Bill C. Foster, also known by many of his closer acquaintances as Bill Jr. (or just Junior), was most notably known as the owner, editor, and publisher of the Waco Citizen. The Citizen, while centered in Waco, serviced cities all throughout central Texas and became a central part of the world of local Texas media. A sharp businessman, Foster was always buying other local papers to grow his own business, included the Moody Courier (later known as the Suburban Courier), the Mexia News, Fairfield Recorder, The Clifton Recorder, The Meridian Tribune, and the Valley Mills Progress. His news empire soon became known as the “News Center of Central Texas”. 

Willie Stephen Foster (known as W.S. or Bill Sr.) opened up the Waco Citizen in 1946 at 319 Franklin Avenue, Waco.  However, he didn’t just start it from scratch. He purchased the Texas Citizen, another smalltime paper, in order to start off his new business with a solid customer base. While Bill Sr. may have been the founder of the Citizen, he wasn’t always the best at managing it. According to his own son, Bill Sr. was “a journalist, reporter, Linotype operator, lawyer, politician, legislator, landlord/ Would give you the shirt off his back. Wasn’t the best businessman”. Bill Jr. saw that his father was a jack-of-all-trades, good at everything, but not really a master in any one area. Bill Jr., on the other hand, knew that he wanted to excel at something, and as he grew older, he had his eyes on the Citizen. 

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 W.S. Bill Foster holding his infant son, Bill C. Foster, accompanied by an unidentified young lady.

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Growing up tinkering with the printing machines in his dad’s garage, visiting his dad’s office, and taking pictures of local buildings, Bill Jr. was practically bred for the paper business. His mother, Vera Chadwick Foster, also had roots in the news industry, having worked for the Waco Press. By the ninth grade, Bill Jr. had started working at the Citizen, beginning a career in the newsprint business that would last almost three quarters of a century. He attended Tech High School in Waco before enrolling as a student at Baylor University, just like his father before him. After graduating and working for his father for an unknown amount of time, Bill Jr. Gained control of the Citizen and began his long tenure as a local newsprint mogul. 

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Foster’s secondary education was at Waco Technical High School, which renamed as University High School in 1954.

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Although Waco may seem on the surface to be just a quite Texas town, there were many high-profile stories that he covered during his time at the Citizen that eventually garnered national attention. Some of his most famous included the Waco Tornado of 1953, the discovery of the Waco Mammoth Site in 1978, and the Waco Siege at the Branch-Davidian compound in 1993. As an avid traveler and lover of world events, he also helped to connect the public of Waco with the rest of the world, reporting on President Reagan’s visit to Baylor in 1988 and the speeches that Vladimir Putin and George W. Bush gave at Crawford H.S. in 2001. In his autobiography, Press Pass Gets You in the Door, he dives even further into these events and many others. Foster was also a longtime member of the Texas Press Association, the Texas Community Newspapers, and the National Newspaper Association. 

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Bill Foster Covers the speeches of President George W. Bush and President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Crawford, Tx. at Crawford High School. President Bush announces he will visit Russia to discuss important issues with President Putin, but jokes that he will only visit when Russia had some warmer weather.

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In public life, Bill Jr. was heavily involved with the local community, running local beauty pageants such as the Miss Waco and Teen Miss America competitions. He was heavily invested in the local Lion’s Club chapter, having been the Public Relations Chairman for 10+ years. Additionally, as a devout Methodist, he researched and documented the history of his own personal church, the First United Methodist Church of Waco. This church was founded in 1850, making it the oldest institution in Waco. Mr. Foster was also a member of the group of local businessmen and politicians that came together to found Celebrate Waco. This event was a showcase of local businesses such as the Texas Hall of Fame, the Texas Rangers Museum, and the Dr. Pepper Museum. Foster even moved his Miss Waco Beauty Pageant to the convention center to grow the repertoire of events during the event. 

