Hungarian Heritage Review, 1987 (16. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1987-03-01 / 3. szám

33ungartan~(Amertcan profiles This is the story of a man who in 1976 had a Master’s Degree but no job pro­spects. His name is Balint Szent-Miklosy and he was born in Hungary on D-Day (June 6, 1944) and came to this country with his family in 1957. He got a B.A. degree at City College, worked for the Peace Corps in Ethiopia, and received his Master’s Degree in Urban Planning from Columbia University in 1972. Ever since high school he had researched the future and assembled a significant library that people used for their masters and Ph.D. research. The research expanded for 15 years proving to its owner that the future is indeed predictable. He avidly pursued his interest in the study of the Future at col­lege and during his early career as Special Assistant for Urban Affairs to the Chair­man of the New York State Urban Development Corporation. Later, he taught public administration at Kingsborough Community College. In October 1976, when he was look­ing for a job and became fed up with the non-sensical reasons people gave for not hiring him (“over-qualified,” “but your degree is in Urban Planning”), he took his $95 unemployment check and went to a printer with a four-page newsletter which dealt mainly with current events with a new twist — not what happened last month, but rather, what was expected to occur in the months to come. The newslet­ter, which he called Futurific (from the words Future and Terrific), was a pedestrian effort, especially since he had no publishing background. For his $95 he got 500 copies printed — overpriced, but he did not shop around — and turned to his family for postage money. For a mail­ing list he used 500 names of people who knew him on a first-name basis. Almost immediately, he received checks in response to the coupon in the newsletter, and he recouped the unemployment check and postage money. He was so elated that he turned out the second issue and then successive issues each month. To build up the newsletter, he needed access to equipment, so he hired out as a word processing operator, even though he could not really operate the machines and learned the operation of each machine he was to use on the weekend before his new assignment. On Friday afternoons he re­quested the machine’s manual from his new employer under the guise of brushing up, thus learning from scratch how to work each machine. With the permission of bemused employers, he prepared his newsletter at night and on weekends, ex­panded its pages, and increased the mon­thly budget. Thus, Szent-Miklosy became an ex­pert on word processing and got a full-time consulting assignment in McLean Virginia, near Washington, D.C. The newsletter grew to 12 pages as more and more peo­ple sent in material for the columns, and he soon completed two full years of publication. He spent many weekends commuting back and forth between his library in New York and Washington, D.C., to keep the periodical going, until he finally transferred the whole operation to the nation’s capital. After his full-time job was finished in Washington, he work­ed on a monthly fee basis for that company for another year and a half while he got a better paying consulting job in New York with a major insurance company. He reverse-commuted on weekends for a year until the organization was moved back to New York. As an efficiency expert specializing in bringing word processing and the office of the future technology into Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Greater New York, Szent- Miklosy soon realized what a market there was for a word processing service and started his own company, Words-Worth, as a spinoff from Futurific. His magazine continued to grow, but it was his word pro­cessing company that really took off. From borrowed space in a friend’s office when he started in 1979, the business expanded to fill a suite of offices at 280 Madison Avenue. Originally a one-man operation, Words-Worth today works with four full­time and four part-time employees. Open 24 hours a day (as per the needs of the clientele), seven days a week, if necessary, Words-Worth produces legal documents, manages mailing lists with thousands of names, and hundreds of reports or papers requiring letter-perfect reproduction. They publish newsletters and books, and conduct direct mail promotions, working mainly for lawyers and fundraisers as well as trade associations. His magazine is also pushing ahead with increasing confidence in its subject, the future itself. Futurific explores the world ahead and forecasts the future by means of scientific methods and detailed attention to the past and present. “Our scope is unlimited,” Szent-Miklosy says. “We examine people, places, things, motives, and ideas as they were yesterday and as they are today, researching in depth and extrapolating current knowledge into the future. We provide the reader with a strong antidote to future shock and aim to assist our readers in taking control of their own futures.” Unlike so many small businesses hav­ing rough times these days, Futurific com­mences its eleventh year of publication this month. During the past year its circulation increased to about 10,000, paid subscrip­tions rose by nearly 100 percent, and total readership is estimated at more than 20,000. For the past five years, the publisher hired an experienced editor to work full-time on the magazine. Regarding Futurific’s success in predicting future trends, Szent-Miklosy says: “As far as I know, no other publica­tion forecast the oil glut during the energy shortage; no one predicted only a month after the Polish government had declared martial law that Russia would not invade Poland, as Futurific did; and I have not seen elsewhere our definite prediction that the Soviet Union is definitely heading toward better and better relations with the western world.” He foresees an even brighter future for Futurific: “Our plans include extensive advertising to increase circulation, assembling a national sales force, secur­ing more advertisers, and expanding the magazine’s size from the present 24 pages to 32. The goal is to be accurate on future­­related developments and programs and share our thoughts with our readers.” He adds: “Our subscribers come from all walks of life, from corporate chairman to students — there’s even one person who identified himself as a “blue color worker”! MARCH 1987 HUNGARIAN HERITAGE REVIEW 9

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