Of Fathers, Birthdays and Presidents

Dad (in straw hat), his sister (in front) a cousin & their Uncle

 down on the farm in Southern Illinois   ca. 1918

Yesterday would have been my father's 101st birthday. Hard to believe. He was born in 1910,  very much a turn of the century time in this country. William Howard Taft was President. Neither the telephone, the refrigerator or the zipper had been invented.  The Titanic would sink when Dad was two years old.  The U.S. was changing from a predominantly agrarian society to a manufacturing one. People who could no longer subsist on farms were moving to the cities as were immigrants making their way to the "land of opportunity". My father grew up on a farm in southern Illinois on the banks of the Ohio River. He always remembered it with great fondness and longing. They were poor but not starving. His father was an anomaly in those days:  he had a college degree in horticulture. His mother had been a milliner in the city of Chicago but his father moved her to the farm. She was, by all accounts, not happy about it.

Dad moved to Chicago to work for Florsheim Shoes in the advertising dept. He worked as a "paste up artist" which meant he cut and pasted drawings and words to sheets of paper in the form of a print ad. These were given to the newspaper to be typeset. It was 1929; he was 19 years old. He vividly recalled the stock market crash. His workspace in the Florsheim building was below street level, with those tiny grated windows looking onto the sidewalks at people's feet.  He remembered a jumper landing outside.  He watched his money carefully from then on.

Dad put himself through colleg,e taking night courses at Northwestern University. He never finished and it always bothered him. He eventually went to work in a new industry: radio. He was selling national advertising air time to big ad agencies for a company that represented radio stations across the U.S. and Canada.  The business was in its infancy and he was there.

Dad smoking (he'd quit by the 

time I was born) ca. WWII.  When

I was little, I thought he re-

sembled Frankenstein's Monster!

The United States entered the First World War, "the war to end all wars" to which it was mistakenly referred, in 1917.  Of course, the war reparations act led to a second world war.  As a result, my father enlisted in the Army Air Corps for WWII. By then, he'd moved to Los Angeles to start his own rep firm.  He walked away from the new business and beginnings of stability at the age of 31 to defend our country. It took him quite a few years to recover what he'd lost.  By then, he'd been married and it had been annulled; a fact I didn't learn til my mother died.  He kept it a secret but it explained much about him and his breaking his engagement to my mother and his melancholy.  But, that's another story.

                                                                                               

Dad and Mom were married in 1950 and together til her death in 1997.  He lived another ten years without her, on his own, in the lovely quiet area of the Central Coast of California, where they retired.

He died during a lunch of take-out Chinese, sitting with his caregiver, a lovely lady named Isabel. He had a heart attack and could not be revived.  I remember all the times we ordered Chinese take out or he'd take me to China Town in L.A..  It was his favorite food and I was happy he was enjoying it at the end.

Mother and Dad at Christmas time  circa 1967

                            

I flew to CA immediately and set to work on funeral arrangements, along with my brother, as well as the celebration I wanted to have at his home.  The turnout to Dad's service was amazing.  My brother and I thought maybe twenty five at the most.  We probably had closer to 60 and a bunch of my friends made the trip up as well.  That meant so much to me.   My brother and I gave eulogies; mine was about how crotchety Dad was but how loving and kind too.  He was a mixed bag as are most of us.  We gave him the military funeral he'd planned for and it was so moving.  He had full honors with an honor guard, the flag folding, taps and a 21 gun salute.  I'll never forget it.    

 My sons pay their last respects to PaPaw

He and my mom left my brother and I, my two sons, his two daughters and, so far, a granddaughter.  My brother and I think of him often.  We can laugh now at things that were not so funny when we were young.  I wish I could tell him that. 

                                                                          My sons, my nieces, me, my brother out on Dad's lawn 2007

Happy Father's Day

M

My father, mother and I in front of our home, Van Nuys, California 1952.

Background is the car they called "Snubnose".

My father died three years ago this summer.  He was  98 years old.  He wanted to live to be 100 and we all thought he would.  Perhaps that's why I was so surprised when he keeled over from a heart attack while eating his favorite food, Chinese. 

Dad's family is long-lived. His mother lived to be 100 years and 3 months.  His Aunt Dema, youngest of his mother's eight siblings, was still driving the coast of California into Oregon when she was in her early nineties.  Her husband, a younger man in his seventies, did not know her real age until she passed.    I hear he was quite surprised.

