RCA Pulls Out
In mid-April, Joseph Miller, the co-president RCA had sent over, came to see Ki-jo and told him the company meant to withdraw from Korea. Nearly ten months had passed since the joint venture began, and KORCAD—the corporation formed with RCA to operate HLKZ-TV—had yet to post a single profit. Just as in the original history, RCA lost patience and decided to pull out.
Miller had spent a month back in the United States. He must have gone over the matter thoroughly with headquarters, for he returned with a concrete plan for the withdrawal.
“Of the two hundred thousand dollars RCA invested in the station, a little over a hundred thousand remains. Pay that sum, and we will turn over every share RCA holds.”
What had already been spent running the station could not be helped. He seemed intent on salvaging whatever was left and getting out.
“I would prefer that RCA continue its business in Korea.”
Ki-jo refused the offer to buy the stake. There was no need to acquire it just yet. If he turned RCA down, the company would have no choice but to burn through the remaining hundred thousand as well. KORCAD would sink into capital impairment, and that, in turn, would open a chance to pick up RCA’s shares at an even lower price.
Business was business. Ki-jo held the winning hand, and he saw no reason to surrender a rare advantage over the Americans.
Miller looked disappointed. Offer the shares at half their original value, and surely Ki-jo would snap them up—that, plainly, was what he had expected.
“We seem to be at odds. I would ask you to bear in mind that RCA may sell its stake to someone else.”
He was letting it show that RCA had other cards to play. Ki-jo was unmoved by the veiled threat. Even if RCA wanted to unload its HLKZ-TV shares, a suitable buyer would be hard to find. Who would take an interest in a business drowning in red ink?
In the original history, it was 1962 before Lee Byung-chull of Samsung and Koo In-hwoi of Lakhee joined hands and leapt into broadcasting. The only man with any real prospect of buying, so far as Ki-jo could see, was Chang Key-young of the Patjuk Gathering. In that other history Chang had acquired HLKZ-TV in May of 1957, and the moment Joseph Miller was trying to slip free lined up with the moment of that purchase almost exactly.
If Chang took the RCA stake, Ki-jo would have every reason to be grateful. It would be as good as gaining a friendly block of shares, and there might even be synergy with Chang’s Hankook Ilbo and the Korea Times.
“President Miller. I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
With those words Ki-jo brought the conversation to a close. They would be parting soon enough, but he had no wish to send the man off coldly.
A few days later, Chang Key-young came to call. He walked into the president’s office beaming.
“The Hankook Ilbo is putting on a beauty pageant in May.”
“Is that so?”
Ki-jo asked it as if he hadn’t known.
“Doesn’t the Republic of Korea need an envoy of beauty to represent her? I’m thinking we’ll choose a Korean beauty and send her as our representative to Miss Universal, the international pageant.”
“An excellent idea.”
Encouraged, Chang pressed on, his voice gathering force.
“The first beauty contest this country ever held was the Miss Daehan selection back in ’49, but the field was a questionable lot. Mostly coffeehouse madams and girls from the kisaeng houses turned up. This time I mean to pick a talent with looks and brains both. We’ll bring in the women from the colleges.”
Ki-jo nodded.
“The heart of it will be the hanbok judging—traditional dress first—but I’m thinking of a swimsuit round as well.”
“You mean to hold the swimsuit judging in public?”
“Of course. And what of it? This isn’t the Joseon era. It’s an age when a woman can show her beauty to her heart’s content. Ha ha ha!”
Politically Chang Key-young leaned neutral, but in business and in culture he was a progressive. Ki-jo did not believe for a moment that the man had come merely to promote a Miss Korea pageant. Having opened with the pageant, Chang soon came to the point.
“RCA’s been putting the word out all over town that they want to sell their stake in the station…”
“They have. They gave me the same notice.”
“Don’t tell me you want out of the broadcasting business yourself, President Lee.”
“No. I intend to keep going.”
At that, Chang’s face lit up.
“Well, that’s perfect. Then let’s be partners, President Lee.”
He seemed already to have set his mind on entering the television business. Ki-jo asked what terms were on the table.
“RCA’s side offered eighty thousand dollars.”
Ki-jo nodded. They had come to Chang twenty percent under the figure they had named to him, and there still looked to be room to knock the price down further. The one sweating now was RCA.
“Drag the contract out and ask them to come down some more. RCA’s the one in a hurry.”
“And if somebody else snatches the deal while I’m waiting…”
“That won’t happen.”
Ki-jo had a way to help him. He would ask Chung Shin-yung at the Dong-A Ilbo for a story: HLKZ-TV had been losing money for ten months, the deficit showed no sign of shrinking, and the station’s future was anything but clear. A rumor of that sort would thin the ranks of anyone inclined to step forward and buy. He laid the station’s finances out for Chang in detail and warned him the losses would go on for a good while yet. Chang was unbothered all the same. The Hankook Ilbo was doing so well that he seemed confident he could absorb a deficit in a new venture.
And then it was May 7, 1957.
Chang Key-young acquired the whole of RCA’s stake for fifty thousand dollars. Installed as co-president alongside Ki-jo, he moved into the office Joseph Miller had used and threw himself into the work. Once he was in, advertising began to grow, thanks to the advertisers of the Hankook Ilbo and the Korea Times being steered toward the television station. The Hankook Ilbo started carrying the broadcast schedule, and a television entertainment page came to fill an entire sheet.
Ki-jo turned over much of the station’s business to Chang, whose gift for selling was plain. He already had more than enough to do. He was straining to establish the bearing plant that would be the heart of the Claymore factory to rise in Busan, and he was not content merely to manufacture Claymores. On the pretext of making the steel balls that would go into them, he meant to draw Hausman’s support by whatever means he could and build a factory for bearings—the rice of industry.
