Last April Alex Seith and Thom Serafin had a funeral to go to out in Sterling, Illinois. Tom Davis, who’d sold them WSDR AM back in 1987, had passed on.
“I was in the middle of the third decade of my rosary,” Serafin tells us, “and he came in and insisted I leave the church. I wondered, what the heck is so important? It turned out we had a consultant working at the radio station who was involved in new formats. He wanted more information on that. I said, “I’m in the middle of the rosary! This is a friend of mine who just died! There’s plenty of time to talk about this!”‘
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“Thom was not kneeling. He was sitting in the pew, and I didn’t see any rosary in his hand. His hands were open, sitting there. If he was counting the rosary, he must have been counting them mentally. I’m not Catholic. But most of the time when I’ve been to Catholic funeral masses, it’s been my observation when people are doing the rosary they get forward and kneel. Maybe that practice has changed, but I saw no rosary in his hand at any point.”
And Seith remembers this clearly: “He knelt.”
What happened between them last spring, says Serafin, must be understood in the context of a personal tragedy. On March 31, his first child was born with a damaged heart and lived only a few hours. For weeks afterward, the lawsuit declares, “SERAFIN was depressed, distraught, distracted and in an extremely vulnerable state. A. SEITH was aware of all this . . . ” The other thing Serafin asks us to understand is that corporate law is beyond him. “I relied on Alex for all my advice. And he was good at it. He knew the law.”
On May 20, the directors approved the issue of 100,000 shares of stock to Alex and William Seith at a price of 20 cents a share.
But Seith understands how the above chronology makes him look. Not eager to be mistaken for a snake, he tried to round out the picture. He wanted us to know that even though he asked Serafin to sign some papers that Serafin now wishes he hadn’t, it didn’t really matter if he signed them or not. “It could have been done without him,” Seith insisted. “When he said, ‘Gee whiz! I really didn’t understand what you did then,’ I said, ‘Thom, we didn’t need your vote. My son and I had 70 percent of the vote to start with.’”
