Adventures in the ad biz

             From time to time I get asked, “So how did you get into advertising?” The tone is not unlike, “So what made you buy Enron stock a week before they crashed and burned? What were you thinking?”

            What I was thinking was, I wanted to be a writer. Just not of ads and commercials! I was thinking bigger. Movies and TV programs. I wanted to be the next Rod Serling.

            So, after collecting my diploma-- a BA in Communication Arts -- I left New Jersey and headed to Hollywood. The trick was to support myself while I strove to write a saleable script and find an agent. I cleverly reasoned that since I was a writer (or at least fancied myself one) I would get a job as a copywriter in an ad agency. Trouble was, about twenty thousand other would-be Rod Serlings had the same idea. It would be many months before one of my interviews paid off and I got a job offer from a real live ad agency!

            I was hired at Fuller, Smith & Ross as a very junior copy cub -- and at the amazing salary of $125 a week! I say amazing because this was 1962 and you could actually live pretty well on that amount. Today, it takes about $600 to buy what $100 got you in those days. My one-bedroom apartment, across from the Hollywood Bowl, had a swimming pool and ran just $120 month. Gas was 31 cents a gallon. A hamburger ran around a buck, and a movie ticket cost 50 cents. So I could even have a social life!

            Of course, I still wanted to get into TV and movie writing. So, on the advice of an actor friend, I applied for a job at Revue Studios (today, Universal). The job was in the mailroom, but it was an entry level position; you had a year to make contacts and talk yourself into a better job. It sounded exciting and glamorous! But, again, there was a long list of applicants, so I didn’t hold out much hope. Well, wouldn’t you know it…not two days after I agreed to work for FS&R, I finally got a call from Revue! I had the job. But the salary was just $70 a week!

            So now you know the sordid truth. I was seduced into advertising by the money! 

 

            1963, on location at Big Bear Lake, California. We were shooting a TV commercial I’d written for McCulloch Chain Saws. The helmet was in case a redwood fell on my head. Something did land on me, however…the trade unions! I was standing by an equipment truck when someone on the film crew said he needed a bag of nails.

            Well, the nails were right next to me, so I thought I’d be a nice guy and take them over. I swear, the bag wasn’t five inches in the air when three or four crew members were all over me! “Hey, that’s not your job. You don’t do someone else’s job! This is a union shoot!” Didn’t make that mistake twice. 

 

 

            In 1964, I made a brief detour in my ad career when my friend Rudy asked me to go to Mexico with him to film a documentary about a little known tribe called the Seris. I had one of those “If not now, when?” moments and said, "Sure, why not?" Rudy was a professional adventurer who had left his home in Germany at the age of 17 and never looked back. He’d just returned from a year traveling on a raft on the upper Amazon.

            We became friends when I wrote the article about this trip for Argosy magazine. If the piranhas and headhunters didn’t do him in, I figured he’d be a good bet to get me back alive. We made the film and eventually sold it to Westinghouse Broadcasting. I think we broke even. 

             In 1966, I went to work at Batten Barton Durstine & Osborne in New York. (Jack Benny once said the name sounded like a steamer trunk falling down a flight of stairs.) I was hired to work on the Campbell Soup account, but when I showed up, the guy who’d hired me had been fired. Nobody knew what to do with me, so I “floated” for a month or two. Then someone remembered that they needed a creative director in the Dallas office. I was offered the job. Frankly, I wasn’t thrilled. I knew two things about Dallas: that’s where JFK had been shot, and summers could be hellishly hot! I turned down the job, but my boss, John Bergin, got me to change my mind using irresistible Aristotelian logic. “If you don’t go,” he said, “we’ll have to fire you.” I went.

            Dallas was a great experience. I learned a lot about TV production, and quickly discovered that things were very different from Hollywood. There were no trade unions to deal with; everybody pitched in and did what needed to be done. Grips painted scenery, lighting guys moved props, even cameramen got their hands dirty. In this shoot, I got to toss a “wave” at these “surfers.” It was a lot of fun; not unlike Hollywood in the silent film era.

 

 

            In 1968, I won a Clio (advertising’s Oscar) for Best Locally Produced Commercial. Normally, three Clios were awarded: one for the agency, a second for the client, and a third for the production company. Paul Randall, my boss in Dallas, thought that was unfair to me and secretly arranged to get me my very own Clio, which he presented to me at an agency party. It was a wonderful and unexpected surprise.

 

             In 1969, I got to co-star with George Raft and Mike Mazurki in an Alka-Seltzer commercial.  Well, okay, not co-star exactly; I was one of a couple hundred extras dressed up like convicts in a prison mess hall.

 

            Full disclosure: BBDO did not produce this commercial and I did not write it. But the New York agency that did, shot it at Fair Park, Dallas, and the extras were derelicts from the local Salvation Army shelter. The day of the shoot, most of them disappeared and the director went ballistic! His assistant was a friend of mine. He called all over town trying to round up bodies for the shoot. He even called me, and asked if I and any other guys from the BBDO office would like to help out. We would be paid $2 for the day’s work. How could I resist!

