Fair Harbor

Getting Away From It All. Or Not.

Summer Time Shares on Fire Island.

Johnny Carson used to use Fire Island as an easy reference to homosexuality when he was the king of late night TV, and there is a gay community there, called Cherry Grove.

To me, the most interesting thing about Fire Island is that while it's a long, lean spit of land off the south shore of Long Island with a lot of summer homes where people go to get away from it all, it's broken up into little towns of like people, who don't get away from it as much as they all go to it together. (Like in this photo of me and some of my housemates -- Michelle, Marti and Marla.)

With some overlapping, there's the gay community, a lawyer community, an author's community, and the “creative” community for directors, producers, editors, copywriters, designers and such, called Fair Harbor.

All summer, ferry boats leave from different Long Island towns, depending on the destination, and Manhattanites usually get to the ferries by taking the Long Island Railroad or shuttle vans. The really well-off fly in.

If you don't own a home, you audition to become a time sharing member of a summer house at gatherings in Manhattan before the season begins.

Nothing's easy in New York.

I learned about Fair Harbor back in the seventies, when Annette Bachner, the director of the commercial I produced without spending any of the “under the table” cash, invited me and Sevan, the producer I was dating, to the home she owned there. More about that in a minute.

But now, in the early eighties, I was ready to be a Fire Island weekender. The first audition I went to was at a fabulous SoHo loft on Spring Street, owned by an account executive type and his wife, Steve and Heather Madoff.

There were people who had been part of the group in previous years, and they had voting privileges on the people who would fill the empty slots. I'm a personable guy, and although I was forty and at least ten years older than the rest, they let me know I was in. The fact that I wanted a double share, or to be there every weekend instead of every other, didn't hurt my cause.

Spending every weekend in the getaway beach community, I guess I've accumulated twice as many summer stories than normal. I'll start with these two.

Teddy Will Fix It.

Some people really did get away from it all.

Annette Bachner, the first female director of TV commercials and former stage manager for the Howdy Doody Show, loves telling this story. I hope she doesn't mind my retelling it here, but it's a good opportunity to drop a name of somebody I wish I'd met and never did. This is how Annette met him.

When she became the owner of her house in Fair Harbor, which is situated halfway between the bay and the ocean, her neighbors welcomed her. And when a problem arose with the house, they told Annette that there was another resident nearby, that everybody called Teddy, who would come and fix it, because he was really handy, and that was his hobby. She hadn't met him yet, but they told her that didn't matter, and gave her Teddy's phone number.

The problem arose, and she called. He told her when he'd be over, and sure enough, he showed up with his toolbox and fixed the problem expertly.

While he was working, it slowly dawned on Annette why Teddy was familiar.

He was Theodore White, author of the definitive book on the 1960 presidential campaign, “The Making of The President.”

Annette's Confusion

Who's that girl with Frank this weekend?

I've always been attracted to women younger than myself, a trend that gets easier and more ridiculous as I age.

The strange thing is that, until I was 40, I only married women older than myself – but only by a few months. And I'm only talking about two women, because all together, I was only married three times. So far.

Maybe those first two were supposed to replace my mother and give me advice about staying away from younger women. That only worked for a little while in each marriage.

But in the early eighties, I'm a successful bachelor in Manhattan, and I'm dating like crazy. And in some cases, crazy is the exactly right word. But that's another story, for another time.

The summer that I was one of just two people renting a Fair Harbor house was a busy one for me. I had lots of guests. Some weekends, it would be one of my three daughters, then in their teens to early twenties, and on others, an attractive date, somewhat older than my daughters, but not by much.

The house was on the same street as my friend Annette's, and when I walked past her house with my guest of the week, Annette would always guess wrong.

Invariably, when she would ask, “Daughter?” I'd say, “No, girl friend.” The following week, she asked, “Girl friend?” I replied, “No, daughter.” The next time, as I passed by with another pretty young woman, she wised up and asked, “Daughter or girl friend?” She even got that wrong, because I answered, truthfully, “Housemate.”

She gave up trying to guess after that.

Next time: A Witch & A Spell

Some Overdue Thanks

I have no insight into what "Mad Men" will be doing tonight, but I doubt that a copywriter on that show will write a wine ad for a boss that every writer but him argues with, or run into a one-eyed man he met in college and thank him for advice that helped the copywriter succeed. Those are my stories today.

