Life presents you with episodes that can be used to build on if they are good.

Then again, when things don’t go well, you analyze what went wrong and hopefully you can learn something from your experience that will help keep you from making the mistake again.

I had three major learning experiences in my college and early adult years. One was the coed dorm concept that Randy Persson and I were pushing for. I talked about this in my last column. I feel I learned the art of compromise from that episode.

Learning that you can gain a lot more if you are willing to give a little in your demands has paid off for me in negotiations throughout my professional career.

My next learning experience has to do with promotion of an event. I learned real fast that I was not a rock concert promoter. I brought the 5th Dimension singing group to Grady Gammage auditorium at ASU. They had such hits as ”Up, Up and Away” in my beautiful, my beautiful balloon and “The Age of Aquarius.”

It was intended to be a fundraiser for the Residence Hall Council.

Prior to their appearance, I had been talking to their manager, whose name now escapes me, about ticket sales.

The concert was to be held in about two weeks and we only had about a quarter of the tickets sold.

We ran an ad in the State Press, the on-campus newspaper. That took just about all of our remaining seed money. But it did boost our ticket sales.

On the night of the concert the theater was about half full. Randy and I were discussing all the empty seats and wondering what we would do when they presented their final bill. A man approached us and asked if we would like to meet the singers.

He knocked on the dressing room door of the two women. Marilyn McCoo opened the door.

I was totally taken by her beauty and smile.

Everyone ended up enjoying the show. The 5th Dimension wrapped up their show singing “Age of Aquarius.” They invited people in the audience to come up on stage with them. They danced and clapped hands to the music.

We ended up splitting the loss with the singers. We were honest with them and they were understanding and cut their fee in half, helping us break even.

The last learning experience I’m going to talk about is when I tried to start an Arizona sports magazine.

I was working for the ad agency when I saw an ad in The Arizona Republic that a publication was for sale called Arizona Sports Digest. Co-worker Gene Vinson said he would like to be involved in the operation and became an investor. My folks put up some money for it.

Gene and I worked at the ad agency during the day and became sports writers at night. We hired an ad salesman who worked on commission only.

We put out the first three issues of it and suddenly, we didn’t have enough money to print the fourth edition.

That episode in my life taught me if you are considering starting a business, it has to be properly capitalized going in.

For a new publication you should have enough money on hand to operate for two years with no income.

Well, those three episodes and the lessons learned from them set the stage for another try at having my own publication.

I’ll talk about my life at The Times and my involvement in the community in my next column.

Happy New Year!