Bill Hoke
I came to Seattle on Halloween Day, 1969, and eight months later I was fleeing in front of a house foreclosure and looking for a light switch. I was not the last one out of Seattle, but I was among the twenty-five percent percent of the advertising people in the U.S. to lose their jobs. It was 1970 and while the economy was looking for a drain to go down, Boeing was waiting for engines for a tarmac of Boeing 747’s parked with big concrete weights, hanging where engines were supposed to be.
And I was the new copy supervisor for the introduction of the Boeing 747, fresh from the east, the first person from N.W. Ayer and Son to join the newly acquired F.E. Baker Agency in Seattle. Within months of my arrival to a big house in Mercer Island Estates and a small office with a window looking out on the world according to Second and Union, I promptly enrolled in the Mountaineer’s Basic Climbing Course and while things got steadily worse with Boeing, with N.W. Ayer-F.E. Baker, I found places in the mountains every weekend that made up for everything.
While my wife organized the new house and found schools and playmates for our two small children, I went to work, often on a bus, from Island Center Way and into Seattle, getting a daily mountain reminder from Mt. Rainier and beyond. We loved everything about living in the Pacific northwest and while many friends from ‘back east’ warned me that my life in real advertising was now over, the love affair with this lifestyle has never wavered. I grew up in the Detroit area, so moving anyplace else would have been for the better; I felt like I was in heaven here, Woodward Avenue and Madison Avenue notwithstanding. I had worked on Pontiac, Cadillac, produced the first radio advertising for GM Corporate and spent enough time working in New York City to realize it was on the wrong coast. Or I was.
When I first heard that Ayer was buying an agency in Seattle, I called from my office in Detroit to ask my boss in the New York office to put me on the list. He reported back I was number seven on the list and over the months he would tell me, “You’re number five on the Seattle list”, and then it was number three and then I was second, behind the senior Boeing copywriter in Philadelphia. His wife refused to give up her medical practice to ‘move to the end of the earth’ and ended up where I wanted to be.
Ayer-Baker as it came to be known, was 45 strong, in the Joseph Vance Building. The big accounts were Boeing (Fred Baker had acquired the Boeing recruiting advertising years before, and Ayer, based in Philadelphia had the Boeing Commercial Airplane account. The entire account was now centered in Seattle and old timers at F.E. Baker were not at all interested in any ideas, or resources, the long-haired creative freak from back east might bring. The agency also had the Cedar and Siding Shake Bureau, Westours, one of the first major Alaska tour companies, Seattle Trust and Savings Bank, Heidelberg Beer, Crescent Spices.
The new guy from back east shows up with near shoulder-length hair, a polka dotted tie, an obvious inability or unwillingness to sit still in meetings and anxious to begin writing the introductory advertising for the 747. Dennis Ochsner had just been hired from San Francisco to work with me as art director on the Boeing account. Dennis had a zany streak and was every bit as impatient with the process as I was.
I knew we were bound to be brothers when the first time Les Meyers, the creative director, handed Dennis a ‘tissue rough’ – a sketch Les made of how the next Boeing advertisement was to look, Dennis wrapped it up into a ball and put it back into Les’s hands.
Dennis did not come here from San Francisco to be a wrist for anyone. We get into more trouble when we resist the client’s idea to call one of his new bank services the “Master Builder’ and I try to be gentle, citing Ibsen and even Hitler. Dennis and I win an initial victory and our proposed campaign had big headlines with statements like, ‘Jan Johnson, you are overdrawn. Again.’ No sale. Clearly these folks don’t want to have any fun Dennis and I quickly conclude.
Jerry Wolfe was the copy director, Rod Barrows the jack-of-all-accounts copywriter. Jim Sutter and Ron Bohart were the creative team on Heidelberg. Herb Liedele was copy-contact on the Boeing account. The Boeing account supervisor was Frank Caspers. Walt Kilgore, Frank Welch were account executives, Shirley Smoke the lady in accounting. Kathy Hale an assistant AE. From my first days in Seattle, I was keenly aware that the realty good work in town was all coming from the same place, Cole and Weber, and the person responsible was Hal Newsom. His television commercials for National Bank of Commerce were high art and hard selling and Weyerhauser commercial after another flashed on my TV, the ultimate in the series ‘Tree House’, probably written by Hal, produced by Larry Fields and filmed by Mike VanAckeren. That’s where I wanted to be, doing work like that.
There is an epilogue to the Hal Newsom story that I will save for later, but will note that I interviewed with him twice and both times he was polite and respectful of my work, but said, emphatically, Cole and Weber was not the place for me. If Seattle, Washington, ever produced a better advertising professional than Hal Newsom, I have not met him or her in my forty years here.
And we should not let this moment pass without a mention of Dick Balch, the sledge hammer wielding Chevy dealer, and the Jingle That Will Never Go Away, for the Glass Doctor (who will fix your panes). And a special thank you for J.P. Patches and friends for being there for my children, 2500 miles from their favorite shows and now sitting laughing with Gertrude.
Meanwhile, back at Second and Union, our ideas for Boeing were dying like flies. Dennis and I quickly learned that everything we thought of had been done before or ‘they (meaning Boeing) would never buy that’. We were expected to develop at least one advertisement a week and Paul Olson, the Doctor of High Comps, would render our copy and layout into a perfect, hand made, high comp color rendition of our work. Paul once put a border of small flags around an advertisement of countries who had purchased the (undelivered) 747’s. Paul rendered each flag, perfectly. He will be remembered as a perfect gentleman in a business that was often not gentle.
