Fast Page, a Reno beeper company at the center of a ten-year legal brawl through Nevada courts, was first formed in 1985. | ||
That
was shortly after Kent and Maria Steglich signed a
$132,300 agreement to purchase Reno-area rights for a
wide-area paging system which communications technology
entrepreneur Mark A. Edwards had designed and started
under the name of the "ARC Systems ARCNET Wide Area
Paging System." Also to be purchased under the agreement were certain "goods" -- some 105 local commercial customer accounts, about 70 ARC-owned pagers, a Motorola simulcast base station installed at Slide Mountain, two omidirection antennas and various other equipment used to operate the system. The agreement -- between Mark Edwards, for Edwards Industries, Inc. and the Steglich couple -- was signed on January 28, 1985. It specified that title to all the listed "goods" was to remain with Edwards until the full sum had been paid and those goods were to constitute security for the Steglichs' performance obligation. However, court papers show that on January 22, 1985 -- six days before Edwards and the Stegliches had signed the agreement -- another couple, Wayne J. and Rebecca S. Alexander, had been in the Keystone branch of First Interstate Bank in Reno, pledging "all furniture, fixtures and equipment of Arc Systems" as collateral for a $35,000 loan. Attached to the Alexander loan application were copies of the same dot-matrix-printer-printed listings of ARC pagers and other "goods" that were attached to the then-yet-unsigned agreement between the Stegliches and Edwards Industries. On February 15, 1985, the Stegliches and Alexanders signed a partnership agreement for a company to be called "Advanced Radio Communication Systems of Reno, also ARC Systems of Reno." Kent and Maria Steglich, as their contribution to the new partnership, listed their agreement with Edwards Industries. The Alexanders, as their initial contribution, listed $35,000 -- the same sum the bank had loaned them three weeks earlier on the collateral of the pagers actually owned by Edwards Industries' ARC Systems division. By March of 1986, the ARC Systems of Reno partnership, suffering serious cash-flow problems, were given loans totalling $230,000 from the profit-sharing plan of a California company owned by Mark A. Edwards father, William H. Edwards. On June 11 the Steglich-Alexander company dropped its partnership status and became a corporation. But an audit completed July 11 revealed the company's situation was worsening, with the firm now defaulting on major contractual obligations. In a telephone call the evening of July 17, after a day of meetings and discussions with Steglich and Alexander about the company's serious plight, Mark Edwards, according to a memo in the court documents, learned that ARC Reno was actually in more serious default than Steglich had acknowledged that day to him. "It appears now, in hindsight, that the entire exercise conducted today was simply lip-service, done to avoid and conceal the real issues at hand..." says the Edwards memo. "Kent knew, during each of the discussions, that the system was in the trouble I felt was still several months off, yet nothing |
was said. I am astounded that while we
were discussing additional funding, Kent was fully aware
that he was essentially in default on existing notes."
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