The reason I bring this up is because I've recently re-established contact with my friend, Jane, who I met in the '80's during one of my summers sharing a house in Fair Harbor, Fire Island.

She has begun following this "memoir blog," and has pointed out some of the coincidences between some of my stories and the events in the fictional but accurate "Mad Men" 4th season episodes in the last couple of weeks. Both the episodes and my weekly blog entries begin on Sunday; mine in the morning, theirs in the evening.

First, it was that we both mentioned "Kenyon & Eckhardt." Next, it was a story of the old pro and the newbie. Today, I'm betting against any more similarities.

Levels Of Quality In The Pan Am Building

In the early eighties, I found my job: New York City Copywriter.

It was a goal I had often fantasized about, and even more often, had feared. But it happened, without any struggle, and it was good. Mostly.

Because of the accounts I was assigned to, as a sort of pinch hitter copywriter, I soon found myself in two different groups.

Here's how it happened. A group was made up of an Associate Creative Director (ACD) overseeing teams of writers and art directors. One of the most wonderful aspects of advertising agencies is their ability, even their desire, to adapt to the creative people in their fold. That's the way things worked at Kenyon & Eckhardt, which had three floors in what was then called the Pan Am building. The first thing they discovered was that I could write about motor oil, so I was in the group that had the Quaker State account, on the 17th floor.

Then, the client at Air France developed a dislike for their copywriter, and I was put on that account and deemed satisfactory. The airline moved into another group, which was on the 18th floor. I was kept on both accounts, and found myself the only writer in two groups at the same time. This gave me the opportunity to compare.

To me, the floor each group occupied indicated its level of quality. I thought the ACD of the 17th floor group was a hack. The ACD of the 18th floor group, Monte Ghertler, was something of an advertising genius, but he drove everyone crazy. Every writer in his group fought with him over every word. When he would go on a shoot, he would change everything at the last minute, driving budgets, producers and accountants through the roof. But everything he touched was great advertising.

I decided that I couldn't be split like that anymore, and I made a decision. I had been writing for twenty years, albeit in a small town in upstate New York, so I knew that the only one of my two supervisors I could learn from was Monte. I made my case to him, and really surprised him. It seems he had frustrated so many writers that most of them were asking to get out of his group.

Now, being the only one who asked for it, I was assigned to Monte exclusively. If I really could learn from him, then it was my job to learn how to write so well, and so like him, that he wouldn't have to change a word. It took more than a year, but I finally did it. The copy I wrote and presented to him on that great day was for our wine account, and I had to create a first person ad for the owner of a great restaurant in New Orleans, Commander's Palace, praising their house wine, Monetery Vineyard, which was one of our brands.

Monte read the copy, handed it back to me and said, “Visco, you're coming along.” It didn't sound like it, but I knew it was high praise, because he didn't change a word. I was never happier doing my job. Thanks, Monte.

The One-Eyed Man Is King.

A follow-up to a previous story. It was about twenty-two years after my one semester at Ithaca College, and my up and down career was now really up. It was 1980, and I was a New York copywriter at Kenyon & Eckhardt, a real ad agency with national and international clients.

As I walked down Second Avenue from a dinner with friends in midtown Manhattan, toward my 28th Street apartment, I saw a familiar-looking man approaching. He had an eye patch. Could it be -- the man who taught me how to get my first job? It was. I stopped him. “Excuse me -- aren't you Joe Culligan?”

He said yes and looked a little wary -- I was, after all, a rather big, hirsute man. I tried to take his fears away as quickly as I could.

“I want to thank you. I was a student at Ithaca College when you lectured there and told us how to get a job or at least some experience, by offering to work for nothing for a specified time period. I did it, and it led to my present job -- copywriter at Kenyon & Eckhardt.”

He looked relieved, and invited me to meet him the next day so we could talk. We met at the Sky Club, which happened to be at the top of the Pan Am building – the very building I worked in.

He told me he was looking for someone to write his biography -- actually ghost-write his autobiography, so we met a few times and I started working on it in my spare time.

It didn't come to fruition, but that's another story. This one ends here, with a grateful student being able to thank his teacher for the one lesson that set his life on a wonderful course.

Next time: Fire Island stories.