These print advertisements layouts went to Frank Caspers and then, never accompanied by one of us, to Les Meyers and we would see them, shaking their heads (read ‘no, they will never buy this’) and they would go off to the WAC to play dominoes (is this peculiarly Seattle – playing dominoes at lunch?). It was 1970 and we went looking for martinis, beers and something that people in the other end of the office described as smelling like ‘burning rope’.
Dennis and I did a beautiful series of color comps, using nature photos from Steve Wilson and one of the images of a Pacific beach, no headline, just the copy which began, ‘Too often the touch of a the human hand has been the kiss of death to our environment...”
When the Washington State Tourism people came in to see the agency’s pitch, they filed into the small conference room and Rufus began pontificating, on and on and I noticed two of the clients were asleep and when I turned to see if Dennis had noticed, he was faking being asleep, drool coming down his chin and convulsed, I turn to see Rufus glaring at me. Dennis woke up and it was finally time to make our creative pitch. Only problem: two of the five possibly clients-to-be were still asleep.
I leaned forward, slapped the table and our sleeping prospects jerked awake and Rufus was really glaring at me, Dennis tried not to laugh and we showed our work. Rufus cornered me later to chastise me for my ‘immature’ behavior and liked it not at all when I suggested he was the one who put them to sleep. We didn’t win the business. My take was that a lot of good prospects were put to sleep in that conference room. Ours is not to reason why, but I am very sensitive, still to seeing my work victimized by idiots. Or worse. Dennis and I developed a full-page magazine advertisement for the Boeing 737 and showed it going from small airport to dirt runway, across Nova Scotia. I figured I would write the copy and therefore have to go on the production trip, a chance to get away from an agency so resistant to doing anything fun. The headline for this proposed advertisement was ‘A Day in The Life of Fat Albert’. This was a take-off nick name from the Bill Cosby Show because air traffic controllers had just begun to call the airplane ‘Fat Albert’. It was a widely known inside joke and the advertisement was supposed to appear in Aviation Week.
‘They would never run that advertisement,’ Casper said, annoyed that we kept trying to do things that had never been done before. We have a small victory when Boeing asks, desperate for publicity to promote lagging 747 sales (engines are coming, first deliveries are being made).
Dennis and I, charged with presenting this huge beyond any conventional scale airplane are not allowed to even see a prototype cabin in Everett. Our (demands) to fly on this new airplane were not taken seriously either, as more trouble, more frivolity from that new art director-writer team in the back corner. What are they laughing about? Why do they want to see, much less ride on, the newest, largest commercial airplane ever to go into service? Why don’t they just shut up and make ads, do as they are told?
So for the one millionth passenger promotion, we came up with a huge nose shot of the 747 with our headline, ‘Take One Today and Be One in A Million.’ The response from Boeing was very positive. They called for a presentation to the Boeing Design Department, sixty strong. This was my first and last meeting with any of the Boeing ‘clients’’, the people Frank went to see, who would never buy anything.
For this presentation, Dennis and I came up with what I think is the best advertising idea I ever had and died so ignominiously. Boeing was having trouble selling the 747, the sales resistance was to the size: would people 350 strong be comfortable in an airplane so big it sort of wallowed?
Our solution: Double truck, Wall Street Journal, New York Times and every other major daily: proposed headline: “Ask the Men Who Own One.” Visual: Four men sitting in director’s chairs on the wing tip of a 747, airplane filling the background. The four men sitting on the wing tip are the presidents of the major buyers, Pam Am, American, TWA . Eastern. The layout Dennis does is stunning. There is no block of copy, just call-outs with the president’s names and their airlines. Caspers is adamant that the four airline owners would never sit together, much less on the wing tip of an airliner.
“They won’t do it unless you ask,” Dennis reminded them. Les kept a Hasselblad on his back shelf, a reminder that at heart he was a photographer and he told Dennis the shot he had indicated was impossible to make. Usually unflappable Dennis went to Boeing Field, found an air stand and made the photo with a Polaroid, no wide angle lens and as spectacular at it was, the idea haters pounced on it and killed it. It never went to the client. And then they killed a two-deck cutaway advertisement with call outs of the features of the 747 with a headline written by Herb Liedle titled across two pages, “Spaceship”. Killed.
While the Boeing ads died one per week like clockwork, I enjoyed meeting and working with the inimitable Arthur W. Sawyer who doodled O’s and 1’s way before DOS and who had a wonderful biting wit and droll cynicism.
Mike Hill seemed to be having way too much fun building Heidelberg into a regional beer brand and I noted, had more success fighting off the idea haters. Hill keeps telling me I should meet Fred Hilliard now at McCann Erickson. “Hoke, you two guys should meet.” But we never did and in the seven months at Ayer, I hardly met anyone on the outside.
Jane Mavor was our good spirited creative department manager and enjoyed our practical jokes and general levity that seemed to irritate the other end of the agency. Frank Caspers called me in and handed me a ‘tissue layout’ for a Boeing advertisement to run in the Air Force Academy yearbook and it is divided into four panels, one of which shows a military version of the 747 with a Titan II missile tumbling out the back end, ready to be lighted and sent off to kill.
“Frank, my deal was that I would work on Boeing Commercial but not any of their military advertising. We all agreed to that before I came to Seattle. I won’t work on this (it’s the height of the Vietnam war).”
“This is a military advertisement and I decline to participate. Besides, all you need are four captions, for the illustrations. You can write those, Frank.” Then I see Frank and Rufus and Les and Fred Baker, huddled together and I assumed the new guy from Ayer Back East was in trouble. Only later did I find that the Baker management did me in at Ayer’s manager’s meeting held back east.
