He also became active in the Dramatic Club and the College radio station, WHRB, and eventually wound up as president of both organizations.

His time with the Dramatic Club inspired him to spend two summers working as the assistant to the general manager of a New Jersey theater company, and his interest piqued.

“As a result of that...I decided to change my whole life career objective,” he says. “I decided I’d study business...and go into the theater business.”

But after earning a degree from Harvard Business School, Billings decided that going into the theater business “wasn’t the smartest thing to do” and turned his sights on newspapers instead.

“I made the circuit from Denver to San Francisco to San Diego to Houston,” he says, “and talked to 28 different newspaper organizations, and every one of them turned me down.”

But Billings did eventually get a call from Copley Newspapers in San Diego and was offered a spot on the corporate staff. Thirteen years later, in 1970, he left his job with Copley (which, looking back, he remembers as “nirvana”) and decided to become a consultant.

From here on, Billings’ professional life was marked by a parade of different posts—from business manager at the National Enquirer to editor of the United Nations Observer and International Report to an executive editor of the United Media Chain.

Lead among his roster of clients was the National Rifle Association, where in 1976 he became executive director. The organization was losing millions of dollars every year in the mid-1970s, and Billings was brought on to make it financially solvent once again.

To this day Billings lists his brief work with the NRA, which turned around its financial statement, as his most rewarding achievement.

But he never shared the ideological fervor of his colleagues. He says he never owned a gun in his life, which made some of his coworkers uncomfortable.

From their point of view, Billings says, “it was clear I wasn’t one of them.” But as far as he was concerned, he had no qualms in the two years he spent there.

“As a management consultant, I view the world the same way as lawyers view the world,” he says. “As long as the other organization is functioning in a legal manner, they’re probably entitled to...competent management.”

From the NRA, Billings headed directly to the other end of the political spectrum, becoming president of the Mother Earth News. The publication, which contains articles on sustainable energy and raising crops and livestock, is what he calls “a marvelous counterculture magazine.”

But all that, Billings now insists, is “ancient history.”

After these initial excursions in journalism and consulting, a headhunter found him and asked him to move to San Francisco and become president of the Recorder Printing and Publishing Company. He accepted the job and presided over a battery of daily legal and commercial newspapers in San Francisco.