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Bill Foster in Moody, Texas

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Bill Jr.’s personal life was simple, and, according to him, mostly happy. He married Camelia Rentz in 1953, having two children, named Cheryl and Jennifer. Camelia began to work for the Citizen after their marriage and was heavily involved in the community as well. Unfortunately, Camelia died on May 5, 1990 due to a major heart attack while taking care of Bill Jr.’s sick brother Brady, which was doubly unexpected due to her only being 55 years old at the time. Bill Jr. eventually remarried, wedding Ellen Foster on May 14, 1993.  

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The inscription reads: “THE W.S. FOSTER FAMILY got together for another Christmas picture. It was the same Merry Christmas wish in 1935 as in 1978, showing an increase in sizes and ages. Mother Vera Foster is on left, on down the line, Barbra Dell Sutter, Brady McCall Foster, Bill C., Beverly Jean Hannon and the old man, W.S. Foster.”

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Bill Jr. constantly struggled with getting in the black, with failed ventures in multiple Texas cities, such as his struggles in south Texas when his father was in charge and in Victoria during his own ownership. He also struggled at home in Waco. He sold and repurchased the Citizen multiple times, always feeling well about each deal until the other party did something he felt was wrong, at that point buying it back. He repurchased the Citizen for the final time in 1976, when he would finally get his feet under him and do extremely well for the next 30+ years. Due to increasingly stronger competition from local papers such as the Waco Tribune and the Baylor Lariat, as well as a decrease in the physical newsprint market overall with the onset of online ads, Bill Foster Jr. sold the Waco Citizen for the third and final time to TexRay Media in January of 2013. TexRay found the market just as saturated as Foster had, and they were soon forced out of the market as well. On November 22, 2018, the Waco Citizen’s online website was shut down, marking the end of the legacy of a local media giant. 

Bill C. Foster’s legacy is one of a man who fought injustice where he could, using his local media outlet to make Waco and the surrounding cities a better place. Where Bill Sr. had struggled in both business and his personal life (having once become briefly involved with the Ku Klux Klan chapter in Brady, Texas), Bill Jr. made strides towards equality. He fought against corrupt city councilmen, crooked businessmen, and greedy IRS officials (to the point of even bringing a retaliatory audit on himself). His first wife, Camelia, was just as passionate about similar issues, waging her own personal war against the Waco District Attorney’s Office and the FBI agents who did nothing to stop them; in fact, Bill Jr. believed that the stress caused from this never-ending fight might have caused her premature heart attack. However, Foster wasn’t only an aggressor; he also helped shed light on the issues surrounding the town, covering charity events, fundraisers, and local church events. He even gave the city’s minority populations a voice, running a Hispanic tabloid in his paper every other week, because, in his own words, the paper was “getting good business” and the tabloid was run by “real nice people”.

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A man who pulled no punched in his newspapers, Bill C. Foster was infamous for picking fights with the wrong crowd, attacking anyone who he felt like had done him or the community wrong. As such, he was very used angry letters by the end of his career. 

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Audio Files:

 

Bill C. Foster talks about his family history in Waco and an unfortunate memory from his dad’s business.

 

Foster also was a fun-loving man. In this excerpt, he talks about printing papers for the NoZe Brothers, a prankster organization at Baylor.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited:

 

Bill Foster Papers Collection, Accession number 1070, Box Number 1, Folder Name “Scrapbook”, The Texas Collection, Baylor University.

Bill Foster Papers Collection, Accession number 3935, Box Number 1, Folder Name “Loose-leaf Documents”, The Texas Collection, Baylor University.

Bill Foster Papers Collection, Accession number 3935, Box Number 1, Folder Name “Preface”, The Texas Collection, Baylor University.

Bill Foster Papers Collection, Accession number 3935, Box Number 1, Folder Name “My Book “, The Texas Collection, Baylor University.

