real magic.
These guys were really talented people. And they are, they're still talented people. Back in the day, I just pretty much stood on the outside so I could understand as a manager when they came and said, we got this challenge or that challenge. What does that all mean? Because when they come into me with all of their lingo, I don't know what the lingo is.
I need to learn the lingo. So I would spend a lot of touring just watching and understanding. I didn't do any of that stuff myself. But I understood how it worked and I got an understanding of it. So it was really great.
Jag: So let me follow up on that. So you mentioned challenges, small challenges that may have been on the production side versus obviously the biggest challenge of your tenure with the sit in.
You're in an industry that has changed significantly over the last couple decades. You mentioned newspapers a while back. Now you're competing with, the Orbitz, Travelocity, XYZ. How have you managed to overcome those challenges and maintain a successful travel agency in the face of all this change?
Marc: It's interesting, we went through a couple of wars, we went through 9 11, and the internet. Yeah. the short answer to your question is in 2008, I put my business up for sale and I sold it literally faster than my head could turn. I was very surprised. Did not expect that at all. So if you get your history, recent history hat on, what happened?
I sold my business in June of 2008. What happened in September of 2008?
Jag: That was that big economic downturn.
Marc: Lehman Brothers went bust. I was now out of a business that was relying on a lot of passive income. And the internet was starting to creep in and really take hold. And as I mentioned, I spent a few years, I bought a retail kosher food market in West Hartford and went and did that.
The change that happened, we adapted to the change. Okay. JPZ adapted to a change or block to CHR. Based on a bylaw requirement and a desire to teach in a certain way. Our change was forced on us. We didn't have a lot of choice, but we made changes. So as the business developed, I opened a online discount cruise website.
Okay. It was not the most successful thing that I ever did in my career. Didn't last all that long, but it was something we needed to try. Just cause the cruise sector was growing and the only way to get traction beyond your local market in those days, because remember, it was still very local was to go out on the internet and try to get people from New Jersey and Chicago and South Dakota to call you, you can give me 50 cents less on this cruise than somebody else.
We did that for a while and made changes like that. Then post sale, after I sold that brick-and-mortar business, that brick and mortar business was seven locations, 37 employees, and it was very heavy on expense. When I got back into the business at all, it's going to go on a change to some degree while I was out of it.
And now it became for a lot of people, a work from home or work from a We Work space or whatever, And it wasn't this whole brick and mortar, they, exist, but not at any great number anymore today, I adapted my business to the cruise sector in about somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 to 80 percent of my businesses in the cruise market and the other 20, 25 percent is in land based vacations and it's all location travel.
I don't do any corporate work. I don't do any business travel. I do meetings and incentives, but I don't do any. get me from point A to point B with a hotel and a car rental for a meeting. I just don't do that anymore. I did it years ago and in a lot of volume, but today we don't do that at all.
It's all vacation. And that was another adaptation and another change. And then we changed to, I literally went from 37 people in seven locations to one person. And I have an office in Connecticut that I work out of when I go back up to Connecticut and I have a home here in Florida where I live year-round and I'm on the road.
Some crazy number of days a year. I don't even know what it is anymore. I was trapped. And in fact, we, you had to reschedule. And then when we rescheduled, I was away for 10 to 12 days. I just got back and now we found this open window to have this time together. Yeah. So that's just the way my, my life is, but the business changed.
Another way was the keyboard, the mouse, the monitor and the internet. And as long as I have that and a cell phone. I can work from anywhere, right? I have worked from Singapore, I have worked with people from Connecticut, I've worked from Singapore, I've worked from other places in Southeast Asia, I've worked from Europe, I've worked from South America, I've worked from any place you could think of, I've worked from the middle of the ocean, as long as we have connectivity. We can work.
Jag: It's so funny you say that because the last cruise my wife and I took were like, you know what? We're just going to unplug. And then we got on the boat and realized that, wow, the internet's a lot better than it was on these cruises a couple of years ago. Crap. I guess I'm going to answer some emails after all.
Marc: And now everybody's moving to Starlink.. The cruise lines, Starling to improve that. Because first of all, they want it. They want the hashtags out there. They want the pictures out there. Oh yeah. And the customers are demanding it. My wife and I are leaving on Sunday for five-day cruise for Thanksgiving week.
And the fact of the matter is she said to me yesterday, she goes. It'll be Thanksgiving week. You think we can just maybe like Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, we can just not open our computers. I said, we'll see, and Friday will be a big day. We'll be home on Friday because of that.
We'll be back in the office. But that is the other big adaptation. And I joined a company in 2016. It's a franchise. I bought the franchise, which is an interesting place for a guy like me to be. Because I'm not used to having people set standards for me. I set my own standards.
But the technology and the marketing made it all worthwhile. When I got back into the business and allowed me a step up and this company is the number one home-based franchise in the travel industry in the country. Cruise Planners is the name of the franchise. Don't let the name fool you. We do land vacations as well.
The woman who started this company was a travel agent like me in 1988. And she figured out what had to be a better mousetrap and she built it into a massive organization. And it's all pretty much based on work from home and the internet. And that has pretty much totally re jiggered the landscape in our industry in a huge way.
And it's another adaptation. And then we had COVID.
Jag: Now you've got the bounce back travel after COVID as we record here in November of 23.
Marc: So here's the thing, the bounce back demand travel post COVID. Absolutely. Has been phenomenal. But then what happened on October 7th, we had a war in the middle East.
So I now can honestly tell you. I have canceled somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars in travel just because of that war so far.
Jag: Wow.
Marc: So far. We're not done yet. So the business that we are in has its ups and downs. We're very sensitive to world events and all this other stuff, the war, even though it's thousands of miles away, it impacts what goes on right here at home in our office.
So we deal with all of that and I'll tell you. The adversity to some degree, the adversity that I dealt with as a college senior in the issue of the city and the issue of negotiating with people who thought differently than I did was an absolutely Indispensable part of who I've become as a person, as a manager, as a business person.
All of that wrapped together. It sounds trite, it sounds cliche like when you talk about it, but honestly in retrospect, and I'll be honest, I don't think about it very often. This podcast made me think about that and, it's Sure, sure. It's a good thing to do. Maybe it's a story to tell grandchildren, which I now have.
It definitely was instrumental and I have to say three years after graduation, I lost my father. I lost my father at 26. So I graduated from college and I had him for four years. And then, so my ability to get to suck any more out of him and what he knew was truncated. But when I had left that piece that I got from being at JPZ and this functional business organization was more than most people could realize.
Because I'm sure somebody like you would say, what is the guy who really didn't go to Newhouse, wasn't really interested in that, hasn't fit into this whole radio thing and hasn't really even made sense, that's where he would spend his time. And at the end of the day, like I said, I wasn't in a fraternity.
I didn't do any of that stuff. It was the only really club that I did and true for so many of us. Yeah, it was just highly beneficial to me as a person in a business person.
Jag: You've left us at a good spot because you brought this conversation full circle. You've made my job incredibly easy for me today, Marc, because you answered my questions right as I'm about to ask them.
So I appreciate that. The editor in me really appreciates that piece of it. I really want to thank you for coming on, sharing your perspective on a really pivotal moment in the station's history and everything you've done since. So thank you for your time today.
Marc: Thank you. I appreciate you doing this.
It's really cool. And maybe we'll get to the banquet this year.
Jag: Let's hope. Okay.
Marc: Thanks a lot, Jon.