A No Account Writer

Before I take you back to 1980 and how I became the Quaker State copywriter because I had nothing else to do in my new job at a major Madison Avenue ad agency, I want to comment on another "Mad Men" coincidence. In the first episode of the 4th season, which premiered last Sunday evening, the new agency was competing for new business with three others -- and one that was mentioned was none other than Kenyon & Eckhardt, the agency that had hired me, and that I also had mentioned here last Sunday morning.

Come in Late, Take Long Lunches, Leave Early.

Sometimes, it's your job and nothing can take it away from you. Two weeks before, I had gotten the job of my life: copywriter at a big New York ad agency, the head writer on a new account. I found an apartment, a one-bedroom with a working fireplace, on the third floor of a converted brownstone -- with the smallest elevator -- in the twenties on Manhattan's east side, a couple of blocks from the East River. I could - and did - walk to work, as I had in Schenectady, when I lived near the Mohawk River.

My first day at Kenyon & Eckhardt (K&E) was a revelation. Judy Southard, the creative director's assistant, met me, and apologized that there were no windowed offices available. It was 1980; the tail end of advertising's golden era. The agency's policy was that every copywriter and art director got a windowed office. It wasn't difficult in the Pan Am Building, since most of the offices were on the outside perimeter of the building, with the service modules in the core. But it was a busy time at K&E, and all the good offices were occupied. Judy assured me that as soon as a windowed office became available, I would be moved in there. In the meantime, I was shown into a small, windowless space with two doors on facing sides, which connected two corridors.

Since one door was right across the hall from the men's room, and because the office had been unoccupied recently, the male employees of K&E were in the habit of using the office as a shortcut to the men's room. This is how I came to know many of my coworkers.

I had a chair, a desk, a typewriter and a phone. What I didn't have was an account. I reported to my immediate supervisor, the Associate Creative Director, and he told me that there was no travel agency account, after all. It had somehow de-materialized.

“But don't worry, we'll find something for you to do. In the meantime, come in late, take long lunch hours and leave early.”

I didn't want to do that. But I didn't have anything to do, so every day, I read the New York Times from front to back, and completed the daily crossword puzzle. Eventually, I started writing things for myself, just silly exercises to keep my mind and fingers nimble. A month later -- yes, a month! -- and there still was no assignment.

My friend Mary Van, who had recommended me for the job, was getting worried. I really wasn't. I figured that this was my job, and that it would work out. Things usually do. Things did.

The Quaker State Motor Oil account, which had been at the agency for almost fifty years, was having a sales meeting and wanted the agency involved in helping to script it. The Quaker State sales manager wanted K&E to write his speech. Since my resume listed my most recent job as being Communications Director of a New York State Commission, they must have figured I had written a lot of speeches. I had never written one.

And I didn't know anything about motor oil. Larry Mulhearn did. He wasn't just the agency's chief writer on the Quaker State account; he was the account historian. Luckily for me, he had no problem sharing his vast knowledge and fat files with me. When he was through with me, I knew everything I needed to know about the account, and a little bit more.

I wrote a speech. I looked at it, hated it, tore it up and wrote it again. I liked the second one, handed it in and discovered that everyone else on the account liked it too. I was invited to a creative brainstorming meeting to help plan the Quaker State sales meeting.

I went where I thought I was supposed to go for the meeting, but I walked into a poker game. Yes, it was an office on the seventeenth floor, it said Andy Doyle on the outside, but inside was a man with an eye shade and sleeve garters sitting not at a desk but at a genuine poker table.

Andy was the Quaker State broadcast producer, and he was a gambling man. Meetings in his office started with poker. I was invited in, but I chose to sit out and watch. After a few hands, the topic of the meeting began to be discussed.

Quaker State was changing, and the sales meeting was supposed to help present those changes to the sales force in the most positive way possible. I helped to come up with a wonderful format. Between each major event at the meetings, speeches, recognitions, new commercial presentations and the like, we devised a continuity ploy. (My first job title, after all, was Continuity Director. )

There would be two main characters carrying on a dialogue throughout the several days of the meeting. One was an old time salesman who had been with the company for years and had seen it all, the other was a newly hired salesman full of enthusiasm. We scripted their exchanges so that in the beginning, the old timer wouldn't have anything to do with new ideas, and the new kid totally discounted all that had gone before him.

Little by little, they would start to see each other's point of view, and by the end of the sales meeting, they would come together in the middle ground, agreeing on keeping the best of the old and trying the best of the new -- in other words, both of them taking the company's point of view. It worked wonderfully, made the client happy, and got me on the Quaker State Account.