Bill Foster Papers Collection, Accession number 3935, Box Number 1, Folder Name “White House”, The Texas Collection, Baylor University

Bill Foster Papers Collection, Accession number 3935, Box Number 1, Folder Name “History”, The Texas Collection, Baylor University

Bill Foster Papers Collection, Accession number 3935, Box Number 1, Folder Name “Moody, Texas Pictures”, The Texas Collection, Baylor University

Foster, Bill C. Press Pass Gets You in the Door: Including Waco History. Sarah Book Publishing, 2015.

Bill Foster Papers Collection, Accession number 3935, Box Number 1, Folder Name “The Waco Citizen Newspaper”, The Texas Collection, Baylor

Foster, Willie S. Waco Citizen, 18 Apr. 1957, pp. 1,2,5,6

Sloan, Stephen. “Bill C. Foster Oral History Memoir Interview Number 1.”

Something that recently caught my eye on my news app on my iPhone was that Viagra had dropping sales in its revenue both domestically and abroad. Curious, I looked into it. In his article “How Viagra Went from a Medical Mistake to a $3-Billion-Dollar-a-Year Industry”, David Kushner covers the same topic by explaining how exactly Viagra was created, reaching back from it’s creation in the 1990s to the expiring patent on its main chemical compound in the present day. This patent, which has already been nonexistent of expired in other parts of the world, will dissolve by 2020 in the US, destroying the monopoly that Pfizer has had on the most viable anti-impotence drug in the world.

One of the four topics covered in this course, unintended consequences and unacknowledged assumption (Idea 4), directly interacts with Viagra as a product itself. Viagra wasn’t originally created as a product for impotence, but as an aid for those with severe chest pain. Viagra was supposed to expand the blood vessels in study patient’s chests to allow better blood flow and reduce pain, but as it turned out, the chest wasn’t the only place affected. Study patients described headaches, muscle aches, and, for some, cured impotence, which had up to this point in time been declared untreatable by the medical society at large. This literal side effect had the metaphorical side effect of creating the multi-billion-dollar industry of Viagra on the medical market and its generic competitors on the black market. 

Another large topic covered by this article (and perhaps the most important) was the interaction between business, state, and society (Idea 3). The first subgroup of these interactions encountered by Pfizer was the interaction between business and society. Before the created drug could hit the market, Pfizer first had to determine if there could be a market in the first place. America is a place that is slow to change its perceptions in many areas, and sex was one of them. Many men would be nervous to discuss their impotence with anyone, including their doctors. In order for Viagra to have a good relationship with their consumer base, the Viagra sales team knew that they had to pull all of the stops. They named Viagra the way it is for no other reason than because they needed a name that started with a V, as products that began with Vs were statistically better at getting uncertain customers. Also, due to the social stigma surrounding the word impotence, they renamed the occurrence, dubbing it “Erectile Dysfunction” so that men could see this as something happing to them and not as some kind of personal failure that degraded their masculine self-perception. The phrase caught on so well that ED has now become a mainstream medical term due to its phycological effectiveness on the public at large. However, public relations were not improved by only the corporate level. Every tier of the company from management down received training on marketing techniques to change the social perspective of their prospective customers. This training went down all the way to the sales teams that worked in the trenches: 

With everything ready to go, the team booked a massive launch meeting at the World Center Marriott in Orlando, Florida, to introduce Viagra to Pfizer’s three thousand sales representatives. The average sales rep was a good-looking twenty-five-year-old— “The guy looked like a quarterback, and the girl looked like freaking Candy the cheerleader,” Nelson says—but that didn’t make the challenge any easier. “We needed to make them comfortable with talking about sex,” he says. They did this by getting everyone used to saying all the right words. They went around the room and had everybody say erection five times. “Erection! Erection! Erection! Erection! Erection!” 

The second of the interactions was one between business and state. Now that Pfizer thought that they could rely on a stable market, they needed government approval through the FDA. Some other parts of the government had been relentless in their efforts to block Viagra’s production, distribution, and sale, with lobbying groups taking firm stances as well. Pfizer wasn’t sure that their $100 million investment would pay off, but they were confident enough to put in the last push to finish what they had started. They passed with flying colors, and Viagra was finally ready for the market.

