Did Judge Yaffe Decide? or Did The Court Legal Counsel Decide? What to Do with Richard I. Fine Case

Did Judge Yaffe Decide? or Did The Court Legal Counsel Decide? What to Do with Richard I. Fine Case

betsee 

Who I Am

Hello to the internet online world!

Chapter One

My name is Betsy Combier, and I am a reporter/journalist with four daughters and a blind white lab puppy. I fight for justice, integrity and respect in the workplace, and against corruption and fraud anywhere, anyhow.

I have a website too: http://www.parentadvocates.org, and you can see what has kept me busy over the years since I returned from Egypt.

I grew up in New York City. My dad was Assistant Attorney General for the State of New York for thirty years, about 1945-1975. He died in 1978. My mom, a descendent of John Deere through her mother Irene Rosenfield, was a musician and a benefactor of theater here in New York City. In 1933 her mom was killed in a car crash and she became a trustee at the age of 18 of The Neighborhood Playhouse in NYC, which had been funded and guided by her mom. My mom's dad was Treasurer of the New York Times, then started a newspaper in Des Moines Iowa. He moved to Katonah NY and published a newspaper called the Villager 1914-1925. His name was Samual Strauss.

I'm a twin, and my sister Jill moved to Paris France thirty years ago under shady conditions and ended up marrying a French criminal named Claude Danger. He left her in 1980 for his girlfriend.

I attended a private girls' school in NYC, Nightingale Bamford, then attended and graduated from Northwestern University with a major in Child Psychology. In 1974 I went to Bologna Italy to study International Affairs with the Johns Hopkins' School For Advanced International Studies Master's Program. My focus was the Soviet Military Industrial Complex. In August 1976 I was sitting in a coffee shop sipping a cup of coffee when a man approached me and asked me who I was. I told him my name, and he said, "Come see me next week".

Mort Siegel worked for Eyewitness News (ABC TV) and had started the first Manhattan Cable TV show on New York City in partnership with CUE magazine, "CUE ON J". He told me that he wanted me to be the producer of the show!!

Yea, right. I had been on Howdy Doody 8 times, but that was the extent of my TV experience. However, as I was about to enter the Russian Institute at Columbia University and I was ready to look at a new direction in my life, I said "ok"!!

So, in August 1976, I became a producer of CUE ON J and I was on camera and in the editing room 24/7. I wanted to do a good job, even though I didnt know what I was doing. I figured it out.

I learned that anyone who REALLY wanted to do something, could. We went from one day a week to four days a week on Cable, and we covered New York - parties with Jackie Onassis, Earl Wilson, stars of Broadway, TV, film, theater, oh my gosh, what a great job. Thank goodness I had a great video editor, Jimmy Vito (where are you, Jimmy?) who taught me everything and did an excellent job in the editing room.

After about one year, I decided that $100/week salary was leaving me a little raw, so I went to the publisher of CUE and asked if I could get a commission for selling time on the CUE show. He thought the idea of selling cable time was the most absurd thing he had ever heard.

In 1976-77 very few people, maybe 100,000, had cable. So why would anyone want to pay to be on it? Yep, that's what he said. He did ask me if I had an ad for the magazine, and I said "sure!" so I ran back to my office, wrote an ad, and he decided, as I insisted I could sell the show and therefore the magazine, to let me try to sell time on CUE ON J.

I prepared a press kit and walked over to Saks Fifth avenue. I stood inside the front door until I saw someone who looked like a VP, (he haad a pin on his lapel of his suit jacket that said "VP"), and I went over to him and introduced myself as producer of the CUE Show, and we would like to provide SAKs with a new avenue for advertising. He asked me to come into his office and we talked for a few minutes about the show. Then he asked me if I had a contract in my bag, because he thought this was an excellent show to buy for a black tie fashion show the next night with a french designer. He signed up for a four minute spot at $400. I believe this is one of the first minutes sold on cable TV.

I took the contract back to CUE, and they were stunned. They said "Go For It!" and from that point, we sold the time on the show. We became very popular, with Bill Wolfe doing reviews, stars of TV soaps and theater as anchors (all produced out of Jimmy's little studio in Greenwich Village).

In 1978 I decided to quit, as I was not getting paid any of the commissions promised, and I started my own production company. I produced several spots for companies such as PAN AM, AlDiryah Institute, and many others, but I was a little bored.

Am I boring anyone yet?

I read about a solar village in Egypt's Nile Delta on June 11, 1978, an article written by Christopher Wren, and thought "WOW!" a solar-powered TV? This was a stunning piece of news. Powering a TV with the sun in a little village struck me as the most wonderful idea I had ever heard. I thought, "If I ever get to Egypt..."

Chapter Two

Coming Next: I move to Cairo, Egypt, and set up solar-powered video in the village of Basaisa as a tool in the re-allocation of money from international agencies into rural villages of Egypt's Nile Delta......