Grantville Gazette. Volume 21 Page 15

  But it wasn't until she left her second husband that the book started to reveal to Fischer a model for how he could advance the faith in this time. In very long, scientific words that he would have to look up, the book seemed to say that a scientifically creditable reason might lie beneath faith healing. That there may be a link to the chemicals the body produces when in the throes of hysteria, and physical changes.

  Fischer wasn't so sure that he believed that St. John the Baptist should be lumped in with whoever this "Sister Teresa" was or if it was right to question how God decided to accomplish his miracles. Still, however imperfect the explanation, perhaps it could help him recognize the congregants who offer fertile ground to allow God's will to be accomplished in their life.

  "Neuropeptides. Synovial membranes. What words are these?" Fischer read out loud. But it was clear that this author believed that even if the miracles had occurred using purely scientific means that made them no less miracles of the spirit. But profound belief still needed the physical touch of the healer to finish the job.

  Fischer marked his place and laid the book on his lap. So the power of faith depends on the collective belief of the members present. He remembered that in the Bible it said, "Wherever two or more of you are gathered in His name…"

  The more people believe miracles are going to happen, the more miracles do happen. Thinking back to the atmosphere of the revival that had brought him to the Pentecostal faith, he understood what happened. "I must learn to involve the congregation in a much more emotional way. More like Reverend Chalker would have if he were my age."

  When Fischer tried to read on, he could hardly concentrate for all the thoughts that were running through his mind.

  ***

  Marc Kronzburg was engaging in his favorite morning pastime-reading the local newspapers at Bridges Books and Coffeehouse. Not that Der Kronz cared two Pfennigs about any story that the local newspapers reported on. For that, he certainly could depend on the better and faster coverage of his own beloved radio station.

  No. Der Kronz was again reading the advertisements.

  "Oh no! They could have bought five more thirty second spots for what they wasted on this half page!" He grimaced. Another sip of the house espresso followed by a scribbled note to record a new concept. It would be ready for his pitch for the next he saw the shop owner who had placed this poorly conceived waste of money. Only then did he turn the page to feast on the delectable agony of more missed advertising dollars. Not to mention their resulting commissions.

  "Mr. Kronzburg?"

  Marc looked up at the unexpected interruption. "Mrs. Kurger! What a wonderful surprise to see you here this morning. I was just thinking about you.

  "See…" Marc bolted to his feet and flipped the newspaper back a few pages to point at a half page ad. "Great stuff for the Kurger Emporium!

  "I was just thinking how much better it would work for you if we put a series of thirties on the station to instruct all our listeners to run out and buy a paper to look at it!"

  "Yes, I'm sure we can talk about that soon, Mr. Kronzburg," Maria said, cutting Marc off. "Right now, however, I'd like to talk with you about buying an hour."

  Maria could practically see the wheels rolling in Marc's eyes. "An hour? Why, that's one hundred and twenty thirty second spots! That's wonderful! How long of a period would you like to space out this spot buy? May I suggest…"

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Kronzburg." Maria knew that it was Marc's nature to take charge of any conversation and lead it to buying spot ads on VOA. "That's not what I meant. What we'd like is to buy a whole hour on your radio station every Saturday night."

  For once, Der Kronz was quiet. Without moving one muscle in his face, he sat back down, reached out with his left hand, found the cup of espresso sitting before him and brought it up to his lips. After gulping it down, he finally replied, "Let me see if I have this straight, Mrs. Kurger. You and Mr. Kurger want to buy a full one hour block of time to advertise Kurger's Emporium on The Voice of America every Saturday night for…"

  The concept was boggling. Even to Marc's well-crafted sales imagination.

  "… how long?"

  "I'm sorry, Mr. Kronzburg," Maria replied. She sat in the chair next to Marc and began again. "Let's start from the beginning."

  Chapter Eight

  "… So until next time, this is Brother Fischer of the Grantville Pentecostal Church inviting you to listen to our closing hymn sung by Sister Jennifer Copenhaver and the children's choir of our church. You have a blessed day!"