Luke Jones

 

 

When thinking about what modern business market I knew the least about, cryptocurrency came to mind. I’m not much of a tech-minded person, so it had always seemed above my head. Specifically, the incident of the Bitcoin market crash of 2017 came to mind. In my research on the topic, I came across Nick Paumgarten’s longform article “The Prophets of Cryptocurrency Survey the Boom and Bust,” from The New Yorker. In it, Paumgarten goes deep into the story of Vitalik Buterin, founder of Bitcoin’s less known but arguably fiercest competitor Ethereum. The article covers both the founding story of Ethereum itself, the history of the American cryptocurrency market as a whole (with a focus on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple, the top competitors in the market), and the modern problems that have arisen with the growth, explosion, and crash of cryptocurrency that has given it such a bad reputation in the last couple of years.

One of the biggest areas covered by this article was Big Idea 4, unintended consequences and unacknowledged assumptions. There were multiple examples of this idea shown throughout the article, but two specifically stood out as the most impactful. 

The first example of this is with the unforeseen negative impact that e-currency would have on the environment through its massive demand for energy for the algorithmic processing process known as “mining”. Mining is when a computer, in competition with dozens, hundreds, or potentially even thousands of other machines, tries to solve a complex mathematical algorithm. Once it does this, the algorithm gets inputted into the cryptocurrency monetary system, creating one bitcoin, worth about 6400 USD. This incredible amount of processing power needed for large scale mining consequently uses a lot of electrical energy, which in turn means more power and pollution is created in power plants.  

“This year, it is said, the Bitcoin network will use as much energy as the nation of Austria, and produce as much carbon dioxide as a million transatlantic flights. Mining rigs—computers designed specifically to do this work—are thirsty machines. Mining farms tend to sprout up where juice is cheap (typically, in proximity to hydropower projects with excess capacity to unload) and where temperatures are low (so you don’t have to burn even more electricity to keep the rigs cool). There are open-air warehouses in remote corners of sub-Arctic Canada, Russia, and China, with machines whirring away on the tundra, creating magic money, while the permafrost melts.”

The pseudonymous original creator/creators of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, was only concerned in making as secure of an online bank as possible, and once Nakamoto decided to launch this peer-to-peer payment system in 2008, it was then out of his/her/their hands. As part public domain on the world wide web (and not any private individual, company, or government), there was no oversight as to how the market forces of the cryptocurrency were to be reined in in cases of a greater public need, such as in this instance with the potential increase in pollution and global warming. Mining conglomerates, private groups that own their own massive collections of mining computers, have been slowly converting their privately-owned machines into public goods, relinquishing even more power. 

One of the other unintended consequences of cryptocurrency was the unanticipated conflict in the governance of cryptocurrency blockchains. Blockchains are the systems that record and protect any transactions made in a cryptocurrency banking system. They are also heavily controlled by the managers of the systems themselves. For the money to be protected, there are rules that must be put in place by the managers (in a public system) or owners (in a private system) to keep everyone else in check. The biggest problem that must be overcome is that for the rules to be followed well, the checks and balances between the people on the system must be simple but very thorough, a paradox if there ever was one.  

A good way to understand the extremely complicated and confusing relationship between people using cryptocurrency and the system rules is to compare it to a person following the law in the real world. The best way the American government protects its people is through its creation and enforcement of laws. There are many simple laws that everyday people can understand (such as don’t murder, don’t steal, pay taxes, etc.). However, in order to prevent problems in complex areas such as big business and healthcare, specialized lawyers are the ones who learn the specific law instead of your average citizen. They are the ones who help coach people how to follow the law, and they are the ones that prosecute people who break it as well.  