Rufus mentioned that Boeing might be interested in hiring Arnold Palmer to do a commercial for the 747 so Dennis and I did a story board showing Arnie putting his way down the double aisles, chipping to the upstairs lounge and at the end, turns to the camera and says with that inimitable Palmer grin, ‘the 747 is big enough for an army’, a reference to ‘Arnie’s Army’ of fans who followed him around golf courses. It is also a not so subtle double play that the 747 might be useful for military applications, something Boeing wanted to sell.
We present the script and storyboard and Rufus comes completely unglued when he learns I have contacted Palmer’s agent to make a preliminary inquiry. I never understood the offense, but it was clearly all the agency needed to end this chapter of my life in Seattle advertising.
Dennis and I would make ads and week by week they would go to the account executives and then, presumably, off to Boeing and we never heard from them again. It was frustrating, demeaning and I am sure I made it very easy for them to unceremoniously dump me on the street the day after the Fourth of July weekend, followed 20 minutes later by Dennis. So much good work killed by idea haters.
All good and bad things come to an end and on July 10, 1970, Les Meyers called me and gave me a check for two weeks pay. Twenty five hundred miles from home, knowing just a few people in town, a big house in Mercer Island Estates and now on the teaming streets of Seattle.
Ten minutes after I got the ax, Les swung it at Dennis. Over the next few years, the agency management swung the ax until finally, they swung and hit at the top. I sent a note to Lou Hagopian, president of Ayer in New York that the next time he decided to dismantle an agency, to start at the top and not at the bottom. He never responded.
While I was trying to convince agency president Rufus Carlson not to summarily fire me, Dennis barges into his office and follows one of the funniest exchanges of my life. As Dennis comes storming into Rufus’s office, Rufus looks at me and says, “I was just telling Dennis here.....” And Dennis, now red with anger, looks at Rufus and fires back, “Listen, @%^#*&$&, my name is Dennis and this is Bill and don’t you ^^%$#@ ever forget it!”
That was for all the times our work had been subordinated to a speech, diatribe, lecture or putting prospects and clients to asleep, literally or figuratively, before the creative could be presented. And for all the times our names had been forgotten, our work demeaned. Rufus looked confused when I last saw him. I took a perverse pleasure in the years that followed (after I finally got back to Seattle) when I would encounter him on the streets and would always get his name wrong, calling him ‘Fred’. ‘Les’, ‘Walt’, or some other AE name. Bad Bill.
In the coming weeks I came to learn a very painful reality: every time I called a friend in an N.W. Ayer office I met with a stony silence. I was a pariah. My friend at Ayer in Chicago promptly offered me a job and two days later called to say it was off. “I can’t touch you, Hoke. You’re in exile.” N.W. Error I began to call it. That’s NW for Northwest Error.
So I got into the unemployment line at Seattle Center. Bill Moyers wrote a description about this building and these sad lines where we stood shuffling to the window to have our little yellow book stamped with the names of the companies we had supposedly called in the previous to weeks to look for jobs that did not exist. The lines were seven abreast and moved surprisingly quickly. When my initial benefits ran out, they were renewed. The people in that unemployment office were wonderful and so was my mortgage banker at Security Pacific who told me over the months that there was hundreds in front of me. “I’ll let you know when it’s getting close,” he generously offered me.
I went back to Michigan and worked for a former employer, unsettled, my in-laws put money down on a house and my family waited for a buyer in Seattle, reducing the price by 10%, then 20%. A real estate agent made advances at my wife and we had the locks changed at midnight, by long distance calls. I could not stand Michigan and returned home and worked on a special assignment at Lennen and Newell and while my campaign for Alaska Airlines (‘See The Gold Coast’) did not fly, I met Marsh Terry, a life long friend.
I interviewed at Kraft-Smith in the Tower Building and sure enough, George Lowe did have an old typewriter under his desk and did stamp his feet on it out of frustration. The day I interviewed with George and not get hired, the creative department was subdued as someone, (op cit, George) had kicked out a big interior glass window, glass shards still on the floor. It looks like my kind of place to work, but it was not to be.
Now it is six months into the unemployment lines, making futile calls back east, being flown to Denver for a job, interviewing in Detroit at Gray Advertising, to no avail and then it is winter, and my mortgage holder calls to tell me my time is near, to get everything out of the house and ‘get out of state if you can’. Perfect. My family flies to Michigan where my wife and two children move into the in-laws. I drive a U-Haul truck and trailer, added at the last minute to handle the overflow, leave my car in the hands of my brother, who survived this and every Boeing cut and ended his career being named ‘Boeing Engineer of the Year.’
Down to may last $75, I drive to Michigan in winter at a governed 55 miles per hour, meeting my father-in-law in North Dakota for the dreaded drive to Detroit. Married, two children, maybe two more unemployment checks to come from Washington, maybe not qualified for benefits in Michigan. I had my butt kicked big time. The dream of living near the mountains was a long way from home. It was cold and wet and soggy and the streets covered in slush and I take the bus into downtown Detroit everyday, going from agency to agency. The creative director at Ayer-Detroit looks at my book disdainfully and the twenty-mile bus ride home to the family in the basement is very, very depressing.
Finally, I am offered a job as National Copy Supervisor on Chevrolet Trucks at Campbell Ewald in the General Motors Building, only half way downtown and I trudge home to announce I am employed, go outside for a smoke and my eye glasses shatter from the radical change in temperature. I see this as an omen, go inside and call a friend in Los Angeles where he is creative director on Nissan, then called Datsun.
