My Tall Tale for a Toastmasters speech contest

At our August 19, 2020 Zoom meeting Pioneer Toastmasters Club held a Tall Tales Speech Contest. I was one of three contestants and came in third. A Tall Tales speech is nominally three to five minutes long (but can run thirty seconds over or under those limits). Its subject should have a theme or plot, and be of a highly exaggerated, improbable nature. My contest speech about the stealthiest cover band in the country was cut down from a 5 to 7 minute humorous speech I had given way back in 2010. I still had some props based on thrift store purchases. Here is the script:

This story is absolutely true, like all the stories I tell you. I heard in Pittsburgh from a friend of Stan Ruckzynski. You’ve never heard of the Ruczynski brothers or their rock and roll band from Youngstown, Ohio. And you never heard them play. They only released one record on their own label. But that’s all right with them. They didn’t have to play to make money. But you probably have heard the name of their band hundreds of times - without ever realizing it.

The four Ruczynski brothers started a band called the Kielbasa Brothers in the late sixties. A kielbasa is a big, long Polish sausage. Their day jobs were making steel pipe at the Youngstown Sheet and Tube mill. Theo played guitar, Leo played bass, Dan played keyboards, and Stan played drums. Every weekend they played covers, versions of other people’s songs. Their gigs were in bars from Pittsburgh to Wheeling. But they never made enough money to quit their day jobs.

In 1975 Theo decided to get advice from the wisest man in the family. Their old uncle Thaddeus, or Tad, worked as an attorney for the Democratic political machine over in Pittsburgh. It started running things back in the mid 30’s and kept on going. They and Tad had their fingers in everything and knew how to make money. Tad listened to Theo and told him to change how you think. You need to become a record company, not just a band. Theo asked how will that help?

Tad explained, “We rename the band Dozens More. Then we trademark and copyright it. We start our own record company and release an album on an LP record. Every night I see TV ads for collections of golden oldies. They all say things like contains ‘Rock around the clock’, ‘ Leader of the pack’ and dozens more. Every time someone runs an ad that says the magic phrase Dozens More I send them an angry letter. It says they damaged us by infringing our trademark and copyright. I tell them they need to change their commercial to remove that phrase. Otherwise we’re going to sue them here in Pittsburgh.” When they ask around, they’ll find they can’t win. I play poker or golf with every judge in town. After a while I will agree to instead settle for some money, provided they don’t tell anyone else. Paying us will be cheaper and easier.

September 19, 1977 was Black Monday in Youngstown. That day Sheet and Tube closed the mill. They laid off 5000 people including all four brothers. That fall lots of Youngstown residents were sitting at home all day watching TV. The difference was that the Ruczynski brothers got paid from doing it. Each brother watched a different network to check out the commercials.

Record companies all over the country and the alphabet tripped over their trademark. Folks like: Atlantic, Columbia, Decca, Mercury, Vanguard, and Warner Brothers. Uncle Tad threatened to sue them all. Enough money rolled in so the brothers never worried about losing their homes. They kept changing formats to keep the album alive. There was a 8-track, and then a cassette, and finally a CD.

Their uncle said that when you pick a few dollars (just a tad) out of enough pockets it adds up to a very nice living. Things picked up further when record companies started running thirty minute long infomercials on late night TV. They definitely didn’t want to redo them. Eventually the story about how Dozens More operated leaked onto the WorldWide Web and blew their cover. But for two decades they were the stealthiest cover band in the country.

  

Very little of that story is true. There never ever was a band called Dozens More. But there really was a guy named Ruckzynski in the Air Force Reserve unit I belonged to in Pittsburgh.

The idea is based on the concepts of a copyright troll and a trademark troll. You do need to have a product to keep a trademark alive. I was making fun of how in trademark law there can be absurdly broad claims. For example, Amstar Corporation, who owned the Domino Sugar trademark once sued Domino’s Pizza to keep them from also trademarking a Domino.  

The image of Jack and the Beanstalk is from a WPA poster at the Library of Congress.