  "Come and listen in to a radio station

  Where the mighty host of heaven sing

  Turn your radio on (Turn your radio on)"

  December 1633, Grantville,

  State of Thuringia,

  United States of Europe

  John Grover arrived at the station early, but everyone else was in the office waiting on him. "Good morning, everyone! Gosh, and I thought I'd get here in time to have a cup of coffee before our meeting."

  After shaking hands and exchanging pleasantries, he looked toward his receptionist, "Helga, could you please get me and anyone else who would like a refill some coffee? And ask Franz to join us in the conference room when he's free, please."

  John took his seat at the head of the table. Roy and Jennifer Copenhaver sat to his left and were joined there by Maria Kurger. Brother Fischer took the chair opposite his, while the other representatives of the station management, Deanna Dee and Marc Kronzburg took their seats to his right.

  John smiled. "Roy, good to see you and Jennifer. How are things going in Franconia? Hope we didn't have to drag you away from government business."

  "No. It turned out that I had to be in Grantville this afternoon for a conference with the Federal Reserve." Shaking his head, Roy added, "We're real shorthanded over there in Fulda. Most of the powers that be still suspect that we're Swedish lapdogs and are leery of anything we propose. Right now this new State of Thuringia is in name only. It's going to take time."

  John now turned his attention to Fischer. "I got up early this morning to listen into your devotional, Brother Fischer. I can see why your church is so excited about this proposal. I especially liked the song Jennifer closed with. I remember listening to Ray Stevens sing that, years ago. It was always one of my favorites."

  "Thank you, Mr. Grover." Fischer smiled and gestured to Jennifer. "Sister Copenhaver suggested the use of that song before our second devotional. Something that I said my first time on the radio made her think of it. We've had a lot of people come up to us and compliment her version of it."

  "Well, that sure goes a long way to explaining all the fan mail we've had to handle for you since you started sitting in for Reverend Chalker."

  Jennifer glanced at her husband as Roy broke in. "I guess that brings us to our offer. John. Marc, have you told John what we want to do?"

  Marc Kronzburg snapped to attention and began his pitch, "Yes sir, Mr. Copenhaver. I think it's very good… for a starting position."

  John added, "It definitely is that. That's another reason I wanted to schedule this meeting after Reverend Fischer's appearance this morning. I wanted to be sure that he wasn't soliciting our listeners for commercial gain. I was pleased to hear…"

  Just then Franz Peck walked into the room. "Franz. You know Reverend Fischer and Jennifer Copenhaver. Have you ever noticed anyone from their group asking for donations or money over the air?"

  At this unexpected question, all the church people immediately swung their bodies around to see what Franz was going to say.

  "No, Herr Grover. Reverend Fischer has never actually mentioned how to write him at any address. He hasn't even given out the station address either."

  "That's great. Thanks for your time." Franz turned and headed back to his basement studio.

  Roy swung back to put his full attention on John. He leaned over the table and glared. "Exactly what are you implying, John?"

  John leaned back in his chair as he responded,
"No offense, Roy. I just wanted to make sure that nothing was going on at my station that the General Electronics board would consider to be a bad business practice. After all, after just three devotionals, we're dealing with more fan mail for Reverend Fischer than any other program on our airwaves. Even the ones that run daily and our most popular weekly shows like Robin of the Committees of Correspondence.

  "Now that I've been assured that we're working on a level playing field…" Grover took a sip of his coffee and picked up the file in front of him. "Let me tell you what my first thoughts are on your proposal.

  "First of all, there is no way we can sell you programming rights to an entire hour. We must keep at least five minutes at the top and bottom of every hour for our news staff."

  Roy, Maria, and Marc smiled, realizing that this negotiation was going to work. If John was thinking of ways to modify and improve the church offer, he had already agreed to it in principle.

  "The second problem I have is that it's an open-ended agreement. We need to add some language that allows both your church and my station to terminate the agreement under specific circumstances. If you don't pay or you harm the other programming we put on the air, we want to retain the right to cut you off."