It turns out that someone was really needed on the account, because Larry had developed quite a problem with alcohol and his lunch hours were lasting from noon to five every day.

As I think back on it now, the gimmick for the Quaker State sales meeting in 1980 really was the personification of Larry, the old pro, and me, the new kid (even though I was forty years old at the time), sharing information and attitudes and coming to an understanding. I didn't get to thank Larry as profusely as I wanted to. He passed away a few years ago, thankfully before the account was forced out of its fifty-three year home at K&E due to merger-mania. I hope this makes up for my oversight.

Next time: Catching up with the past.

Is This For Real?

“Come right over to the Pan Am Building, Frank! We've got a new account, and we need a writer with your kind of experience,” Mary Van said.

Five years earlier, I had advised Mary to leave the Schenectady ad agency where we worked together, to take a job as Account Supervisor in New York. Now, she was working on new business at Kenyon & Eckhardt, and she had brought in a national travel agency franchise that was just in the planning stages.

That meant they needed a copywriter with retail experience -- someone who could write fast and write well, for retail advertisers -- not the usual kind of portfolio that gets you a job at a major ad agency with headquarters in New York. She knew I was right for it, and could get a great campaign up and running in a hurry.

I had my portfolio with me at the Helmsley Building next door, because I was putting it together in preparation for the demeaning task of begging for work.

But I didn't have to beg. Mary had pre-sold them on me. And it's a good thing, too. Because it was a fast-moving, frenetic agency I walked into with my portfolio at 3 PM on that Friday afternoon.

John, the wild-eyed Associate Creative Director met me at the front desk, hurried me into his 18th floor office (with a spectacular view looking right over the top of Grand Central at the Empire State Building), and asked me to wait for him there. He had something urgent to discuss in the print production department.

As I sat there, I noticed two ad proofs for the Savings Bank Association, and with nothing better to do, I read them and critiqued them for myself. Fifteen minutes later, he was back. He told me that the agency had just gotten a new account, an association of travel agencies, and that Mary assured him I was the right person for the account.

As I opened my book, he asked what I thought of the two ads he had left on his desk. This is where attitude came in handy. I didn't have time to worry about this interview, plan it out – hell, I didn't even think this was real. I looked at it as a kind of rehearsal for job hunting, so I was completely candid, and told him what I thought.

“This ad is fine,” I said, and told him why. “The other ad is okay, but it would have a positive, double meaning with just a comma added right here in the headline.”

He jumped up.

“You're right! I woke up thinking about that last night! Let me go see if I can change it before it goes out.”
And away he went again, pleading with me not to disappear. When he came back, he said it was too late to change the ad, but, as he paged quickly through my portfolio, he said he was hiring me. “Actually, my boss does the hiring, but it's just a formality. Let me go see if he's available.”

His boss, the creative director, was busy, but he had obviously gotten the word that the right candidate was there. They just didn't want me to get away.

At about 4:30 I was brought into the creative director's office, with an even more spectacular view than the previous one. He was a tough-looking, gruff little man, of Italian descent, named Bob Fiore. (He later went on to have his name on the door of another agency.)

He said that Mary had told him I was working for Governor Carey.

“Do you know the governor?,” he asked.

“No. Never met him, he doesn't show up at our meetings or our functions.” '

“I know him.”

Was he testing the honesty of a copywriter?

“Well, they tell me you're what we're looking for. Let me see your book.”

He looked. He asked for a resume. To my surprise, I didn't have one in the portfolio. I explained that I hadn't had time to put a new one together, and had thrown out my outdated resumes. “Well, you can have the job. It pays $35,000 a year. But you have to be here in two weeks, and you have to bring a resume.”

''Thirty-five? Is that all? I can make that free-lancing.” It was a substantial amount back then, and a hell of a lot more than I was making.

I was bluffing, trying to see if there was more money in his budget. I had done one free lance job in the last year and a half, and made a couple of hundred dollars. I guess I still didn't believe this was real. “That's all I have for this job. But if you work out, I'll take care of you.”

I believed him. We shook hands. I had the job. I went back to the office of the Year of the Child Commission, where Fran and Nancy, my two co-workers were waiting for news. I told them I had the job, and that weekend, wrote my letter of resignation, updated my resume, and made plans to find my own Manhattan apartment.

But when I showed up for work two weeks later, something important was missing.

