Around 7:30 on a typical weekday morning in New Castle, Penn., Adelphia Communications' New Castle general manager Louis Abraham can be found at his off-site office ? the Dunkin' Donuts on North Mill Street ? with a cup of coffee and a napkin's worth of written reminders to connect someone's high-speed service or check out a complaint.
Most of the time, though, Abraham can be found in his real office ? the one with the open door. About 5,000 of the New Castle system's 21,000 subscribers pay their monthly bill in person, and many of them stop for a chat with the GM everyone calls Lou. ?Everyone knows him,? says Pam Mackenzie, area manager for Adelphia's 400,000-plus Western Pennsylvania region.
As the manager of the cable system in his birthplace of New Castle, Abraham says he is ?really fortunate. It's almost like a dream come true.?
Formerly a seventh-grade teacher and a state legislator, Abraham, 43, entered the cable industry in 1982 when he was hired by Cable Entertainment to manage its Rochester, Penn., system. ?Ralph Peluso, the regional manager?wanted to bring in young people with new ideas,? Abraham recalls. ?Working for Ralph Peluso was like a free graduate degree. His philosophy was cable was 90% communications [and] 10% technology, which I tend to agree with.?
When Adelphia bought the systems in 1986, Abraham and Peluso stayed on. In 1990, Abraham was promoted to regional administrative manager but, wanting more direct contact with customers, he asked to return to operations. Peluso retired the next year, and Abraham took his post, creating what James Rigas, Abraham's supervisor at the time, calls ?a match made in heaven.?
His customers know they're ?dealing with a human being that really cares about their community,? Abraham says. Lawrence County District Attorney Matthew Mangino says: ?He's made Adelphia?synonymous with goodwill.?
In his ten years as GM of the New Castle and Rochester systems, several of Abraham's initiatives have been adopted by other Adelphia systems, such as the McGruff Truck Program, which teaches children who need help to wave down Adelphia trucks bearing the McGruff emblem.
The program wasn't Abraham's idea, but he embraced the notion when Mangino returned from a 1998 White House Conference on School Safety and Youth Violence and asked area utilities to take part in the McGruff program. Only Adelphia responded to Mangino's request.
?Lou kind of jumped in with both feet when he learned about it,? says Mangino. ?It's not only a commitment and investment financially and in other resources, but it's also a hands-on commitment from Lou Abraham.? That commitment includes a PSA campaign on his cable systems, extensive local publicity and sponsorship of a 45-minute program for school assemblies. About the only thing Abraham doesn't do is wear the McGruff suit.
So far the program has reached more than 7,000 kids in the New Castle area. Last year the Adelphia GMs in the Western Pennsylvania area voted to take on the project, which may go national.
Another Abraham export is the ?theft of service? program he started eight years ago, which includes a six-week ?No Questions Asked? amnesty, the installation of traps on some lines and the hiring of a private investigator to document piracy. The program is now used throughout the region.
Abraham's local roots might have made it ?very easy for him to not pursue that as aggressively as he has,? says Mackenzie, who calls the program's success a result of his ?personal mettle.?
Abraham spent his childhood traveling as an Air Force brat. When his father, a master sergeant, died in 1970 at 38, his mother moved Abraham and his two sisters from England back to Western Pennsylvania, so they could grow up near her husband's family. All still live in New Castle, where Abraham and his wife Patti are raising their son and daughter.
John DiMuccio, business administrator for the city of New Castle, recalls barely more than a handful of complaints about cable service in ten years. ?I get a lot of complaints here about a lot of things, but we get very few calls here about Adelphia Cable,? he says.
Meanwhile, the results of the 600-mile upgrade to the systems ? completed ahead of schedule in 2000 ? are starting to show: Abraham has exceeded the 2001 targets for digital and high-speed subscribers. That push continues, as does his battle against direct broadcast satellite incursion.
In the future Abraham would like to become more involved in his community, although he has turned down requests to run for county office. ?I like to do things behind the scenes,? he says. ?I don't want to be the actor; I want to be the director.?
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