As Johnny Cardone prepared to sing his mega hit he exclaimed to the standing room only audience, “I am a father and hope to be a grandfather, and I have had the privilege to meet tens of thousands of amazing young people over my career. And here’s the deal. The tobacco companies are targeting young people because if they don’t get young people to start smoking, they will be unprofitable. It’s as simple as that. So we are going to sing some kick ass rock and roll and encourage you to support the good guys in the tobacco wars who have set up tables out in the lobby.” And he launched into UR Not Killin Our Kids and flat out ripped it up. He walked down into the crowd, pulling people out of their seats to sing a line of the song with him, and kept walking.
And then he said, “Alright folks upstairs hold on, I’m coming up.” And he did the same for those in the upper seats. And he sang the song and walked the whole distance of the iconic venue, singing his anti-tobacco anthem to all twenty-thousand-and to what would actually be a much larger audience, since the concert was being video-recorded and streamed live. Cameramen and women were scrambling after him as he walked, talked, and sang.
William Gomez, the CEO of Global Tobacco Corporation, and a hard-core rock-and-roll fan, was startled when he opened his tablet the morning after the concert and read the reviews of what had happened at the Garden. He threw his cereal bowl against the wall of his five-million-dollar Charlotte, North Carolina mansion after the second review mentioned how much money was contributed in one night toward the efforts to make his company less profitable. He impetuously emailed his executive team the concert review and commentary, with the words, “What part of make Dawn Mortenson’s life a living hell did you not understand?”
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Dawn of the Tobacco Wars by Peter Prichard
Peter Prichard has been a published writer for over 40 years, writing book chapters, articles, two novels, newspaper columns and hundreds of papers and handouts for presentations done at over 400 conferences and workshops for individuals on five continents.