Next time: The client that wasn't there.

Party Time

You wouldn't think that something as universal as a year to celebrate children and to insure that the weakest members of the human race should be loved, protected and nurtured would be reviled by anyone, but it was.

There was a very vocal minority that feared that the plan was that children would be able to divorce their parents, and other nonsensical fears about a United Nations' hidden agenda for the International Year of the Child. I'm afraid the same lunatic fringe is still active 31 years later, although I'm not naming names.

That kind of insanity kept commissions all over the country from getting the support we really needed to make important social changes.

What we could do was celebrate childhood, and we did. With the help of Governor Hugh Carey's office, virtually every New York state and city agency and the city's parks department, we threw a huge party in lower Manhattan, at Battery Park, in mid-September of 1979 – “The Great New York State Children's Party.”

Posters, designed one of my soon-to-be ex-stepsons, appeared all over the city. All of New York's newspapers, radio and TV stations were alerted, and we had some great publicity. The weather was perfect, thousands of families showed up and the day was a success.

We put together one more event, celebrating families, in early December in the concourse under the Empire State Plaza in Albany, once again with the cooperation of many state agencies, who donated time and talent. We featured family counselors, family movies and family events.

Since we started late in 1979, the commission lasted into early 1980, but the only work left to do was prepare a report and wind down. Not being politically savvy, I felt uncomfortable writing that report, so it was farmed out to a writer who knew the proper legislative language. Personally, there wasn't much for the three employees of the commission to do except to start thinking about our next jobs.

With a sort of a Mr. Micawber attitude of “something will turn up,” I decided to take an earned vacation, and on the spur of the moment I accompanied my friend, Rich Capparela, as he drove across the country in his tiny Honda Civic, making his professional leap from announcing on Schenectady's classical music radio station to the same position in a major market – Los Angeles. The plan was to drive out together, and for me to fly back.

We saw a lot of the country, shared the driving and a lot of laughs, and became good friends. We noted a lot of strange place names, experienced some unusual incidents, ate well and stayed in some beautiful hotels. I'll probably write about that trip someday, but for now, its purpose was to ease my mind and prepare me for whatever the future would hold in 1980. And, as John Lennon sang back then in “Beautiful Boy,” “life is just what happens to you while you're making other plans.”

And when I got back, life happened in a way I could never have planned, even though I had inadvertently set it up years earlier. Sitting in my office in the Helmsley Building early one afternoon, starting to put my portfolio together in preparation for looking for work, I got a call from my friend Mary Van, who was now an Account Supervisor at Kenyon & Eckhardt – a big, international agency with headquarters right next door, in the Pan Am Building.

She told me to come over right away. There was a job with my name on it.

Next time: Fate takes a hand.

Year of Surprises

When I took the job with Governor Carey's New York State Commission on the Year of the Child, I assumed that the commission's headquarters would be in Albany, near the Governor's office in the Capitol. My first surprise was that the main office of would be in Manhattan, and in one of the most beautiful and iconic buildings in the city – the Helmsley Building, formerly the NY Central building. Sevan called it “the wedding cake building.”

That was another surprise: Sevan was back in my life, now that I had a job, and one that sounded important. And I would be making regular trips to Manhattan – to an office in a standout building. You see it in all those great photos and movie shots looking south on Park Avenue from the 50's and above – it's the one in front of the MetLife, formerly PanAm, Building. There are only three buildings that sit literally on Park Avenue – the third one is Grand Central Terminal.

The International Year of the Child was a United Nations project, and they had their logo. New York State was known for its logo/slogan, I ♥ NY. We hired a friend of mine, Tom Swimm, who at the time was an Art Director from upstate New York, to combine the two into a logo that said “NY ♥ ME,” which we put onto buttons, balloons, banners, posters – anything we could get sponsors to pay for. Tom also designed some big felt banners to use as backdrops for publicity shots.

I lived in the Albany area, so the commission gave me an office there, too – in the Empire State Plaza, across from the Capitol. Other perquisites included free vouchers for rail travel between Albany and New York City, and a prime parking space under the Plaza.

Because he didn't have a wife at the time, Governor Carey appointed his Attorney General's wife to chair the commission – so I found myself in meetings with NY's future First Lady Matilda Raffa Cuomo, and shepherding her through whatever interviews we could get from the media.

It was a fascinating way to get reacquainted with New York City, and I managed to write and produce a few very nice radio and TV public service announcements, which played throughout the state.

