Shortly after graduating from business school in 1992, Cape Elizabeth resident Bill Burke received a phone call from the owner of a company who wanted to bring him onboard as the new director of business development. 

The company was the WTBS television network, and the owner was none other than Ted Turner, the founder of CNN and a pioneer for cable network super stations.

“I think I had to ask someone who he was,” Burke recalled.

The atmosphere of WTBS and TNT – another up and coming network at the time with ties to Turner – Burke could only describe as “the wild west.” As director of business development for the entertainment portion of the WTBS network, Burke’s job was to see ideas formed “in the shower” by Turner – his boss’ boss – through to their final fruition.

“His mentality was ‘Let’s launch new networks and keep going,’” Burke said. “It was ‘Just go,’ all the time.”

One new concept, the Turner Classic Movie channel, became Burke’s next assignment. 

“I was the first general manager at 27,” he said. “There was a bit of a safety net since we had ties to other companies, but all of a sudden I was hiring people right out of school and working to make it all happen. It was amazing.”

Soon after, Burke was appointed the president of WTBS, which had an annual revenue of more than $500 million at the time. It was a promotion he said he nearly turned down at such a young age.

“They told me they wanted me to be the president and I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s the next logical step in the next four or five years,’ they were thinking that August,” he said. “It was like moving from the acorn to the oak tree.” 

Burke wasn’t the only youngster working his way through the network ranks; he was the president of WTBS at age 29 with a boss in his mid 30s. Senior management at TNT were all younger than 40.

“The entertainment industry really seems to be that way. They really throw you in the deep end and see if you can swim,” Burke said. “We joke that [Turner] saved a ton of money that way. I would have done the job for free.”

Burke collaborated with Turner as WTBS president before the company merged with Time Warner in 1996. After the shift, Burke managed CNN and Time Warner’s online presence during the dot-com boom, a position he said was more complex than his previous duties.

“It was a political mess,” he said. “I had to report to any number of different people, was getting calls from headhunters all the time, it was crazy.”

After four years in the maelstrom, Burke said he suddenly decided to resign – a process that took two days flying around the country to notify his many superiors – with no particular plans for the future.

“I was thinking about maybe teaching,” he said. 

The resignation couldn’t have been more timely. Burke said within two weeks of leaving the company in 2000, a merger was announced with America Online (AOL). He said it was an agreement that ended up costing Turner an estimated $7 billion.

“I got out just in time,” Burke said. “I had [reporters] calling me for information about the merger before my resignation was even announced. It was that close.”

While Burke had no specific direction for his career, he said he and his wife had always been enamored with the idea of moving to Maine. Burke had enjoyed Kennebunk beaches while growing up and his wife spent summers on Sebago Lake, he said. 

“I got a call from a headhunter who knew me and said ‘I’ve got a perfect job for you but it’s probably a long shot because it’s in Portland, Maine, [for the Resort Sports Network]’” Burke said. “He had me at ‘Hello.’”

That same year, Burke, his wife and their two children moved to Cape Elizabeth and “immediately fell in love with year-round living,” he said. Burke said he helped the Resort Sport Network survive the dot-com burst, but by 2002 the company was possibly looking at selling and he was receiving more job offers from his former associates at larger networks.

“I was being recruited back to [Time Warner] and I got an offer from the Weather Channel,” he said. “I took the job at the Weather Channel and we moved to Atlanta in 2002.”

While Burke said he had “a great job for a great company,” at the Weather Channel, his family “greatly missed” living in Maine. After two years with the Weather Channel, Burke said it became apparent his next step in the company would require moving to Norfolk, Va. to work at their corporate headquarters.

“We figured our kids weren’t getting any younger, and we had to get back to Maine,” he said. 

Once again, Burke severed his business ties and moved his family to Cape Elizabeth in 2004 with hopes of beginning a career in education. In entertaining the thought of his new career, Burke said he found himself reminiscing about his experiences with Turner, who he had “loosely stayed in touch with,” since he left the company.

“It had been five years since I had worked with Ted,” Burke said. “I realized I had thought about him or something he had taught me nearly every day since.”

On a whim, Burke wrote a 20-page article titled “Leadership Lessons with Ted Turner,” something he never published but shared with friends and family. At the encouragement of those who read the article, Burke sent it to Turner in 2005. 

“An hour later I had an email from his secretary,” Burke said. “We connected on the phone and he asked, ‘You still in Maine? Have a job yet?”

Turner had already shown the article to his publicist and was convinced he wanted Burke to help write his autobiography. 

“I told him, ‘Ted, it’s 20 pages. That’s the longest thing I ever written,’” Burke said. “My wife said I had to do it, so we started that summer.”

Although Burke had previously worked with Turner, over the next three years he was able to share personal time at his many properties, where Turner shared his story and subsequent life philosophies.

“His three concerns are: global climate change, population increase and the nuclear threat,” Burke said. “You and I may worry about those things, but [Turner] has to fix them, that’s one of the ways he’s different.”

Turner wasn’t the only mega-media personality Burke got to know in composing Turner’s story. He spent more than an hour sharing “Ted stories” with Tom Brokaw and Jane Fonda – one of Turner’s ex-wives – burst into tears during an interview that lasted nearly two hours.

“I felt like Barbara Walters,” Burke laughed.

Burke said some of Turner’s associates, specifically President Jimmy Carter and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, reminded him of Turner’s “crackling energy.”

“Carter had just signed one of his books and was rocking in a chair he made by hand,” Burke said. “[Gates] started rocking forward and backward in his chair and I thought he might be a little excited. Forty-five minutes later he was still doing it.”

Cape Elizabeth has become a calming place for Burke, now 42, who said it was easy to forget the real world after spending time with Turner and his friends.

“The dichotomy is definitely there, some of the people Ted knows live in an unreal world,” he said. “It was huge to come [to Cape Elizabeth] and decompress. You couldn’t pick a better place to write, either.”

Burke said he wasn’t sure what the future held or whether he considered himself more of a writer now than a businessman. 

“I’d like to teach but I certainly wouldn’t presume to give writing advice. Not yet, anyway,” he said.

The Kennebunk Senior Center at Lower Village is sponsoring a book signing where Burke discuss writing, “Call Me Ted,” and share his stories at 4 p.m. Dec 7. at the Coastal House on Route 1 in Wells.