Ahead of the Curve

by Thomas Greco, Publisher

I have always prided myself on being ahead of the curve. Especially when it comes to things like music, movies, trends, culture, gadgets, technology, etc. Fuhgeddaboudit.

Food and fashion? You’d never know it, but I was pretty good there, too. All of that is well and good. Unfortunately, for some reason, I always move on too fast. Hear me out.

I was wearing Adidas sneakers in the early ’70s! Something about those three black stripes was so cool to me. And that was the ONLY style they had. I can’t be sure, but I’m pretty sure I played a basketball game against one of the guys in Run DMC sometime in 1978. Coincidence?

I was drinking Gatorade out of a GLASS bottle when it only had ONE flavor. And it wasn’t even a flavor. It was just Gatorade.

I was making mixtapes on EIGHT TRACK tapes, even before they invented DJ mixers! I moved to cassettes in the ’80s, then Digital Audio Tape (DAT), then recordable CDs and DVDs. I remember having to go to someone’s house in Staten Island to find a DVD recorder. No one knew there was such a thing.

I had my first VCR in 1979! Straight from Crazy Eddie’s! Like their prices, it was INSANE! (That item caused some problems when my mom would walk in my room while I was watching one of those “art” films I’d rent from that curtained room in the video store.)

I had giant LED wall clocks. I had these six-foot tall fake fish water tubes that lit up throughout the house. I got DirectTV when it launched in 1994. I even bought a portable satellite dish (it came in a briefcase!) from them around that time so I could watch NFL Sunday Ticket when I went to Florida.

Speaking of, on my honeymoon, I hid a 50-pound VCR/TV combo in a garbage bag and dragged it on the train so I could watch videotape games of the New York Giants in our cabin on the way down to the Sunshine State. Dragging that thing through Penn Station and down the skinny Amtrak hallways had to be a sight to see.

I had a DVR before anyone ever knew what those letters stood for. I bought my first Apple computer in 1984. I was the first person I knew who had an iPod, an iPhone and an iPad. As I write this, I still have my Betamax, my reel to reel, my six-CD changer and my 300-disc DVD jukebox. I even have a specially-made CD plastic case opener!

The one thing that most of these items have in common is that they were all cool at the time, but that time passed. And in most cases, pretty quickly.

The last thing I can think of (as I write this, anyway) that I was ahead of the curve on was podcasting. Now, I’m not saying I was the first. Far from it. Podcasts have been around for a while. I think the first official one was in 2003. But as far as podcasts for collision repair go, I think we were pretty early on that.

Even if we weren’t the first, when we started creating it in 2016, Alicia Figurelli and I came up with the idea of not doing the typical interview expert/consultant/repairer podcast. We came up with an alternative style. We wanted to talk about the industry, but we wanted to entertain. We weren’t interested in educating or training. We figured there would be dozens of those sooner or later (and we were right). We wanted our listeners to hear what was going on in their industry, listen to news and stories, and laugh. It was a kind of old Howard Stern and Robin Quivers news format. We’d go through the best collision-related news stories of the month and riff on them. No subject was sacred.

I think we hit on a formula that was pretty original for the industry and the format. We released a bunch of episodes and we started to get some attention and some fans. Then COVID hit.

Like everyone else, we were cut off at the knees. We couldn’t devote the time to make the podcast grow. We were too busy trying to save our business. Once again, although I was ahead of the curve, I could never hit it. Through no fault of my own, the time had passed. The day was done.

Just like a friendship.

Want more? Check out the October 2026 issue of New Jersey Automotive!