Ed Harding
His Story
An e-mail from Ed Harding to Gerry Wilkinson....At graduation in '69 I still didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. I did, however, know that whatever I would be didn't involve wearing a khaki uniform and carrying a rifle. This led me immediately to grad. school at the University of Texas at Austin. I even managed to have them give me six hours of course credit for Temple's summer seminar in London at the end of my year in Texas. With two degrees under my belt, I came home and spent the next six months driving a cab on the midnight shift. Suddenly the khakis didn't seem so bad, and at least I would have had the rifle. Then, I lucked into a corporate video job at SmithKline. This was long before video was VIDEO. Half-inch videotape was black and white and reel-to-reel. We edited by physically marking on the tape with magic marker and backing up the reels by hand far enough so the machines would get up to speed by the time the appointed mark flew by and we could do a crash edit that would be clean. After five years I caught on to the fact that since I worked for a pharmaceutical company but wasn't directly involved in making or selling pills, my career path would be limited. I could either change careers or leave. I left. By now video was at least becoming VIDeo. I started making the rounds as an independent producer/director using Media Concepts, Inc. as the company name. Within eighteen months, I was buying my first equipment. It was one of the original RCA TK-76 mini-cams, Serial Number 000056. If I remember correctly, it was the third one sold to other than a TV station. I was also starting to have employees. We did video production and editing for about five years. By 1981-82, video, at least in the business world, had really become VIDEO. People were coming out of the woodwork calling themselves producers or production companies. The competition was fierce. It was driving me crazy. Then one day I had an insight. At that time, video duplication was a regional business. There was one small video duplicator in the western suburbs. The vast majority of all these people who were now producing video programs were going to Pittsburgh, New York, or Washington to make copies for distribution. If I turned Media Concepts into a video duplication company, I could potentially turn most of those competitors into customers. By the end of 1983, we were fully entrenched in video duplication. As time passed we added international video standards conversion, audiocassette duplication, and in 1997 we started doing CD and CD-ROM duplication. February of 1998 will be Media Concepts' 22nd Anniversary. As my friends would say, for fifteen years I was married to Media Concepts. For my mid-life crisis, rather than ending a marriage I got married for the first time. My lovely wife's name is Lee, and she is a hospice social worker. Our anniversary is in February, too. As I write this, next month (February, 1998) is our fourth. No children yet. We figure that by the time there are kids and we're moving around with them, everyone who sees us will be assuming we're the grandparents. Life goes on....
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