But just before I took the state job, I had one pending free lance TV project which I was really proud of, and I wanted to get it approved and produced before New York demanded all my time.

And the obstacle to accomplishing that was my next big surprise. Here's the story.

Don't Take No For An Answer.

Take It For An Opportunity.

In the late seventies, a woman with the unique name of Zenie Gladieux was the marketing director for the charming little Schenectady Museum, and her job was to try to increase attendance. She came to me with a request for a creative public service ad campaign -- radio and television.

Public service spots are easy to do, but hard to get placed. TV and radio stations have just so much time unsold that they can devote to local Public Service Announcements (PSA's). They like to run the slick, national spots, like the old “This (egg) is your brain. This (frying egg) is your brain on drugs,'” because the production values make the stations look and sound better.

That was my pitch to Zenie. The Schenectady Museum campaign had to stand out -- it had to be well-produced, but it had to be more -- it had to grab attention and make people want to see it. The more it did that, the more air time public service directors would give it.

I created a teaser campaign that would feature people looking at a display (an empty box in which was the video camera) and being intrigued by what was “on exhibition”. As we panned across the line of people, each person would express some strong emotion about what they were “seeing.”

The TV audience would just see each person staring through the box at them, and the viewer would have to imagine what was on display. Luckily, there was a new professional theater group trying to establish itself in the area, and they agreed to participate on camera for the free exposure.

And one of the great voices of commercial and Public Broadcasting fame, Peter Thomas, agreed to record the voice-over tag for the spots. It was a line that was intended to get attention, sounding shocking but, when coming at the end of the spot, was the just right punch line that would help make the spots even more memorable. The end line was (and I don't think we could get away with it in the twenty-first century as we did in the twentieth): “The Schenectady Museum. We're Exhibitionists.”

Zenie and her staff loved the campaign. But it had to be sold to the Chairman of the Board of Directors, a local bigwig who had a upstanding reputation in the community.

The time and date were set for me to present the campaign to him. But, they all showed up early, and instead of waiting for me to sell the campaign -- explaining it pretty much as I just did to you -- someone, thinking they were doing me a favor, gave away the ending.

When I walked into the meeting room and sat down, the bigwig looked at me and said, “No.''

“Excuse me?''

“No. The Schenectady Museum will not be a part of anything that makes light of exhibitionism. Not on my watch.”

I've actually learned to love it when somebody says no. It gives me the adrenaline to come up with every reason I can think of why no is exactly the wrong answer. This experience was one of the best lessons in how to do that.

I asked if he would be so kind as to listen to my presentation. He was kind enough to say yes to that, but made it clear that nothing would change his mind. I made my pitch. He thought it was creative, but his answer was still NO. I knew that his term as Chairman of the Board would be up in a year or so, so I offered a proposition. (I wanted to get paid for this work, and I wanted this spot on my reel.)

I proposed that we go ahead and produce the spot, since it wasn't going to cost that much more than they were already indebted to me for the time spent, and if he still didn't like it, keep it in the can, and let the next Chairman of the Board decide whether to use it or not.

He agreed to this, and we went ahead and produced it. It came out every bit as good as I had hoped.

Now came the real moment of truth -- presenting the campaign to the board of directors. We ran the sixty second version, the thirty, the twenty, the ten. (All we had to do was tape one long version, and then cut it up to fit each length.) Everybody loved it. There was nothing prurient or suggestive about it. (In fact, Peter Thomas is such a sweet, innocent man, that he didn't even know what an exhibitionist was!)

You could see that the Chairman wanted to be associated with it, but he had already pretty much vowed that the campaign would not be seen during his tenure. He needed a way to save face.

He said, “Well, that's different from the way you described it. You said the exhibitionist line would come first, and here it's the last thing.”

Everybody looked at me. They all knew I never described the campaign the way he just said. They were all wondering: “Will he win the battle and lose the war?”

I let him save his face. I said that once we had videotaped it and were putting the spot together, we realized that it would be better to “revise” our thinking and put the end line at the end.

He had his dignity, Zenie had her campaign, and I had a great PSA for my reel. The local stations loved the spots, and ran them as often as they could. The campaign did its job -- created a buzz, and increased museum attendance.

Next: Party time!

Independence

Another marriage on the rocks, another job that went sour. Just when I thought nobody loved me, New York State proved me wrong.

