Caption First

Back to the Sponsorship Committee….I was ready to go a’CARTing. But there were several potential ALDAcon CART sponsors so I looked to Lois for guidance. She said: “You are up first with Caption First.” An English major unto death, the lyrical repetition of “first” soothed me.

And so did the assignment. Caption First is one of ALDA’s earliest and most ardent supporters. They sponsored the tote bags for ALDAcon 2007 and, Lois pointed out, they had first dibs at the bags this year. Without my c.i.’s on, “first dibs” sounded an awful lot like “slam dunk.”

It didn’t hurt that I’d known the president of Caption First for almost two decades. That would be Pat Graves. Long before ALDA had tote bags, Pat Graves toted ALDA Chicago’s caption needs on her fingers. Both ALDA and live, real-time captioning were in their infancy in the late 1980s. (I’ll let you decide whether ALDA ever grew up.) Pat was a court reporter who saw a future in real-time captioning, and she volunteered her services to ALDA Chicago so she could do useful work while she improved her skills.

At board and self-help group meetings, Pat would faithfully arrive, set up her equipment, put on her red cape with an S on it, and sit down at her keyboard. Meetings sometimes went two or three hours, and she rarely asked for a break. Once in a while, deep into a meeting, one of us would notice that Pat was kneading and wringing her hands feverishly and looked like she was about to keel over. So we’d finally call a time out. After stretching a while and applying smelling salts, she was ready to soldier on. And on. And on.

The and-on’s continued even after she had set up her own business, Caption First, which flourished. She later moved the business to Colorado, but she never stopped serving ALDA. At ALDAcon 1998 she received the ALDA Angel Award.

The night before I contacted Pat to sponsor us again I got an additional bargaining chip, in the form of a poker chip. I discovered that her deaf brother was in my monthly poker group. I didn’t even know she had a deaf brother. Anyone asking for money should network better than that. But now I had the perfect anecdote-that-precedes-sales-pitch.

Not that I needed one. Pat bleeds ALDA green, red, and blue (see http://www.alda.org/ for team colors). If I blew this one, I’d be selling ALDAcon pencils immediately thereafter.

But my approach to Pat was very savvy. Very savvy indeed. After the know-your-brother anecdote I typed something like: “Hey Pat! Want to do the tote bags for ALDAcon?” She wrote back in capital letters, 20 or 24 pt. font: “CAPTION FIRST WOULD BE HONORED TO BE THE SPONSOR OF THE TOTE BAGS.” Boy, was I good at this sponsorship stuff….Next!