In 2008 I hung up my regular gig as a golf packager in Scottsdale and moved up to Payson — high country at about 5,000 feet along the Mogollon Rim. I rented a little retail space and called my shop Got Memories of Payson. The job: take whatever folks had — VHS tapes, slides, photos, 8mm, 16mm, even stray flash drives — and turn it into DVDs so their families wouldn’t lose the good stuff.
I made a friend fast: the editor of the Payson Roundup. He was a Marine, a Vietnam veteran, and not just any Marine — a survivor of the Siege of Khe Sanh. That bond sealed it. We swapped stories, compared scars, and drank coffee that could strip paint.
Back then social media was exploding: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace. I’d been blogging since 2000 and fiddling with WordPress long enough to see which way the wind was blowing. My editor friend wasn’t thrilled. He was convinced the internet was going to kill the printed word. I told him straight: embrace it — add a digital edition and meet readers where they’re standing.
One afternoon after lunch, still jawing about Marine days, he asked me to come work for him. I said no — I was having too much fun running a shop where nobody ever heard me say “I can’t.” But I offered an idea for new subscribers, something I’d just seen in a YouTube clip: a guy flying a drone with an iPad mini.
“Think about it,” I said. “Give readers a view they’ve never had — a bird’s-eye of the rodeo, the Rim after a storm, a traffic jam of Phoenicians fleeing the Valley heat, wildland fires (safely), even high school games. If pictures tell a story, this tells it from the sky.”
He looked at me like I’d grown a second head. “A drone? No thanks.”
I’ll admit, that surprised me. I wasn’t claiming drones would save newspapers, but I knew it could make a local paper feel alive — rooted in place, showing people their town from a new angle.
Time did what time does. Drones got cheaper, then everywhere — tools for police, fire, and search-and-rescue, and yes, toys for weekend pilots mowing the sky. Newsrooms ended up using them, too.
What I learned running a little transfer shop in a little town is this: being early is lonely. Sometimes you’re wrong. Sometimes you’re right, and it just takes the world a while to catch up. In Payson, the sky was right there, waiting. All we had to do was look up.
Your turn: What “crazy” tech idea did you pitch that people laughed at — and later came true?