Cable Pioneer.

Ted Turner, the unconventional Atlanta-based entrepreneur who was also known as "Captain Outrageous" and the "Mouth of the South," became one of the pioneers of the burgeoning cable-television industry in the 1980s. Beginning in the late 1970s he parlayed an independent Atlanta television station and an idea for a twenty-four-hour news channel into the foundation of the multibillion-dollar Turner Broadcasting System.

Billboard Start.

Turner Advertising was a prosperous billboard business in Savannah, Georgia, that Ted Turner inherited under tragic circumstances when his father committed suicide in 1963. Several months earlier, the senior Turner had made a series of business deals that made Turner Advertising the largest outdoor advertising company in the Southeast and gained the company entry into the lucrative market in Atlanta, the capital of the "New South." The company was in financial upheaval after Ed Turner's death, but his son had remarkable success...