He went to Yongsan Command, met Hausman, and over steaks at the Eighth Army Club indulged in a bit of wheedling, if that was the word for it.
“Advisor, please help me make the steel balls for the fragmentation mines.”
“Steel balls? Can’t you just buy those from Japan?”
“There’s the exchange rate to consider, and Japan is pushing its machine industry these days, so bearings are worth their weight in gold. They’d rather make bearings and sell those than sell steel balls alone, which is why they’re reluctant to let the balls go.”
He laid it on a little thick.
“That so?”
Plausible or not, the explanation gave Hausman pause. He chewed his meat and thought, and while he was thinking Ki-jo refilled his glass with wine.
“All right. I’ll look into it. When the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers was running Japan, they must have gotten hold of the records on every Japanese munitions firm.”
Bearing makers had been classed as munitions companies during the Second World War. Weapons took a great many bearings, and in those days a bearing was a cutting-edge product.
“Advisor?”
“What?”
“While you’re at it, bring me some of SKF’s bearing technology.”
“Well, now. You sly fox. Already got a company picked out, have you?”
Hausman gave him a scolding, but he did not look truly displeased. True to a man who had come up through the U.S. Military Advisory Group, he liked a sharp Korean.
“But has SKF even set up in Japan? That’s a Swedish outfit, isn’t it? In the Second World War the Brits were smuggling bearings out of Sweden, and we leaned on the Swedes ourselves—told them if they sold bearings to the Nazis, they wouldn’t like what came next…”
Hausman wore the look of a man caught off guard, and Ki-jo explained. SKF had entered Japan in 1909 and established a subsidiary there in 1932. When the Second World War broke out and Japan went to war with the United States, American pressure grew too heavy to resist, and SKF withdrew from its Japanese business. Japan then seized the company’s equipment and produced bearings for its own weapons.
What Ki-jo coveted was the technology of SKF, first in the world at making bearings. The know-how was more than twenty years old, and yet Korea did not possess even the bearing technology Sweden had been turning out two decades earlier.
“You’ll be wanting a few Jap technicians too, won’t you?”
“It would help if you brought a few over.”
“All right.”
Hausman grinned, speared a piece of meat on his fork, and put it in his mouth. Chewing, he glanced at Ki-jo’s plate.
“Steak sitting any better with you now?”
“It’s excellent, Advisor. All the better for sharing it with you.”
“Well, I’ll be… Have I ever seen such a flatterer?”
“For as long as you’re in Korea, Advisor, I intend to live as an apple polisher.”
He was announcing, in so many words, that he meant to flatter the man, and Hausman let out a snort of laughter.
“I like that your English is good.”
“And I like that yours is good, Advisor.”
“What?”
Hausman stared at him as if he could not believe his ears, and then he laughed.
“Advisor.”
“What?”
“They’re choosing Miss Korea in the middle of May. Would you serve as a judge?”
“Why ask me a thing like that?”
“We’re selecting a Miss Korea to send to the Miss Universal pageant. We need a candidate whose English is good, and for that I need your eye.”
“All right. I’ll think about it.”
He did not seem unwilling. Ki-jo knew the man was lonely. When Hausman had called him my son, it had slipped out, Ki-jo judged, from the loneliness of a life lived in someone else’s country, without his quite meaning it to. The difference in their ages was only twelve years, but a Korean could look young to American eyes, and Hausman seemed to need someone against the quiet. An uncle and a nephew would not be a bad arrangement.
“Lately I’ve been watching your station now and then.”
“In the evenings?”
“Yeah. How’d you get American movies that fast? Feels quicker than what they screen inside the command.”
“That was thanks to RCA.”
“RCA? Didn’t they pull out?”
“They withdrew, but the relationship continues. We’ve arranged to be supplied with films held by RCA and CBS.”
Ki-jo had not let go of the tie once it was formed. When RCA handed Chang Key-young a two-hundred-thousand-dollar stake for a mere fifty thousand, he had gone to Joseph Miller with an offer: a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, in exchange for the television rights to films and cartoons.
What he wanted were the American B-movies that never reached Korea, and Mighty Mouse, the cartoon then airing on CBS. Mighty Mouse was a knockoff of Disney’s Mickey Mouse, but it was CBS’s flagship animated program, and he wanted something on the air that children like Yeong-su could watch.
Joseph Miller, suddenly in a position to recover every dollar RCA had put into Korea, accepted. He won headquarters’ permission as well. For a hundred and fifty thousand dollars Ki-jo secured some one hundred B-grade science-fiction films and Westerns, together with the Korean and Japanese television rights to CBS’s Mighty Mouse. Television was not yet thriving even in Japan, and when Ki-jo offered to buy the broadcast rights for both countries, RCA seemed glad enough to take the deal.
He could not forget the look on Joseph Miller’s face. A venture that had failed completely in Korea had let the man recover every cent of the principal, and he had been ready to jump for joy. Two hundred thousand dollars was no great sum to RCA, but Miller looked relieved all the same. He could erase a line that would otherwise have stood as a failure on his career.
When the steak was gone and Hausman had wiped his mouth with his napkin, he spoke.
“You picking up the check again today?”
“No. This one’s on you, Advisor.”
“Then eat up. Don’t wrap it and haul it home like last time.”
“Yes, Advisor.”
Ki-jo cut into the steak with relish. Watching a Hausman unlike the man he had first known, he felt a hope take root: that this man, too, could change. If Hausman changed, then perhaps Korea’s history could change as well.