I go to live with he and his wife in Beverly Glen, survive the Sepulveda earthquake but take a direct hit from the African Queen from the wall of books that fell and all but one flew over me. ‘That Chilton Motor Manual could have killed you,’ my host said and daily we went up to Mulholland where he drove the curves, sometimes using the clutch on whatever Datsun he was road testing and with cigarette in his mouth would explain in historical detail and in music language I could understand, every coda, every movement, ever nuance of any classical music that came from the radio.
We went rock climbing on weekends and he recited T.S. Elliot, Prufrock and Practical Cats his favorites, in the evenings, he and his wife comforting my bruised ego. We wrote ads, had fun, the agency loved me but would not pay moving expenses for my family. Parker Advertising was owned by John Parker and he ran the agency with kindness and generosity and with a real understanding of a Japanese auto maker he had taken on when none would and was now rolling in Datsun Z cars and running a very, very popular and profitable advertising agency in Palos Verdes.
It was a real pretty set-up. I was back to being a broadcast writer-producer where not everything had been done before and where we had adult production budgets. I received an assignment to write a poster for center field in Yankee Stadium to announced that pitchers from the bull pen were brought to home plate in a Datsun B-210 and I wrote what I thought would put me into the Copywriter’s Hall of Fame, ‘The Yankees Take One for Fast Relief’ but it died in Tokyo with the comment that ‘this does not translate into Japanese and has a different meaning’. Duh.
John Parker had nicknames for everyone (“Wild Bill”) and my friend the creative director Roger (”The Dodger”) and when you were hired, Mr. Parker sent his interior decorator in to furnish your office. In my case I sat in the outer reception area of my corner suite and did not dare put up an anti-war poster (‘unless approved by the interior designer’). They were serious.
When the art director I worked with Gary (‘The Guy’) told me that Mr. Parker rewarded good work on the spot, calling people in and giving them $10,000 with the promise they would never tell anyone. Sure. And thanks to “The Dodger”, the creative department was civilized with little of the typical creative-AE adversarial stuff going on; Parker was a good, fair place to work, no overtime, very....civilized.
And as Mr. Parker told me when he made the (final) decision to hire me, “Bill I see here on your resume you were a vice president and creative director. The way it is here is that I am the president and secretary and my wife is vice president and treasurer and there are no other officers. We own it all and we decide how it’s run. Fair enough?”
Fair enough.
Good times, missed my family, loved the weather, was getting a good lesson in classical music, could climb to 5.2 and still had this nagging feeling that I still belonged in.....Seattle.
I never sent for the moving truck and after intercession in Seattle by Fred Milkie, a photographer I barely knew, McCann Erickson offered me a job to work on Pacific Northwest Bell. I had been without a real job for nearly 10 months. We had finally sold our house and lost all but $135 in equity. We were starting over. I rented a house on Mercer Island (not in the Estates), and soon had my family back in the northwest.
Two weeks later the top brass at Interpublic from New York came to Seattle to ‘go through the books’ and I was shortly announced as being on the list of 15 to be cut. In one of the low points in my life, I persuaded my boss, Bob Todd, to give someone else a chance to be unemployed and I met Fred Hilliard and we went to work on the phone company.
McCann had five office managers in the three years I was there. We had three or more account executives on the PNB account and one of them was Steve Darland. When I was at Ayer-Baker, people told me about the magic that was Steve Darland and his arrival on the PNB account was good, indeed. An adult. He was someone who respected what we did, fought for us, was honest and fun and the best AE I ever worked with, anywhere (and that takes in the 27 agencies where I worked full or part time).
Many of us hoped McCann would make Steve the office manager but whoever was in charge wanted to play roulette with the stability of the accounts we had. And they were good ones. PNB, Seattle City Light, with Jim Faber copy-contact, Roman Meal Bread, Brown and Haley, Unigard Insurance and Rainier Beer which meant all the Rainier we could drink, delivered to the refrigerator in the conference room.
We drank a lot of Rainiers, morning noon and night and went to lunch at the Guadalajara, Moe Rose’s, a tiny bar around the corner from the SeaFirst Building where we drank way too much gin and sometimes ordered lunch. The 610 was going strong, advertising people drank to excess and I was too much among them.
One day Bob Todd stopped me in the hall to ask if I will read the copy for a Rainer Beer commercial they are recording for a focus test. Weeks later the focus test is complete and the only definitive finding from the three approaches they test is that people like my voice. Hello? My voice? I become the three-state voice of Rainier Beer and when my first talent checks arrive, they are seized by the office manager, Phil Reilly, asserting that I can’t make this much money.
I finally tell him I have joined AFTRA and that he has to give me my checks and I make enough in the next year for a down payment on a small house near downtown Mercer Island. Finally, a little solvency.
And, for the record, here is the first commercial Dean Tonkin wrote for what we called the ‘Historical campaign’: “Back when Washington was covered with the mighty Douglas fir, men took to the woods to swing double bitted axes and pull cross cut saws all day and when they got back to their camp at night, they had more than flap jacks on their mind. Rainier has been making a beer for times like that since 1878, beer good enough to drink by the bucket. Mountain Fresh Rainier. Good beer...since way back when.’
There it is, thirty-six years later. Dean wrote wonderful commercials in this style, dozens of them, for rodeos, round ups, the Portland Rose Parade. Morrie Alhadeff, king of Longacres, commissions the agency to conduct a campaign against the legalization of dog racing in Washington and Jim Faber is dispatched to Arizona to look into the world of dog racing. It is not a pretty picture and Jim turns his considerable PR skills into a campaign.
Dean and Fred come up with an anti-dog racing campaign and I am the TV voice-over spokesperson and the radio voice, and I read the following over scenes of a Greyhound racing, and losing.... “Spot is running for her life. That’s the price of a loser. Spot must win....or die. Please, don’t legalize dog racing in Washington. Don’t let Spot die”.