  Roy smiled. "Neither of those terms poses a problem, John. Jennifer here has been working on what kind of program we're planning to put on."

  Jennifer piped up, "John, you're going to be very pleased with our program. First of all, we're not planning to be 'preachy' on the show itself or solicit donations directly.

  "Our plan is to produce The Grand Ole Opry meets Star Search. We'll have a good Christian message, lots of good music and try to bring in whatever musical talent that responds to our talent contest auditions during the week." She paused a moment and decided the fact that the Elders of the church had scheduled the auditions to take place immediately before the regularly scheduled Bible study wasn't important to the issue at hand. "We'll mix that in with a show band and some of the talent from the church performing some up-time country, some gospel music, and some bluegrass. Maybe we can get the Old Folks band to come in for a guest appearance. Or Benny Pierce and Minnie-they're popular already, so we can mix them with the new talent. Of course, Brother Fischer will be the show host and he'll have a segment where he tells the children a morally positive story. If you've listened to the devotional, you know how good he is with children."

  After Jennifer finished laying out the proposed show format, they discussed some questions on specific details with Deanna Dee and John. When everyone ran out of questions, John tapped his pencil on the tabletop for a moment and turned to his program manager, "Well, Deanna Dee, what do you think?"

  All this time, Deanna Dee had been jotting down notes of the specifics of the church proposal as it applied to her. "I've got to tell you, John, I like it. I used to watch Ed McMahon all the time on Star Search. It really pulled in the audience. I even used to watch the repeats of the old Ted Mack Show on that cable channel that showed all the really old TV repeats. It was one of the most successful shows of its era as well. I think it might have actually started up on radio. Then it moved to the early TV broadcasts."

  "We'll have to add some man hours for station personnel to make the show work technically. I'll probably want to add on an additional janitor on Sunday morning to clean up after everyone's left."

  Deanna Dee flipped through her notes, continuing, "The biggest thing we've got to look at is how do we keep the show in the critical hours. I'd suggest we set the schedule so the show starts on the first top or bottom of the hour following dusk. That way as the day gets longer, we don't have to keep moving the show around the fixed newscasts. It will start at 6:00 now, then move to 6:30 and so on as sunset changes."

  After another round of questions, the discussion finally got to money.

  "Marc," John looked to his sales manager. "How much do you think we should charge for this block of time?"

  Finally Der Kronz could do his thing. "Mr. Grover, since we're keeping the two five minute newsbreaks, we could just charge them for fifty minutes at the one minute rate."

  Roy responded to that suggestion with a laugh. "That would be nice, Marc. But we've come up with a different concept for fairly valuing the time. Maria, could you explain our thoughts?"

  Maria opened the file in front of her and brought out a VOA Rate Card. "I've gone over this and the previous rate cards that Marc furnished us at Kurger's Emporium, and it's clear to me that the time slot we're looking at is set up as a fixed percentage of the cost of weekday spots at the same time. What that tells me is that you don't consider Saturday night a high listenership period."

  Marc broke in, "Yes, but this isn't just the set aside commercial time we're talking about here, Mrs. Kurger. You want to promote your business… I mean your church the whole hour."

  "That's not quite right, Marc," Jennifer interrupted. "We're buying the sponsorship of an hour entertainment program that has commercials built into it!"

  "Precisely." Maria nodded and continued. "What we propose is to buy every commercial slot during the show for the length of the contract. We'll also agree to rate increases based on the same percentage that you change the rest of your rate card as you've currently established. What's more, we'll pick up any additional costs Deanna considers necessary to run the show properly.

  "But to my mind, the best part of our offer is that you will be able to resell those same spots as special programming for whatever Marc thinks he can get at or above the rate we're guaranteeing. If he sells them all, we'll get credited back our guarantee costs, and you keep the rest."

