Tim David: Cable Center Oral & Video History

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• published: 25 Jan 2013
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BURKE: Good afternoon. This is Sunday afternoon, February 11. We're in Sun Valley, Idaho. I'm interviewing Tim David of Daniels & Associates. He is an executive vice president and has over twenty years of experience in the cable business. First, we're going to have Tim David tell us a little bit about the group that's here, the Sawtooth International Cable is having their 20th meeting here, and perhaps you can fill us in. DAVID: You're being very generous by calling us international. Our organization is made up of cable TV executives who have gotten together for the last twenty years. We ski different places each year, but we always come back to Sun Valley every two or three years, the place where we first skied together. There's alternately between 12 of us who do this every year and sometimes as many as 30. We've been to some pretty neat places, Telluride, Crested Butte, Park City, Vail, and of course Sun Valley. We meet the second week of February each year. In the past, we did a lot of crazy things. In fact, some of the guys were so crazy that we had something called the "Porcelain Throne Award". One member of our group threw up 19 years ago, in a porcelain toilet. So we initiated a rotating trophy for the person that did the craziest thing each year -- the most outlandish thing. One person went to a restaurant one night after a hayride, was so tired (he had been drinking a little bit) that he curled up in the corner. He just got up from the table, excused himself, said he was very tired and left his wife and went to the corner of the restaurant, curled up in a fetal position and went to sleep. Another guy put another gentleman's wife on his lap. They began getting fresh (they also had a bit to drink) and their chair tipped over in the middle of a restaurant, to the amusement of everyone but his wife. His wife let him know what he did wrong the next morning when he sobered up. He's never done it again. We've had the award given out for people who have missed Sawtooth events. We put one fellow on probation one year and gave him the Porcelain Throne Award for that. Another person got it for singing all the lyrics of "A Boy Named Sue" after he'd had something to drink, quite a bit to drink actually, on one of our hayrides. So we gave it out for silly things like that. However, the last couple of years we've gotten boring. We just don't do silly things anymore, don't have too much to drink, don't do goofy things. We just behave ourselves. That's a function of age, I guess. But it's been a lot of fun. We've met a lot of people and made a lot of friends over the last 20 years, and it's all been cable TV related. BURKE: On that note, maybe we should turn the clock back 20 years. You've been in finance longer than that, but somehow you got interested in cable television finance, which back in the 70's was fairly rare. More: http://cablecenter.org/barco-library-hauser-oral-history/item/david-tim.html