We have no shame. It turned out to be no contest. Spot never raced in Washington and Fred and Dean went on to do wonderful work for Longacres, using the music Camp Town Races....” Doo-Dah.
These were some salad days, in spite of the dysfunctional agency management around us. It was the best of times and Hilliard and I swept the Seattle Art Director’s Show two years in a row and then the idea haters split us up, Fred to work with Dean Tonkin and me paired with Bill Addams. All wrong. Wrong for me, anyway.
I was not happy, accepted a job from John Strachan who was doing some really good radio on the 49th floor or the SeaFirst Building; McCann countered the offer and I got from them they felt like they were being held-up. Too bad. We put in hundreds of hours of overtime preparing for the annual PNB pitch, with three slide projectors and hundreds of slides and when it was over, the creative director who was not present the past 36 hours we lived and worked In the office, chided us for having one slide in backwards.
I get teamed up with Bill Johnson to work on the telephone company account and Bill discovers Mariette Hartley as ‘Ms Bell’ spokesperson for Pacific Northwest Bell and we go on to do a lot of fun production trips and created dozens of radio and television commercials for Ms. Bell. How come the account people made more money, got the Elliot Bay views, got the free tickets while we creative people did all the work?
The thing I remember about McCann was not that they hated ideas; they resented the people who had so much fun making ads. Gentle Bob Todd and his wife Karin left the agency. The place was poison, I could see now.
Dick Paetzke and I went to San Francisco to hire a new account executive for the Rainier account, someone the client said they wanted. Rainier was not happy with the agency’s work. We were on notice. Then Bill Johnson and I were put on special assignment to save the Rainier Beer account. We worked at Bill’s studio across town, smoked and drank and listened to the new account executive as he gave us a list of ‘beer words’.
We were told to stay away from any mention of Mt. Rainier in the new advertisements, never mind it was their name and on every bottle. No humor, either. And he insisted we re-position Rainier as a ‘premium beer’. Bill and I did a campaign, with music accompanied by gorgeous hand painted Bill Johnson story boards. The other master of drawing or painting story boards was Dick Brown who with his wife, Cherry, started the New School of Visual Concepts where I was an instructor in copywriting and broadcast production.
The advertising manager at Rainier stood by us through the creative development, saw the work unfold, never commented and true to his action, said not a word in what turned out to be the final presentation. “Come home to Rainier’ the singer sang and the commercials-to-be featured people returning to the northwest and advised to ‘Take Some Home’, an attempt to get more take out sales.
It was a good campaign and we even recorded one commercial with all 20 beer words. Maybe if Ed Combs had just heard that commercial, we would have saved the account. Charlie Watts had made the radio and music demo for the presentation and it was good, clean, fresh, icy, bold, clear, fresh (did I already say that?). The president of Rainier killed the entire campaign in the first five seconds in the McCann Erickson conference room when he saw the ‘Premium Quality’ and total package redesign, done by Mits Katamaya.
”Falstaff tried that (positioning as premium beer) and it did not work.” We sat there dumbly and in one of the most astonishing moments in my life in advertising, no one said, “Yeah, but your ad manager here told us to do this.” We died. Right on the spot. Eight weeks of day and night work, dozens of un-shown comps, all sitting on the conference wall shelf. No defense, nothing. No bang, barely a whimper.
All someone needed to do was turn to the Rainier advertising manager and say, “Bob, you told us to do this brand re-positioning...” But no one said a word and I punched a big hole in my office wall, to add to the ones Fred had left earlier. The only relief from the disfunction was to take trips to LA to produce radio and television commercials.
I took Mike Mogelgaard, and later Bob Hacker at SeaFirst to LA for production sessions and I would rent a car at the airport and then I would drive circuitously through Beverly Hills and show them movie star homes, “Back there in that little guest house is where Gregory Peck lived” and I would go on for blocks, day after day until they finally figured out I was making it all up.
McCann was also the scene of some lurid and very funny elevator jokes, usually played on AE’s. And there were the fake Hoke memos, one with Phil Reilly’s initials, telling everyone to clean off their desks every Friday night. And drinking in the conference room, sleeping there, sometimes. Terry Heckler and Gordon Bowker got the Rainier account and showed the mountain and had fun and Steve Darland quit, Hank Barer arrived, quit, came back, quit again and it was time for me to leave.
Good people left behind, Hal Atkins, Cebe Buford, besotted Bob Wesson gone and Stuart Hinkel in media, David Turrill, and one of the most underestimated and poorly used copywriters, Carol French. Dune Riedesel struggled with the management changes and so many good people victimized by poor management, absentee owners.
When I first came to McCann, a street-talking, rail thin mail boy came by my office and tossed the mail onto my desk. I did not know him, or anything about him, but looked up and said, still for some odd, still unknown reason, ‘Mrs. Hayden would never permit that, to be tossing mail like that.” He stares at me and is incredulous when I add, “Mrs. Hayden was my third grade teacher at Adams School in Birmingham, Michigan. Mike Mogelgaard stares and me, sits down and says, “Man, like I went to Adams School and Mrs. Hayden was my third grade teacher. This is so cool, you know, guy?” Go figure.
Mike was the mail boy and most people at McCann wanted him to be the mail boy forever. He could not find a way into the creative department where he belonged because he was not officially a writer or art director, but he found a way and was soon assisting Bob Sumner, AE on the Rainier Beer account, and working on the Longacres account. I think he may have worked as an assistant on the nearly impossible Seattle First National Bank account, the agency’s largest, lead by Steve Seiter.
