Secrets of the Olympic Ceremonies. Myles Garcia
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counterparts. Prior to the record-breaking sale of Mark Wells’ Lake Placid 1980 gold medal in November 2010 for $310,700, the highest price fetched for a pure gold medal was $50,000 for the St. Louis 1904 gold medal of George Eyser for the Climbing event.
The most amazing thing about George Eyser was that he won 6 medals at St. Louis 1904 (3 golds, two silvers and one bronze) despite wearing a wooden prosthesis for his left leg which was lost as a youth in a railway accident. Only one other prosthesis-wearing athlete has competed in the regular Olympics since (Natalie Do Toit), and this is also because since the 1960s, the Paralympics now cater to the needs of handicapped athletes.
5. The Double-Purloined NBC logo. While this might seem a subject more for corporate network intramurals, nevertheless, I include it here because NBC , the National Broadcasting Corporation, has been the premier American television network for the Olympics successively for the last 24 years and at least up to 2020. And I have first-hand authority on this story. Thus, as first revealed in the 2012 print edition of this book, is a story that perhaps might help NBC recover some $55,000 it paid in past damages to a third party if the statute of limitations already has not passed.
As NBC approached its 50th anniversary in 1975, the network commissioned a new logo from (then) Lippincott & Margulies, a corporate branding firm. The resulting logo was a stylized, trapezoidal “N,” which logo the network hoped would carry them into the coverage of the Moscow 1980 Games.
Who was really first? How old was Nebraska’s? The UN Yearbook is clearly 1963.
At about the same time the Peacock network was trumpeting its new corporate identity, I was working for Unipub, a company in New York (since defunct) which sold publications of the United Nations by mail order when I discovered the cover (above, left) of the 1963 Yearbook of the United Nations. Eureka!
In February 1976, Nebraska ETV Network sued NBC for trademark infringement because the new NBC logo was virtually identical to the Nebraska ETV Network logo, except in coloring. NBC settled out-of-court and gave Nebraska ETV new equipment and a mobile color unit, valued at over $800,000, plus $55,000 to cover the cost of designing and implementing a new logo.
But who was really first with the design?
It was later that I learned of the lawsuit. However, at that time I was just getting my feet wet in the U.S. and New York, and was thus not legally-savvy about such things nor did I know how or where to proceed properly with my “discovery.” I just didn’t know.
(In the meantime, life intervened and I moved around the country (Los Angeles, back to New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, etc.) and had completely forgotten about the dust jacket until I started writing this book in 2009. Like Hal Prieste and his Olympic flag saga, the dust jacket would have lain buried and forgotten in my old files had it not been for me digging up old Olympic files to do research for this book.)
It was most puzzling that the United Nations never weighed in on the matter. Clearly, the “N” on the U.N. Yearbook cover is the same idea and predates the NBC-Nebraska tussle by about a dozen years. So a number of questions crop up:
•when did Nebraska create and copyright its logo: pre- or post-1963?
•did the U.N. copyright its artwork or was it automatically covered by copyright law anyway?
•is the Nebraska station liable to the United Nations?
•was Lippincott doubly remiss in its IP (intellectual property) searches work for its client?
•might NBC still recover any of its damages?
But for the author, there is an even stranger postscript to this story. NBC turned me down as a researcher/fact checker when they covered the Centennial Games in Atlanta in 1996. What other discoveries might I possibly have made had they put me on the payroll then?
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