Now in his own early ‘70s, Speros is back in Urbana trying to piece together and reduce to writing just what has happened since.
The man who tried to market advertising on airplane sickness bags, made a bundle selling advertising on the jackets of airline tickets and got cup holders installed at Jack Murphy Stadium for Super Bowl XX, the autobiography business is no easier than the others.
But friend Tom Flynn of San Diego’s Lone Star Legal, predicts that if Speros can solve his latest personal Rubik’s Cube, “It’s going to be a helluva book.”
“He’s very creative, a risk taker — a guy who likes to strike out there but doesn’t like to follow the rule book all the time.”
Speros retooled for this undertaking with courses in non-fiction writing while finishing the degree he left behind at Ohio State University 50 years before.
“Every morning, I struggle with it,” he said over coffee at Un Mundo in Springfield.
Just like he did when was waking up on a porch.
Taking a flier
Speros remembers his situation being every bit as absurd as the San Diego weather was idyllic. The most sensible thing might have been to go home, he allows; but he couldn’t bear the thought of people who looked up to him seeing him so down.
So, with half the $40 he earned fixing a VW van in the garage of the couple whose porch he was inhabiting, he prints flyers and passes them around the neighborhood to round up work.
And when the city’s noise abatement department chases him out of the garage, two repair shop owners he seeks advice from tell him to go mobile.
After he talks a local waitress into co-signing a loan for a pickup truck, his dad passes along an idle air compressor he uses for painting.
Then it’s off to a swap meet, where a guy with a set of tools agrees to trade them for a few hours of Speros’ labor.
“Two weeks later,” he says, “I was completely set up.”
Well, for a while.
Classical gas
A short fast forward and Speros is paying an idiot gas station owner $25 a month for a space to work on cars and hustle business from people at the pumps.
“I did that for a good two years,” Speros he says, until a Buick Riviera is damaged at a nearby ARCO station, whose manager asks Speros to bid on the repairs.
“I drive my truck up,” he says, and the owner of the station dies on the spot, closing the station but opening a hidden spot behind it where Speros can resume his repair business as a squatter.
With the eight-story apartment complex behind the station blocking the wind and a spray of water dampening the dust, “I’m painting cars right on site.’
Hell hath no fury
A year later, two ARCO corporate reps stop by and tell him to leave.
“They took off,” he says, “and I stayed.”
A year later, the same guys “freak out” to see the house trailer he’s now living in. But, once again, they leave, and he doesn’t.
But trouble lands like a fly in the paint when a middle-aged woman who runs the apartment complex starts “hitting on me,” Speros said.
When he doesn’t respond, she calls the police, and an officer drives up to inform him the department has received a complaint that he’s breaking up marriages in the apartment complex. When officer drives off smiling and fails to return, the manager calls the fire department.
“They were really cool,” Speros said, “but I knew it was the end of it.”
Greek to her
He immediately turns to a union carpenter he has been playing poker and shooting dice with and who has himself been looking for a lot and building in which to store his collection of Lincolns. The man has found the perfect place, he tells Speros, but can’t get the lady looking after it to rent it.
So, an hour after the fire department leaves, “he gives me an address near San Diego State, and I jump right in my truck” — work clothes on — to pay her a visit.
“Right away she says no. So, I leave, take a shower, put on a sportscoat and go back a couple of hours later. Same answer.
“This went on for a week. (and) I wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
Success comes when it turns out that Greeks are one of the few ethnicities for which she has a soft spot – especially when represented by a guy she thinks looks like a movie star.
All she needs is to see the business license Speros doesn’t have.
So, he calls a zoning guy who says “no problem” on the phone, a week letter, sends a denial in the mail and ultimately refers Speros to the fire department.
So, like apartment manager, Speros calls the fire department and explains the matter. An hour later he gets a call saying the paperwork is in the mail.
“It was crazy,” Speros says. “It was crazy.”
From a porch to a Porsche
And it wasn’t over.