Here was the situation: Once my steady but unsatisfying employment qualified us to get a mortgage and move into a beautiful old house in the proper school district for her sons, my new wife told me she didn't want to be married anymore. As if we really had been!

I thought of myself, if I thought at all, as a lamb led willingly to the slaughter. I should have known something was wrong, when, out of all the big, spacious rooms in the house, she chose the smallest cubicle for our bedroom. She obviously considered the conjugal bed the least important aspect of her new life.

So, reluctantly, I moved into a small, no-lease-required studio apartment in Schenectady and tried to figure out what to do next.

My soon-to-be ex got a job offer she didn't want, and suggested me for it. It was a one-year-only job with a new New York State Commission on the International Year of The Child. I interviewed and, to my surprise, was hired!

I gladly gave my notice at Communication and Design, letting the head of the agency think that I had more influence with the state than I actually did, leading him to believe he wouldn't get any more lucrative state jobs, which were some of the most profitable pieces of business ad agencies could have back in 1979.

There are many stories to tell about that year, but today I'll share just one.

Explaining The Year Of The Child To A Child

When you listen, be sure you can hear.

He would be in his mid-thirties now, and I don't remember his name, but the day I tried to explain The Year of the Child to him has stayed with me for thirty-one years.

Back then, in 1979, I had just begun a new job that would last for just one year. I left the business world to be the Communications Director for the New York State Governor's Commission on the International Year of the Child.

It sounds impressive, but as government commissions go, it was pretty small potatoes. Not a lot of money to do anything, except pay for a staff of three: a commissioner, an administrative assistant, and me. Our time would be spent begging – for corporate gifts, for underwriting of our activities, for free newspaper space and air time for public service messages that I would write and produce.

I was given an office in Albany's impressive Empire State Plaza, built during Nelson A. Rockefeller's tenure as governor. It's a complex of seven massive buildings, connected by an underground concourse that features a permanent exhibit of some of the finest examples of modern art and sculpture.

State agencies that occupy the buildings above also use the long, marble-lined concourse for weatherproof exhibits and fairs, promoting their services to the public. As I was strolling through one of these, trying to familiarize myself with the workings of New York State agencies, I met some friends of friends – New York State employees – who were setting up a booth.

They had their young son with them. He was about four or five, and he needed attention that they just couldn't supply at the moment. I asked them if it would be all right to take him for a walk down the concourse and back, giving them a break and giving me a chance to do some research with one of the people I'd be representing for the year.

They were more than pleased, and he wasn't shy, so with his parents approval, we took our stroll. He was interested in the activities around us, and thoughtfully considered what I was telling him. I explained to him what my new job was about.

“I'll be talking to a lot of people about children like you and your friends -- all the children in all the cities in the state. And I want to tell them what you think is important to you.”

He said he understood, and I could see in his large eyes that he was thinking seriously. As we sat down on a bench at the far end of the concourse, I asked him directly, “So, what's the most important thing you'd like me to tell all those people about children?”

He sat quietly for about the length of a commercial. Then, he said just three words, and the simplicity and directness of his message surprised me. I complimented him, and thanked him profusely. But somehow, I knew I wouldn't – or couldn't – use his advice. It seemed too, well... childlike.

As we walked back to rejoin his parents, he obviously considered me a new friend, because he invited me to his family's lakeside camp, in precisely the way a child would ask a contemporary. He said I should ask my mother if I could go.

That was my opportunity to repay the advice he had given to me. I said, “I'm going to tell you something important, too. When you get older, you don't have to ask.”

His eyes grew even larger, and as we approached his parents, he ran to them, proclaiming his new discovery – “When I grow up, I won't have to ask!”

They smiled and confirmed that what I told him was true. And when they learned what he told me, they said it was too bad I couldn't use what he said in a public service ad campaign. And I agreed.

During that year I wrote clever theme lines, had beautiful logos and banners created, produced TV spots that said “New York ♥ Children” and helped organize events for children and their parents in Battery Park and in that very same concourse in Albany.

But I have always regretted that I didn't re-create the moment with that serious, thoughtful and insightful little boy, and put his advice on radio and TV stations and in newspapers throughout the state.

His simple, straight from the heart message might have made a difference for many children. Because he understood the purpose of The Year Of The Child better than I did.

And he got it down to just three words: “Don't hurt us.”

Next time: I'm back!