In 1970 I was a partner in a conservative educational think tank and mass media program based in La Jolla, Ca., in a nutshell; to give college students the other side of the story they weren't getting. Injecting some rational sense into the madness. Remember it was a time when the left was taking over student governments and student newspapers, rioting and cutting off funds for athletics.

This was all as a partner and director of financial development at only age 24. Our parent nonprofit corporation was based in Ohio called World Research, Inc.; but my division was DBA Campus Studies Institute.  I raised huge amounts of capital to fund the program. Our original seed money was from a great conservative Jewish inventor, Leo Roon. (He invented the process for the first water-based latex paint.) As a gazillionaire, he and Mrs. Roon made their home out of an entire floor at The La Valencia Hotel in La Jolla. This is where we conceived the program.

It evolved into mass media communication to college students at then-troubled U.S. colleges being "taken over" by leftist radical students and faculty, SDS, Weathermen et al.  The program consisted in part of millions of sinfully creative and colorful direct mass mailings to students nationwide by zip code.  We strictly focused on troubled areas like Berkeley, Columbia and campuses having riots like UCSB). Also, we bought near-campus Foster-Kleiser highway billboards, and paid radio spots that The Wrecking Crew was coming to town.

The mailings were not blatant-sledge-hammer-ultra-right-reactionary-preaching in nature. The students would have seen right through that.  Rather, the mailings were extremely subtle, in content and graphics, with a palatable 'between the lines' alternative message of the true meaning of the virtues of free market economics vs. socialism. After we had created a fever-pitch with all this mass communication, we'd appear to packed houses on campus, and man we felt like hemophiliacs in a razor blade factory.

On the road, if hotel rooms were scarce, I roomed with Al Capp.  You talk about priceless memories! The first night he took off his trousers to don his jammies, I saw he had a wooden leg, never even having been aware of it! I can imagine the look on my face! You might be too young to remember but he spent the lion share of his years penning the legendary "L'il Abner" cartoon strip, and had been a devout ultra-liberal Democrat most of his life. But in his last years, alas, 'he saw the light, and came over to the right'. Oddly enough, as there's nothing so refined as the reformed, he became the most ardent conservative vocalist from the podium!

He told me he was run over by a train as a kid, (his real name was Albert Caplan.)  He joked that it was fine living with the wooden leg as long as he oiled it every five hundred miles. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. With all of them actually. Buckley was with me the night my son was born and tried to persuade me to name him William F. Topper. We wrote each other often for years. Bill instantly became one of my all-time heroes; right up there with Dutch Reagan, T.R., Hop-a-long Cassidy, John Wayne, Ayn Rand and Elvis, to name just a few. (Boy it's not too often you'll see Ayn Rand and Elvis in the same sentence!)