 

            After my stint in Dallas, I transferred back to New York and worked on Gillette and Dodge. Here I am on location with Donald O’Conner, who directed this Dodge commercial. Donald was a great guy, and I was star-struck, having seen him in a zillion musicals.  Evenings were spent at the lodge where, over a few drinks, we swapped anecdotes. No surprise, his were way funnier than mine!

 

 

 

            The original Dodge Sheriff commercial was written in 1970 by my co-writer, Bill Brinkley, and was inspired by the movie, “In The Heat of the Night,” starring Sidney Portier and Rod Steiger. Veteran character actor, Joe Higgins, played the sheriff and was an instant hit with his line, “You inna heapa trouble, boy!” Naturally, Dodge wanted more Sheriff commercials. I got to write most of them, including numerous versions for regional dealerships. Here I am in 1972 with Joe after a long day and night producing a package of TV spots for the Houston Dodge Boys.

 

            I was getting tired of commuting on the Penn Central, plus the office politics were getting to me. So, when I got a job offer from an ad agency in Dallas, I decided to take it. But back in Big D, I felt like I had gone from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. The job wasn’t as promised, and I had a whole other set of political games to contend with. Two high points: I got to hire an art director from BBDO/New York (Tom Melnichek) who became a close buddy and the most talented colleague I’d ever worked with. Tom designed the cover of Sellin’ the Sizzle.
 

            The other high point was getting to work with Morey Amsterdam in a commercial I wrote and produced for our client, Rodeway Inns. Morey, perhaps best known as Buddy on The Dick Van Dyke Show, was a generous, down to earth soul who belied all those Hollywood celebrity stereotypes. He couldn’t have been nicer, and kept us all laughing. I wished the shoot could have gone on a few more days.
 

            Eventually I formed an agency (Harvey, Barham &Wasowski) with two other disgruntled employees. I had my name on the door and it felt great. Our main account was Curtis Mathes, manufacturer of TVs and stereo systems. Here I am with Frank Coghlan, a delightful actor who was our on-camera spokesman. Frank had been in the original Hal Roach “Our Gang” series, and, as a teenager, played Billy Batson in the Captain Marvel serials. The reason for the t-shirt: Frank informed me that he had just filmed a pilot based on the “Our Gang” movies. Frank said his character’s name was Officer Witkowski! Needless to say, I kidded Frank that it would take all his acting skills and then some to play a Polish cop with his very Irish mug! (Sadly, the series never got produced). 

            Advertising is a precarious business. After five fairly successful years, HB&W went belly up when we lost a client that represented 70% of our billings! Well, as the old saw goes, when life hands you a lemon…well, you know the rest. I wasn’t out of work ten minutes when my buddy Tom offered me a job in his agency as VP in charge of broadcast production. It was a fun place to work; Tom and his partner Jack Reed never let an opportunity to party slip by. But we also managed to get some pretty good work done from time to time.

 

            In 1981, Tom and I went to Hollywood to sign Woody Woodpecker as a “spokesman” for the Elk Corporation. We arrived on Walter Lantz’s 81st birthday and celebrated with him at a very posh Hollywood eatery. Later we met his charming wife, Gracie, who, we were surprised to learn, was the voice of Woody Woodpecker. Imagine being in a crowded, fancy restaurant with Gracie when she decides to demonstrate how she does Woody’s laugh!

 

 
 

            About the time I was feeling burned out and thinking of a new line of work, my wife Sally came to the rescue. A landscape designer, she became enamored with native plants and the whole concept of environmental gardening, i.e. low water use, fewer chemicals, and very low maintenance. She felt that she needed a book to show clients the plants she planned to use. But this was a new concept, and that book didn’t exist. So she decided to write it. And, oh by the way, would I help out with the rewrites, the photography and driving the van? That first book was for Texas and was an instant best seller. (After twenty-five years, it still brings in royalties.)

            We discovered that we enjoyed working together and decided to do another book – this time for the Southeast. This one also did very well, so we wound up doing seven more books. For more info on these books, check out our website: botanicalmissionaries.com.

 

 

            Sally and I got a lot of help over the years from the folks at the National Wildflower Research Center in Austin, Texas, and we were invited to speak there on numerous occasions. The Center was started by Lady Bird Johnson, another native plant enthusiast.

 

 

 

             The ad biz, like all professions, has its ups and downs, its glory days and its apocalypse now times, its good people and its SOBs. On balance, I’d have to say the good times far outnumbered the bad. I’ve never worked in any other business, so I can’t really make comparisons. What I do know is, I’d have made a lousy insurance man, real estate broker, lawyer or doctor.

            And I guess I’ll never know if I could’ve been the next Rod Serling. Don’t think I never wonder how my life might have turned out if I’d taken that job in the mailroom at Revue Studios.

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