The band was called Allegiance, and it was playing a number with a chirpy message of personal renewal:
This is for all the lonely people, thinking that life has passed them by.
Don't give up until you drink from the silver cup
and ride that highway in the sky.
At 7 o'clock on a rainy morning in San Francisco, hundreds of people were running across the parking lots of the Cow Palace in the pursuit of happiness. This was the fourth of 41 stops scheduled so far for Success 1994, a road show featuring the best-known former cookware and computer salesmen in the country, famous athletes, more famous preachers, military heroes, the Governor of New York and three -- count 'em, three! -- former Presidents of the U.S.
Where are they now? Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Gerald Ford, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, Tom Landry, Bart Starr, Roger Staubach, Mike Ditka, Marilyn Quayle and Ruth ((Mrs. Norman Vincent)) Peale? On the success road along with Mario Cuomo, Larry King, Willard Scott, Paul Harvey, the Rev. Robert Schuller and Zig Ziglar. The show grew in marquee power when it moved on to Dallas last month with six starters on the motivational dream team -- Bush, Schwarzkopf, Staubach, Schuller, Peale and Ziglar -- talking to 16,500 people who had paid from $49 to $225 to be in Reunion Arena for eight hours of all-American self-improvement. "No matter what your line of work, President of the United States or running a business," Bush told them, "character does matter." Schwarzkopf added that it was "a thing called 'character' that described General George Patton and Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Mother Teresa and Margaret Thatcher."
Success 1994 is part revival meeting, The Music Man and medicine show and all uplift, with dialogue inspired by the Bible, Poor Richard's Almanac, Calvinism, common sense and Horatio Alger. The show has already been to Seattle, San Jose, Washington, San Francisco, Anaheim, San Diego, Phoenix, Houston and Columbia. Coming up: Cleveland, Youngstown, Akron, Richmond, Sarasota, Rochester, Chicago . . .
At the San Francisco seminar, which drew 6,000 customers, I paid $110 extra (regular price: $49) for what I was assured would be an "awesome!" seat up front in the arena and a 7 a.m. breakfast with Zig Ziglar, a former pots- and-pans salesman billed as "America's No. 1 Motivational Speaker." Over doughnuts and coffee with 300 other "VIPs," I nodded and laughed along with everyone else at stories of his hardscrabble boyhood in Yazoo City, Mississippi, where his mother said motivational things like this: "You're going to have to lick that calf over again. That job might be all right for some boys. But you're not most boys. You can do better."
The definition of success, said Ziglar, 68, is "getting many of the things money can buy -- and all the things money can't buy. Money can buy you a mattress, but you can't buy a good night's sleep." I had come thinking Success 1994 would be about dollar signs -- and Ziglar recycled the old line, "Anyone who says he's not interested in money will lie about other things" -- but I was wrong. Success 1994 is essentially a secular religion preached by believing Christians. The recurrent theme: Money has no value without happiness and love.