Passing thought:
An update on my brother Daniel, the brainy one in the family. Remember he chose a career in electrical engineering while I went on to become a huckster. Dan is now a hot shot consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton. From a recent news release " Booz Allen Hamilton has been awarded a $149.5 million, multi-year delivery order to provide technology, program management and engineering support to the U.S. Army’s Space and Terrestrial Communications Directorate under the Strategic Services Sourcing" Dan Hampel Program Manager said " This project is the largest modernization effort in Army history and one of the most complex networking of systems across the joint services." Whatever that all means but it sounds really important. All I can say is we can all be grateful Dan is on our side.
Let it be recorded that I contributed to increased recruitment for the U.S. Air Force with the advertising slogan, "Aim High." Dan and I always competed going back to those fiercely contestedcribbage games we played in the bedroom we shared on 23rd Street in Paterson. Last time I looked he was beating me by hundreds of games. But you had to count holes and he was always strong on math. I was a word man.
Late in the summer of 1957 after a brief vacation in Fire Island, I returned home to find a letter from Young & Rubicam waiting. This can't be, I immediately thought. Y & R writing to me? As my trembling fingers tore at the envelope I imagined all kinds of scenarios. Could this be my first rejection notice from the most prestigious New York ad agency even before I was interviewed? But then again, a rejection from Y&R is better than an acceptance from Ted Bates. Go figure. The letter requested that I call for an appointment. Dorothy recalls that I started celebrating as if I got the job. "But just a minute", she reminded me. The letter is signed by a Harry Rubicam and isn't he dead? This has to be a joke. Someone is playing a trick on me. True to his word, Walter Weiner passed my resume on to the right person at Y&R. Or did he?
Sure enough there was a Harry Rubicam, head of human resources for the creative departments. He turned out to be a nephew of Ray Rubicam, one of Y&R's founders. He was a grandfatherly gent who talked to me about the greatness of Y&R and what a wonderful place to work. Like I needed to be advised. Harry Rubicam introduced me to Bob Work, manager of the copy department. We had about a fifteen minute chat and browsing through my resume he asked why I had moved around so much. "No sir, those are not places; they're the accounts I have worked on." Bob Work was completely bald and much younger than he looked. He was a beloved friend of the creative departments and a senior member of the all important plans board, the body that had final approval on critical campaigns for the agency's leading clients. Bob Work offered me a job in sales promotion at a starting salary of $8,000 a year. The cliche that I would have paid him to work at Y&R in any capacity could not have been a more accurate expression of my elation as I left the building at 285 Madison Ave. that sunny summer afternoon. Look ma I made it and I didn't have to work my way up from the mail room, one of advertising's more traditional starting jobs. So what if I started out in sales promotion, a tangential department that helped supplement the more glamorous media of print, radio and the fledgling medium TV. I was in the house and that was what mattered. For days I walked around my old neighborhood and places where I used to work looking for friends and anyone who would listen, "Yeah I got a new job at Young & Rubicam. You've heard of it right?"
My early impressions: Every day I commuted by bus from Wayne, New Jersey and later Ridgewood to the Port Authority bus terminal and a walk east on 41 St. I couldn't wait to go to work in the place I considered a cathedral of creativity. Not a new agency in a new building, Y&R showed signs of aging, its walls dull green (green for Dartmouth, ceo's Sig Larmon a renowned alumnus and a golfing buddy of president Eisenhower) Its furniture, utilitarian and a little shopworn from the squirming and fidgeting of the rear ends that were broken coming up with winning campaigns. From those modest surroundings came such memorable campaigns as Bert and Harry Piel, the Remington shaving a peach, Jell-o's Chinese baby (trying to eat Jell-o with chopsticks), Lay's Potato Chips, Kent with the Micronite Filter, The Temptation of Beautyrest, Breck, J&J Baby Products, Excedrin Headache, Borden's Elsie, General Electric, Chrysler, General Cigar Modess Because, Band Aids, (one new and naive copywriter submitted a headline to her supervisor, "Never Neglect the Smallest Prick.". The ad never ran.