The fire department tells him he needs a certified paint booth to operate, and when the first price he sees is $10,000, Speros goes to a bank for a loan, is told no by a loan officer, asks to see a supervisor and ends up with two guys in suits and ties asking for his profit-and-loss statement. Not knowing what that is, he provides a box full of receipts and the names of customers, then provides five more names at their request.
A few days later, he stops in the bank “and they say your loan’s approved.”
Not only that, “they were all excited about it.”
Next, God provides a $4,000 paint booth the Fire Department OKs and some of the people he fixed upscale cars for help him pave the lot for California’s newest shop, Condor Auto Body.
“A week later, this girl who works in the international department of the bank calls up and wants me to paint her Porsche.” And at a jazz concert she asks him to he asks her what happened.
The supervisors approved the loan because several of his customers — including those for whom he restored high-end cars — did business with the bank.
After telling a story as complex as Bilbo’s wanderings away from the Shire, Speros adds, “I’ve got to tell you, there’s a lot more.”
To that story and a few others:
- After selling his car repair business for $50,000, the former football player talks two brothers who build sandcastles on the beach to design cup holders that American Desk in San Diego produces and installs at Jack Murphy Stadium for the Super Bowl.
- Although he fails in a multi-year effort to make an air sickness bag a cartoon-driven entertainment device for an airline, Speros follows the purchasing agent’s advice to sell advertising on their ticket jackets instead. That pays for the printing with cash left over and launches a new business.
- And then there is the deal that got away. Working with Flynn’s cutting-edge printing company, Speros and Flynn team up on plan to convert buildings in Tampa into virtual billboards by wrapping them with advertisements for the 1991 Super Bowl. But a king’s ransom disappears when a disintegrating Oldsmobile pulls out and the deal falls apart.
But as Flynn says, all that just might make “a helluva book.”
GRADING MARK:
Here are some remarks about Mark Speros from those who have known him:
TOM FLYNN: Tuned in, not out
When others are talking, most people are focused on their response. “He’s not that kind of guy. He’s listening, he’s asking questions, he wants to understand.” In a creative business structure, “you surround yourself with creative people and you extract those ideas from (them). Then (you) have to harness, organize and implement. That’s the key. That’s what a true entrepreneur does. He gets people to do things they’ve never done before.”
COUSIN SUSAN SPEROS: He’s a Speros
His mother was stunningly beautiful. “(She) was to me, Sophia Loren. She was very forward-thinking” in the business she ran out of her house. And his dad was in the restaurant business, ”so business was in the blood.” And there was family. “In ‘95 with his airline ticket jacket business, he was able to obtain some tickets for a cruise to Greece for my mother, his mother and my aunt, Emma, who lived out in California. And we were able to find the old village.”
COLLEAGUE JOHN BLACKMORE: Just enough rope
Not content with the routine of selling advertising bags to local drug store owners, John Blakemore “had the idea to go to K Mart” with the same deal Speros had with the airline. “He said, ‘It’s a dumb idea. Don’ do it. It’s too logistically difficult.’” Blakemore then booked flights for two to visit K-mart, and Speros refused to go. “I go walking in there young and scared and naïve, and when I came back, he was already working out the logistics stuff, which is why he didn’t want to do it in the first place. He gave me enough rope to hang myself,” then “enough of a safety net” for him to succeed. “It was one of the best memories in my career.”
FRIEND STEVE MALOWNEY: A big, hairy beach guy
“In 1979, I moved to San Diego from Canada on a lark with another friend. My brother had a 1959 Corvette, and he went to Condor Auto Body,” where Speros repaired it. Hanging out at the garage, “we got to be pretty good friends,” sailing, fishing and roller blading. “He was kind of a big, hairy beach guy back then, long hair.” Later, Speros lent his jet skis and boat so the Malowney kids could use them at a birthday party on Mission Bay. And 25 years ago, he passed along tickets for a cruise to South America Malowney and his wife will never forget.
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