I remember sitting and talking to Dad when he was elderly, trying to glean information about his life.  He was born in 1910.  I'd heard much about his youth because he spoke of it often when we were growing up:  his days on the Ohio River, the old steamships and paddle wheels, the one room schoolhouse, life on the farm. But his single years, while learning the ad biz in Chicago before the war, were not well known to me.   There was so much more I wanted to know.  Did he have fun?  What were radio and ad agencies like back in the 30's?  What was baseball like?  What entertainments and entertainers did he see?

Dad originally worked as a copywriter and print ad designer for Florsheim Shoes.  They had a large building in downtown Chicago.  He worked in the basement probably starting around 1928 or '29.  I know he was there in '29 because he spoke of the Stock Market Crash, seeing a jumper's body on the sidewalk of his building outside his basement window.  He expected another major crash for the rest of his life.

My family circa 1957 in our second home,Woodland Hills, CA.

My little brother is on a hobby horse.

Dad participated in the beginnings of radio broadcasting. He pioneered in an exciting new business,  national radio representatives, representing  stations around the country to the big ad agencies like Leo Burnett and Foote, Cone & Belding.  Chicago was the center of advertising in those days thanks to pioneers like Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Wards.  Dad went to work for one of the early national radio representatives, Howard Wilson & Co.  They sold broadcast air time on radio stations around the country to Chicago ad agencies.  In those days, radio programs ran in fifteen minute segments, also known as quarter hours, and were sponsored by one major advertiser.  He said it was exciting times back then; the business was young, they were young, they lived in a great city, it was all new.

Dad had access to some pretty exciting sporting events too.  He was a lifelong fan of baseball going to both Comiskey Park to see the White Sox and Wrigley Field to see the Cubs.  When I was a kid, he occasionally took my brother and I to Chavez Ravine to see the Dodgers.  I think the Cubs were his favorite team, however. In those days, he said you could meet the players and he was lucky enough to shake hands with Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the like.  He saw Red Grange play for the Chicago Bears.  He watched Seabiscuit and Man O' War race.  It wasn't the race.  It was after that.  But he said it was "memorable".

Around 1939, he moved to Los Angeles to start his own rep business.  He later gave it up to enlist with the  Army Air Corp at the beginning of WWII.  He worked in several areas including:  transportation manager for supply trains across the U.S., as an intelligence photographer in Europe.  He was a skinny guy, weighing in at 125lbs during the war, making it easy to hand him partway out of the plane to take photos while flying over Germany.

As kids, we would ask him, "Did you bomb anything?" 

"Oh sure," he'd say.  "But I don't know if we killed anyone."  I don't think that was something he ever wanted to dwell on.  Dad remained in the USAF Reserve after WWII, retiring as a Lt. Colonel.

After my mother died, in 1997, Dad told me he'd been married before, during WWII.  It was an absolute shock; not because he had but because he never told us.  He'd fallen in love with a young woman from New York.  I don't know how they met but they married just before he shipped out.  They wrote back and forth throughout the war.  I have her letters.  They are quite poignant.  Sometime, prior to his coming home, she had the marriage annulled.  She said her father was an alcoholic and she felt obligated to care for him and ddn't want my father to share the burden.  My father was crushed and he carried the pain of it with him all those years.  He erected a monument to her after he learned she, too, died of alcoholism-related illness.

Dad was 40 years old when he married my mother.  He said she never knew about his first wife.  I asked him why and he said he thought she'd be "jealous".  I don't think she'd have been jealous; Mother had two previous husbands.  But I'm sure she didn't know as we were close and shared a great deal.  My brother and I are their only children.

To say we do not know our parents is an understatement.  Their lives are a mystery, for the most part, just as ours may be a mystery to our children.  We may never really know our parents but we should try to learn as much as possible.

Happy Father's Day, Daddy.

D

Dad and his grandsons, 2005.  

He was very proud of them and thrilled they were boys!

                                                              

Theme Thursday Lunch

 
When I was a kid, mom or dad made my lunch.  I took it to school in a lunch pail.  Did I have a special one?  Probably, but I do not remember.  What I do remember is having a thermos of milk, a sandwich, some cookies and an apple or orange slices.  My father always made sure we had fruit.  At some point I became too "big" to take a lunch pail and began carrying lunch in a lovely brown paper sack.

By high school, we were eating in the cafeteria.  Not much memory of anything there except chocolate pudding.  By 11th grade, my best friend I would sneak out of school at least one day a week to eat at a local coffee shop across the street.  She and I would split a plate of french fries for 35 cents and we'd each have a cherry or vanilla coke.  It was heaven.

