Good question. This website is a dumping ground for all kinds of stuff, from memories from my 30-year career as a public relations consultant to cruise lines and travel companies to miscellaneous writings, found things, photography, Banks family stuff and ephemera of all types. Hope you enjoy it.
When I moved back to North Carolina in 1980 with my wife Terri after our family’s failed stab at running a farm in the Florida Panhandle, I decided I wanted to make things. So, I took a job at Carolina Extruded Plastics, working the production line on second shift. Plastic extrusion is like the old PlayDoh Fun Factory: you put a blob of PlayDoh in the machine and crank down on a lever, which forced the PlayDoh out of the front of the device where it would come out in whatever shape you wanted. I wrote a little poem about it.
George McDonald, who performs under the alias “George Trouble,” can’t separate his creative life into neat categories.
For me, Thanksgiving 2012 began in May, when I was dispatched to Galveston, Texas, to escort a contractor onboard Carnival Dream. The contractor had been hired by Carnival Cruise Line to create a giant inflatable turkey for a planned Thanksgiving public relations stunt.
In 1986 I realized I needed to finish the undergraduate degree I was supposed to have finished in 1979. My wife at the time, Terri Averette Banks, was art director at Pace Communications, a fledgling publisher of airline in-flight and business magazines. Terri had gotten me a gig demolishing some offices in the Pace building that were being remodeled. I was standing on top of a partition wall, busting up drywall with a sledgehammer when in walked Editor Melinda Stovall with a shoebox in hand — and changed the trajectory of my life.
The great actor and comedian W.C. Fields has a famous quote: “Never work with animals or children.” In my 30-year career in public relations, the closest I got to working with children was when the Olsen twins, Mary-Kate and Ashley, served as co-godmothers for Holland America Line. Then there was the time when we should have taken Fields’ warning to heart.
During the course of writing scores of press releases for new cruise ship introductions every year, one can get a little bored. While each new cruise ship brings some innovations and new twists, the process of informing the media about it is drearily repetitive. For instance, in 2002, Carnival Cruise Line introduced four new ships — its busiest year ever.
“Grampy, please tell me the virus story again.”
