Mad Man
Chicago, 1972. I was at the Leo Burnett Advertising Agency for an interview for a copywriter’s job. I had been working in Detroit in that capacity, was let go along with a score of others one day. Cutbacks, was, I believe, the term they used. I’d sent my portfolio of ads to Burnett, and they told me to come to Chicago, and they’d see. Leo Burnett was huge, and famous, and one of the few ad agencies outside of New York that retained big clients. So, to Chicago I went.
I remember very little of this encounter except one moment that has stayed in amber.
I was talking with a mid- or low-level man at the end of a long day of interviews. He was extolling the virtues of Leo Burnett and its eponymous founder. Ad agencies often have a cult of personality about their long-gone founders, displaying them proudly like preserved communist leaders in rotundas. I still hoped I might get the job. (I did not.) So, I had a frozen smile on my face, and I kept nodding at everything he said like a bobble-head doll.
The man was in the middle of praising the agency when he looked over my shoulder and stopped talking.
I turned and saw another man approaching us. He was tall, easily six feet, and likely two or three inches taller. He was perhaps in his fifties. He looked tired. Weary is probably the more precise word. He had an overcoat slung over his shoulder that he grasped with one hand. With the other, he carried a briefcase. Much later, when I thought about all this, he made me think of Willy Lowman. He had that same tired, weight-of-the-world-on-his-shoulders look as the main character from Death of a Salesman.
The man walked slowly toward us. My interviewer said,
“Good night—-”
I don’t remember the name.
The man said goodnight back. He didn’t pause. He continued down the hall, walking away from us.
“Do you know who that was?” my interviewer asked.
“Uh, no.”
“That man….”
He paused.
“That man.…”
Yes, yes?
“That man created…the Jolly Green Giant.”
I looked down the hall, and, just in time, I saw the man, coat slung over his shoulder, slowly turn a corner, and then disappear.
Great story! Early in my career I aspired to make the switch from client side to agency. One day I found myself sitting in the interview hot seat across an ostentatiously huge desk facing the president and founder of one of the largest ad agencies in Houston. Over his shoulder was an enormous oil portrait — of himself. I was offered the job, but turned it down. That day I learned the truth in the adage about learning to love the sound of my feet running away from something that was not meant for me. I followed that up by interviewing to be the media spokeswoman for Enron — exactly 1 year before the company imploded. That job, I would have taken in an instant had it been offered. Enron was THE place to be in those heady days of Oil and Gas and energy deregulation. But I was not offered the role. I went on to take a job with a great company where I stayed for 22 years. Lesson learned that day was divine intervention!
Thanks for sharing these wonderful stories.