The agency wanted none of Mike’s flamboyance, resisted his ideas and to their ultimate detriment, insulted him. I was happy to play even a small part when he got even with McCann. Do I sound vindictive? The problem with McCann Erickson was never the creative; it was unsophisticated marketers who ultimately victimized the creative people tangled up in constant management changes, never to the good.
When Bob Todd left, with Karin, to go be a painter in Vermont and for me a little of the air went out of McCann Erickson. Bob was a gentle man, fought for good creative, hugged you when up were disconsolate from yet another good idea killed by client. Or he hugged you because he sensed you needed a hug. McCann management could never get it right and while the creative work was good, sometimes really good, we lived in some disquiet, so many management changes.
When a long time employee was named office manager, he told the staff, “I guess this proves if you stay around long enough, you will get what you want.” Mike Mogelgaard and I went to LA to produce a final series of commercials for Rainer with Chuck Blore and somehow we get by the line, “Lift your can to celebrate life” – pretty risqué in those days. And then the account was gone. I become acting creative director but it is not to be.
If I am guilty of anything about the demise of McCann Erickson it is only of piling on. They were their own worst enemy and mean to the troops. Everything they say about the prodigious drinking in those days is true. It was rampant, daily and often accompanied by whacky tabacky. But alcohol. mixed drinks, were the drug of choice.
There were some truly legendary drinkers at the 610, Trader Viv’s, El Gaucho in the Tower Building, many radio and television sales people, ad agency media directors going to football games, salmon fishing, drinking, hard drinking. Here’s to Betty and Moe Rose’s and some of the best lunches of my life. Salad days, listening to Janice Joplin, Credence, Let the Sun Shine, sitting with Bob Todd, Hilliard, Hoke, Tonkin, Hal Atkins, Bob Sumner, Dick Paetzke, pumping quarters into the little machine at our table.
“Betty!” someone would shout, “Sprinkle the infield!” and martinis would appear, double and triple shots. We were usually the only customers and always by ourselves by 2 PM.
Ken Todd, the manger of PNB’s advertising took me to dozens of lunches at Victor’s 410 where Dorothy would bring us two sometimes three martinis, wine with lunch, after dinner drinks and I would return to work. He was very unhappy with the McCann management in Seattle and everywhere else.
He told me I could get a job at the phone company, that he could pave the way, but wisely discouraged me. We were good friends and he was a very civilized client, one of the best. Why did the agency want to antagonize him? Why piss off our biggest client. So what he wants to talk with the creative guy on the account?
Maybe they do talk books and Thurber. This is bad?
Ken called me to a meeting in that tiny little bar in the basement of the Exchange Building on Second Avenue and told me he was firing the agency. He’d had enough. I don’t recall who the McCann general manager was then --- that there had been so many was definitely a problem and I was certainly not the only creative person who was keeping an account from running away. Dick Paetzke was bonded to Unigard and Bob Todd to Roman Meal.
I suggested to Ken that rather than summarily file McCann – which in spite ot the good work Bill Johnson and I did to create Marriett Hartey as “Ms Bell’ and what I still believe a dazzling series of television commercial with her – I did not want to be fired, so I helped Ken draft a warning notice to the agency. The vice president of the agency was furious with me, reported me to San Francisco and the feared Carson McGill.
I told the VP and Carson I thought it would be better for the agency to be placed on notice as opposed to a summary firing, but I had my toes and fingers roasted anyway. I started to look for an exit.
A final aside about McCann Erickson, and maybe all big agencies of that era: After a year or so at McCann Erickson, and probably in lieu of a decent raise, I became copy director, a meaningless title but it did put me in the position of making copy assignments. I came to find that Hal Atkins could write brochures and long copy as good as anyone, enjoyed doing it, had wonderfully witty ideas and was sort of the agency utility player. Hal was never paid enough. He was the go-to guy for funny cards, last minute writing assignments and he was probably teased too much. Good night, Hal.
I also began working with Carol French, a writer without a permanently assigned art director and Carol began returning assignments to me and they were really good – gems. She was not yet thinking in terms of campaigns or the ‘big ideas’ that Hilliard-Tonkin, Bill Johnson and Bill Hoke got to work on but she worked hard and got better and better. She was a tall woman and bent over her desk, she wrote headlines, one after the other.
When I went to bat for her, I was told she was one of those minorities -- women, who ‘had a smaller cranial capacity’ (read glass ceiling) and no amount of me championing her would help. This would be a funny joke, but the people said these things, and believed them. I noticed Carol had to keep the same hours as the other women in the office, even thought she was in the creative department. Yes, I did some windmill tilting. I admit it.
McCann lost the phone company, then Mogelgaard escaped taking Longacres with him and with that the impetus for him to grow a very successful and highly visible advertising agency.
The one person who could have kept the good people and the five star accounts was there at McCann Erickson all along, but in true MaCann fashion they let Steve Darland get away and then there was no stopping us, Hilliard, Tonkin, Hoke, Jeff Tuininga, Carol French and here’s to Bob Whitten, the most unflappable production manager (maybe Cebe Buford was close) and to Bob’s inexplicable life long interest in the Texas Egg and Poultry News.
I left McCann after almost three years. I was at the height of whatever powers I had and our legacy was a good one. Together, we brought more gold medals to McCann than probably at any other time. I was making $20,000 and the account executives $30K or more. It made no sense. I interviewed in a private dining room at the WAC with Don Kraft, to be their CD. I insisted on total control, was told some in the creative department were exempt and I declined to pursue it.
