The Most Famous Entrepreneur You’ve Never Heard Of- Hagley Film Showcase Airs New Documentary Tomorrow
Join Hagley Museum and Library at 3 p.m. on Friday, September 23, for a viewing of a new documentary on the life of Bill McGowan ,“Long Distance Warrior.” Film will be shown in the Auditorium of the Hagley Soda House. Use Hagley’s Buck Road Entrance off Route 100. This program is free and open to the public. “Long Distance Warrior” is a presentation of WTTW Chicago, American Public Television and the Hagley Museum and Library.
Bill McGowan transformed long distance service from a luxury to a cheap commodity as he built a tiny company called MCI into a telecommunications powerhouse. He took on the most powerful monopoly of his time—AT&T, and its Bell System of local phone companies—and won against all odds. He helped usher in the Information Age by unleashing the forces of competition and change.
Hagley received the records of MCI in August of 2000. The collection contains approximately 750 linear feet of material including annual reports, correspondence, photographs, and interviews. Hagley’s online exhibit, “William G. McGowan’s MCI 1968-1991” is accessible at http://www.hagley.org/library/exhibits/MCI/.
The Hagley Library is the nation’s leading business history library, archive, and research center. Current holdings comprise 36,000 linear feet in the Manuscripts and Archives Department, 290,000 printed volumes in the Imprints Department, 2 million visual items in the Pictorial Department, and more than 100,000 digital images and pages in the Digital Archives Department. The Library operates a research grant program, and offers conferences, research seminars, and a public lecture series.
Hagley Museum and Library collects, preserves, and interprets the unfolding history of American enterprise. Hagley is located on Route 141 in Wilmington, Delaware. For more information, call (302) 658-2400 weekdays or visit www.hagley.org.
About “Long Distance Warrior”
“Long Distance Warrior” a new one-hour film directed by Sarah Holt and produced by Holt and Bestor Cram, is a colorful portrait of a man whose vision and enthusiasm inspired so much loyalty that his former employees still hold annual reunions 25 years after his death. Fast-paced, dramatic and imbued with McGowan’s famous sense of humor, the film will premiere on public television beginning in September 2011 (check local listings).
And yet Bill McGowan’s extraordinary story is now largely forgotten. His company, once analyzed and dissected daily by the media, has disappeared. Only his legacy remains: the dazzling world of information technology, lightning-fast communications, and inexorable innovation we now take for granted.
It’s a world that was the stuff of science fiction and fantasy just fifty years ago, when everyone had a black telephone they rented from Ma Bell and thought twice about calling long distance because of its cost. Progress was stymied by a risk-averse corporate behemoth, and competition was stifled at every turn.
“Long Distance Warrior” chronicles McGowan’s rise from his hardscrabble Pennsylvania roots to Harvard Business School to the CEO of MCI. A risk-taking, rule-breaking workaholic who delighted in a challenge, McGowan refused to accept the status quo and dared to take on AT&T when no one else would.
Told through interviews with former colleagues, historians, and journalists, “Long Distance Warrior” is a compelling film that is long overdue. It brings a major figure in American business history back into the public spotlight and presents a gripping case study of the kind of vision, determination, and calculated risk-taking it takes to spark real progress. But above all, it shows us how we got to the present by taking us back to the past, so we can follow the path of a man who saw the future, and then made it happen.
It is, in essence, a classic American success story.