I worked summers at my father's office on Hollywood & Vine.  Once in a while, he'd take me to lunch.  he loved going to nice places so we'd eat at the Brown Derby or drive to Chinatown or walk up the street to Dupar's.  Hollywood was full of characters, derelicts, drug addicts and wanna-bes.  We'd see famous people, crazies, and prostitutes and one old guy in a ten gallon white hat & bolo tie who drove an old Cadillac convertible with hand tooled leather seats and real steer horns on the hood.  It might have been the famous boot designer Nudie, but I'm not sure.

Once I started my career in advertising, lunch was the silver standard for wining and dining the media department:  me, my media director and the other buyer.  While a national media buyer for Fotomat Corp., I purchased spot radio, spot tv and newspaper in eighty markets across the U.S.  We spent many days and evenings meeting with radio management from all over the country.  These guys (90% of them were men) were usually on a long road trip and they always wanted to eat in the best places.  I grew very spoiled.

After I went into broadcast sales, lunch continued to be the event of the day.  Clients expected to be taken to lunch at lovely restaurants.  For many years, the stations had due bills or trade or barter with many fine restaurants so their sales people could entertain in style.  And we were stylin' for a long long time.

The new millenia, corporate mergers, takeovers and acquisitions have replaced the independent owners of the broadcast industry.  Cutbacks and changes to the tax code have removed the perks for all but the upper management types.  Lunch nowadays is just lunch and I find myself coming full circle, bringing my lunch most days in a brown paper bag; having the occasional special meal with my husband and, once or twice a month, entertaining a client.

Ah but it was fun while it lasted.

Cupcakes, Valentines and Commerce

I'm hoping to sign a new client and I'm very excited.  Why?  Look at the product!

 

I went in to get a cupcake.  We started talking.   I was in sweats, headed to the gym.  They sold me a lemon curd topped lemon cake cupcake.  I started eating.  I gave them my card.  I sell local television advertising.  They thought it was funny I was eating a cupcake before  hitting the gym.  Next thing you know, we are talking air time and visuals for their brand new business.  

I ordered their Valentine's Day special:

I'm going to surprise my husband, son & MIL with these.

They make cakes too.  This is a little dog on a John Deere tractor.  

 

And a very cool spider cake.

I wonder who will end up spending the most money with whom?

Advertisers Are Watching YOU

Just saw an amazing story on GMA Saturday about advertising's brave new world. Once the stuff of science fiction, advertisers are finding plenty of alternatives to advertising in the Super Bowl and they'll know alot more about you, your interests, buying habits and more when they are done. 

Talk about Big Brother watching. This is scary stuff.
 

For more information, go here.

Roller Skatin' Babies

I admit it, I lovvvve babies. This has probably gone viral by now but I'm posting it anyway. Clever use of CG by an advertiser's agency.

The Long Slow Death of Radio As We Knew It

This post was written as a comment in response to a recent post on Inside Music Media.

Early in my career, I was a national media buyer with the Fotomat Corp. They were, at that time, the 8th largest spot radio buyer in the US. I worked with incredible radio stations, both AM & FM. The Fotomat buying strategy was simple: 40 weeks of radio annually in 80 markets. Everything Fotomat did from a marketing standpoint was primarily dependent on the reps, the stations, the station personalities and the marketing partnerships we developed. Fotomat's marketing strategy utilized the best each station had to offer. Aside from having the requisite cpms to meet, the programs were individualized and they worked. Fotomat's marketing dept was smart enough to realize the strengths and unique aspects of each station with whom they partnered. There was no 'one size fits all". There were no clusters, no ownership monopolies and very little voice tracking other than the "Beautifuls". Stations were still personality-driven and formats were pretty much divided between: Top 40, Rock, Oldies, AC, News/Talk & Beautiful. Our national reps were the cream of the crop from Group W, CBS, Eastman, Katz, Blair, McGavren-Guild, Christal, Buckley and many others. Bill Burton was, indeed, The Man. It was a golden time.

To say that these days are gone forever and radio will never recover to these levels again is probably true. And yet, when you look at the amazing way it all fit together, the dynamics of the stations, their representatives, their advertising partners, their personalities...it all fused to deliver a great product with thoughtful marketing and strong content resulting in a fiercely loyal audience. What is so hard about that?

January 17, 2009