I had a lunch, also at the WAC, with Ken Todd and Jay Chiat, a failed shot gun wedding set up by Ken, but a delightful and very funny man that Jay Chiat. Mike VanAckeren persuaded me to leave the agency business to go to work in his film company, headquartered in a nice loft in Pier 70. Dick Friel and Mike had just done an insanely funny film, for K-2 Skis --- Dick played ‘K2 Shorty” and it looked like Mike, with me using my agency contacts, could land some good television commercial business.
Before I could go to work for Mike, Les Smith bought out the VanAckeren Company and I found myself in the Kaye-Smith Studios on Fourth, still under construction, a new sound stage planned. I was officially creative director and assistant studio manager and had nearly 40 people, writing jingles, including Norman Durkee, Jimmy Kirk, Buzz Richman, Merle Addams, two of the Brothers Four, Dick Foley and John Paine, two of the nicest people I ever met. Make that three because George Toles was there, soon to depart.
In months, Lester ordered cut backs and in one day I terminated the eleven people on Lester’s list. Mike called me in to announce I was seen as the ‘’hatchet man’ and I asked how he was doing with the 11 people on his list and he says he thinks my eleven is enough for now.
Ironically, we were hired to produce a series of zany, unforgettable, indelible commercials for the guys who just won the Rainier beer account – Terry Heckler and Gordon Bowker --and we see the dailies of ‘Beer Crossing, the ‘Raineeeeeeer’ motorcycle, and one morning I find myself in a taxi with Mickey Rooney as we are driving to a Rainier shoot and Rooney turns to Rooney and says. rhetorically, “Rooney does not think $7500 for this gig is enough.” I reply, “What about $10,000?” and I hear Ronney in the back seat turn to say, ‘They’re offering ten grand, what do your think, Rooney?” “Rooney says he’ll take it.” Rooney replies, Rooney and Rooney got the ten grand and I got another chapter in my introduction to show business.
Harry Watkins joins the company and then Buzz Priestley, from KING TV, to produce a weekly Seattle Sounders TV show with John Best. The Sounders were magic but Lester continues to remind us our ‘numbers’ are not good. We film the famous AT&T commercial with Bill Russell sitting at a desk with basketball in hand and backboard behind him. He makes his sales pitch, tosses the ball back over his shoulder and the ball swishes through on the first take and we get both the swish and the wonderful laugh. The commercial is a big hit, we market ourselves like crazy and nothing comes of it.
Mike and I conceive of the first simultaneous round the world television program for New Year’s Eve, 1974, but the technology does not quite exist yet. Danny Kaye sends his money guy to Seattle and this time the firings were carried out in earnest. We built out a little voice-over room to see if we can get some of the agency work going to Lou Lathrop, and I meet a new to Seattle engineer I had probably crossed paths with at National Recording in New York years before. He takes over the VO room and Peter Lewis and I become life long good friends, a blessing.
Mike sends me to Los Angeles to interview a new grad from Brooks, an aspiring film editor. Bill Bruning and I meet him at the Hamburger Hamlet on Hollywood Boulevard and he arrives to work a few weeks later and then disappears upstairs, three packs of Pall Malls in hand, two pots of coffee. Sometimes he comes out.
We hire Gary Noreen, just out of school, Western, I think. Brad Huskinson joins the film division and Bob Beaumont. David Imenaka, our graphics and designer. We hire Simon Wilder to do the first of many sales films for clients using his Patton character, complete with uniform and pearl handled six guns. Lester says to buy the gear we need, build out the sound stage and somehow at the same time become a commercial film company; we are no longer a jingle works and Lester puts Harry and me on the road, selling. The pressure is on, for sure.
Harry gets Portland where he had worked in the agency business and he gets Vancouver, BC. I get Denver, Minneapolis (a good ad town) and places in between, like Bozeman, Billings, Missoula and Spokane.
It is clear to all of us: bring in the work, whatever the numbers. Lester wants to see the work come in. He’ll worry about the bottom line he says. Emphatically, but I am not sure everyone was always listening to the clear warnings. Now I am calling on agencies and trying to sell them on the idea of skipping LA and coming instead to Seattle, 1974 style -- not a very cosmopolitan place. Not an easy sell. I go so far as to show our reel of commercials accompanied by a handout that listed the cost of the commercials. Writers and producers (and clients) in these towns usually had one big production trip a year and no one wanted to come to Seattle when they could go to “LA”.
People loved our work, were amazed by the low prices and high production values, but they wanted to go to LA. We heard it all over. And, in truth, we were competing for production work on one side and trying to be a film studio with a sound stage. And people asked what Hoke, a creative director, was doing in the film business.
Meanwhile the cachet over the big A and B recording studios was wearing off with the loss of brilliant engineers Jimmy Gaines and Buzz Richman. When Mike VanAckeren was shooting the ‘big film’ -- 35 MM -- he could make magic and with his immense physical strength, there was no one better in a helicopter, filming a Boeing hydrofoil with the helicopter down below the trough of the huge waves and Mike yelling to go lower, or the breath-taking shot of the Weyerhauser ‘Tree House” commercial, the fly over was captivating. Mike had an eye and I recall picking up some test Polaroids he’d taken somewhere and I thought I had never seen a better Polaroid photo. But as good as Mike’s eye and reel were, it was no sale for Seattle for me, except for one account I developed while in Minneapolis.
Carol French had left McCann and gone to BBDO in Minneapolis and when I went to Minneapolis, I went to see her. I could not persuade the CD or producers at BBDO to come to Seattle, but Carol introduced me to the advertising manager of County Seat Stores, Levi only stores owned by SuperValue, based in Brooklyn Park, a suburb north of the Twin Cities.
Carole arranged a meeting in the BBDO office and after the discussion, I stayed up all night in my hotel at the Northstar Center and wrote three television commercials and a near-campaign and presented it all the next day to her. She was dazzled and impressed and I wrote my first sale, commercials to be produced in Denver, a non-union market. A reprieve.