  Marc's eyes glazed momentarily as he calculated the profit to the station. "Yes, but we've got a certain percentage amount of overhead allocated to each commercial spot we sell. I don't know…"

  At this point, Roy added, "Marc, we'll even guarantee upfront a full month of shows in cash. Any spot you aren't able to sell, we'll use ourselves. You just sell what you can and allow our new church treasurer access to your books so we can verify your numbers."

  "I can live with that, Roy." John pulled himself close to the table and picked up his pencil to write the terms agreed so far on his copy of the proposal.

  Roy thought for a moment and then asked, "John, we're getting a lot of different currencies in the collection plate as well. Since the station doesn't have to pay an exchange fee, would it be alright for us to pay in those other currencies?"

  "I don't see any problem with that," John replied. "We get the official exchange rate at the time we make our deposits. I'll pass that right back to the church. Then, once a month we'll settle up the difference in USE dollars."

  As John began writing, Marc once again turned his eyes upward and seemed to lose focus as he thought through the deal. There is something I'm missing. Why are they so willing to commit this amount of money and agree not to solicit donations on the air? We're leaving some money on the table. But how?

  First, he studied Fischer's face, and then looked at Mrs. Kurger.

  No clues there. She always did know how to get the best rate and the best times out of that Rate Card.

  Then he turned to examine Roy Copenhaver. No. Anyone who's doing the kind of work he's been doing will know better than to give anything away.

  Finally, Marc turned his attention to Roy's wife Jennifer. His eyes went wide and he practically yelled, "That's it. They are getting money in the fan mail!"

  Jennifer turned white. Everyone in the room turned their full attention to Der Kronz and his explanation of his deduction.

  "You've been receiving more than fan mail, you've been getting cash! We were thinking it might just be from increased church attendance. But, no." Turning to Fischer, Marc laid out his case. "I know you haven't been asking for it, Reverend. I know you haven't even given out an address to send it to, but for some reason listeners are being compelled to send you donations."

  Marc was amazed at the thought. Here he had spent his life learning the secret of using
words to get people to give him money. Now this preacher just gets on the air for five minutes every second week and has money cascading over him like Schwarza Falls. Marc was in awe!

  "Is that true, Roy?" John asked.

  "Yeah. We certainly didn't expect it. We for sure didn't ask for it. But for some reason the Holy Spirit saw fit to have an awful lot of conversations with an awful lot of people out there about supporting Reverend Fischer's word."

  Turning to his wife, whose eyes were beginning to fill with tears, Roy added, "Don't worry, dear. I should have realized that this would happen. We should have let you leave after you finished up the programming issues."

  Still holding his wife's hand, Roy looked back to John. "We got every currency we've ever heard of and some even Maria hadn't. But they are all denominations of that new paper money the area governments have begun issuing, and some stock shares, neatly sealed inside the folded letters. A lot of people sent small, light, silver coins completely covered by the wax seal.

  Then, Roy addressed Marc. "So, how did you figure it out, Marc?"

  Beaming, Marc explained. "It's something up-timers call a 'tell.' Gamblers watch their opponents for ticks or gestures that indicate they are bluffing. I'd noticed Jennifer freezing when the issue of your fan mail came up. But, when she was talking about her programming ideas, she was enthusiastic, inspired even. Then when money was mentioned again, her face froze.

  "At first, I thought she wasn't comfortable dealing with money, but it dawned on me. Mrs. Covenhaver is not just any up-timer, but the wife of a man who built his career dealing with money. Surely, she's been in these situations before. It should be second nature, unless. .."

  "Unless we had a hole card." Roy finished. "Very good indeed, Marc. Maybe I need to get you drafted to come and help me with my negotiations over in Fulda."

  After some laughter, Roy got back to the subject. "We're still committed to no solicitations on the air. What we plan to do is to steal your idea of sending out flyers to teach listeners how to build crystal sets. Our flyer will be the song sheet of the featured song of each program. On the back we'll include a little Bible lesson and let the recipient know that if they enjoyed the song and wanted to support our work, they could send us any donation they felt it worth to them.