The same holds true for rules on an e-currency platform. There must be a balance between simple rules that an average miner or currency trader can follow (such as how to properly mine in a legal way on other people’s computers) and the complicated rules that only lawyers specializing in the cryptocurrency field can understand completely in order to properly advise the systems managers (such as how to handle system controls in a way that doesn’t steal miner’s money). Where cryptocurrency was created to be both user- and manager-friendly, people trying to negatively control the system have ruined it for everyone. Cryptocurrency, an online banking platform first praised for its simplicity and independence from the many human errors and corruption found in real world banking, now needs the human interaction and management it once fought against. Not even the “magical fake money” of cryptocurrency can remain untainted by greed in America forever.

While thinking of what sort of businesses within American business history are the most fun to study, I realized that the most interesting markets are those that have totally and completely failed, only to find an unlikely way to rebound (although with today’s average consumer intelligence level, this has become much more common). Inferior products now have a fighting chance because of a generation of economic incompetents. 

In realizing this, I remembered a certain conversation that I had with a high school (and economically handicapped) friend a year or so ago. There’s no reason to go through the whole conversation, but in basic shorthand, she first told me the approximate sum of money that she had spent on vinyl over the years, I then thought for a second about the abundance of free music on sites such as Spotify and YouTube, and, lastly, I promptly called her an idiot. 

In remembering that story, I decided that I would show her why vinyl died in the first place (Hannah, this is for you): it was an inferior product beat out by unforeseen technological innovation. This inferiority, mixed with a consumer base with an eye for objectively better products, cause the downfall of vinyl and its subsequent replacement with alternative products, such as the cassette, the CD, and the MP3 player. 

In her article “Chronology: Technology and the Music Industry” on the PBS Website (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/music/inside/cron.html), Callie Taintor describes the evolution of music technology leading to and following vinyl. Thomas Edison created the first ever voice recording in 1877 on what he named the phonograph (literally translated from Greek, it means ‘sound writing’), and competitiveness in the market only improved upon his idea. With lookalikes of his work being created, Edison made the first improvement upon his idea by replacing his original hand crank with an electrical motor to create better sound quality and an easier listening experience, common goals that would be the driving force for future innovation. This innovation of changing the old device into something much better allowed Edison to remain ahead of the game, at least for a while.  

Several “Big Ideas” appear throughout time in this piece:

The first “Big Idea” that we see is the idea of capitalism through expansion, innovation, and competition. In 1888, the cylindrical recording device of the phonograph was first replaced with a disk recording device in a new contraption dubbed the gramophone. This would be the first circular precursor to the vinyl we know and (don’t) love today. Improvements continued with materials and production techniques, eventually spurred on even more by competitors in the radio market. After a plethora of production types and a long list of materials were used to create the perfect sound quality, in 1943, polyvinyl chloride (also known as PVC or, as its popularly known, vinyl) was discovered to best fit the bill. The quiescent vinyl was born from the forge of capitalist growth, creativity, and business rivalry.

The second “Big Idea” revealed is that of unintended consequences and unacknowledged assumptions. The entirety of the professional music production industry was built on the belief that music created by a company would always be distributed by that company, and thus the revenue would always flow to that company as well. However, with the introduction of cassette tapes, made popular by the Sony Walkman in 1979, the issue of illegal music copying (AKA piracy) became a serious problem that would continuously plague the music production industry for years. Opportunity cost of producing the same amount of music at a certain quality and price fell. All it took was a new technology shattering the assumption of monopolized retail to make music prices to rise and quantity/quality to fall.

The third “Big Idea” shown is the idea of complexity. Music Consumers have turned out to be extremely fluid in their demand expectations. Where consumers previously fought for cheaper, better sounding, and more readily available music, the tide turned with the modern-day vinyl resurgence movement. With the vastly improved music available on the world-wide web today, music producers have found niche music consumers really care much more about appearance than music quality itself, which is the real reason vinyl has reappeared in such a massive way.