We hired Mike Hill to join our corporate division, Kaye Smith Productions, in Bellevue. I suspect this ‘corporate division’ was really a ruse, so Les and Bob could see if Hoke, Priestley and Hill really could drum up corporate films. We couldn’t because Charlie Watts of Watts Silverstein was doing all the good corporate stuff, big racks of slide projectors, Alabama for Kenworth. He had the local corporate market cornered and soon he was making his music and productions for national clients.
We didn’t have a chance and we suggested that Lester hire Charlie and that will bring in tons of work. Lester reports back to us a few days later that ‘Charlie checks out” (how Les ‘checked out’ people is a story for another time) and then we invite Charlie in and Les offers him what I consider really (really) good money and an AMEX card, an air travel card...Charlie, ever graceful, declined and goes on to build his successful creative business.
Returning from a production trip, I had an idea while sitting in the Denver airport, watching one of the first live TV pictures from an airplane, a DC 10. Why not, I ask Hill, why not produce videos to show on airplanes just before they land, highlighting how to get through the airport, find transportation, where to stay, what to do, showing sights and sounds and making it all pay by selling advertising?
Buzz and Harry and Mike and I, now working for Les and Bob LaBonte in the Kaye Smith Building in Bellevue figured we would all be driving Porches and Destination Previews would be big, bigger than Concerts West. Mike and later Brad Huskinson tried to sell the idea under the name ‘Destination Previews’ and they gave it their all, doing a test with American Airlines, but the logistics of tape and movie film that ran the length of the airplane’s cabin made it too difficult, too hard to sell. Still seems like a good idea, landing in a new city.... But it was not to be and Les broke up the party at Christmas, 1975, firing me, Mike Hill and Buzz Priestley.
That party was over, but I learned some really valuable life long business (and life) lesson from Lester and from Bob LaBonte. Pat O’Day -- having left KJR -- was in an office next to mine on Concert’s West working on Concerts West. Pat and I went drinking at noon at Jonah and The Whale and he tried to get me to write film treatments on the E. Howard Hunt plane crash where Hunt’s wife was killed and then Pat claimed he met a guy on an airplane who Pat was convinced was D.B Cooper. I heard a lot of stories from Pat O’Day. I think some may have been true, but I am still not sure which. I think Pat and I may have quit drinking at about the same time, in 1988. Good for us. We shared some good times, drinks notwithstanding.
With no parenthesis, I want to add a note that in my entire life in this business, working in large advertising agencies in New York, LA, Chicago, Detroit, running a punch press in River Rouge, writing advertising or producing a film, sitting in a news room in Royal Oak, I never met a finer man than Les Smith. Les turned the County Seat Store work over to me, along with a typewriter and encouraged me to go start a business. Les gave me a three-month head start, another example of his decency to people.
Everyone I ever let go at Kaye-Smith received two to three months in severance pay and I know people who got more than that, appealing directly to Lester. For whatever reason, Priestley, Hill and Hoke developed just about zero corporate business in our six months there, so the ‘annual Christmas massacre’ was not unexpected.
So, thanks to the helpful push from Les, I began freelancing. I opened a company on Mercer Island with the forgettable name of Mountain Productions and spent my first summer working on broadcast projects for County Seat Stores, traveling all over the west and also working on ‘The Day in the Life of Longacres’ a film commissioned by Morrie Alhadeff.
I had worked for nearly two years to land this project that ended up at Kaye-Smith where Kip Anderson did most of the camera work and Gary Noreen and Bill Bruning did the production management and editing. We shot over 27,000 feet of film, getting to the track at 4 AM, and while I was not a horse person, the track and the setting won me over.
Morrie did the film’s voice-over while watching the cuts on the studio walls, adlibbing a wonderful track. The film – a real team effort -- won a Cine Golden Eagle and I finally ran out of freelance work, not liking to be so alone and my wife not enjoying the financial insecurity.
Free lance copywriting – free lance anything – is a harrowing ride. So I drift into Seattle and start working with Hilliard Tonkin who have quit Ayer Baker where they have done some wonderful work on the Olympia Beer account. They think they will win the entire account. They think they will win the Longacres account.
They are Hillard Tonkin Advertising, in the lower level at 85 South Washington, in the old St. Charles Hotel Building, newly remodeled, open for business, expectantly. Patty Graf joins the fledgling company and we work around one large table, smoke dense, playing one million two million, Dean on the hunt for new business, finding little at the City Loan Pavilion. Almost immediately, the agency writes an intemperate, impatient memo to Olympia Beer and that is the end of that.
By now, Mike Mogelgaard has left McCann, fired I think, and I arranged some free studio time for him at Kaye-Smith and he produced enough good radio to steal the Longacres account away from McCann.
Take time out here for a very sweet moment.
I have done my three years at McCann, helped Mike find space in the Tower Building and he is off and running. Vindication. He later goes on to steal the entire SeaFirst Bank account away from McCann, one of the great stories in Seattle advertising history and one of the great advertising campaigns, and coups.
Sometime the good guys do win and the big national agencies lose their good people, their blue chip accounts and they inexplicably change their name and become obscure. ‘That which deserves to live, lives’.
Someone else can tell it better, but as I recall, SeaFirst Bank got into real financial trouble and McCann seems paralyzed at the thought of doing any real strategic thinking (calling Steve Darland, calling Steve Darland) and the bank is in real trouble and fighting to survive when Mike Mogelgaard meets the president, a man named Cooley, I think, at a party and Mike suggests that he has an advertising idea to position SeaFirst as making a come-back.
