by Avery Corman
One of the people who wrote for the paper was Elliot Denman, a premier race walker who competed for N.Y.U. and went on to represent the United States in the 1956 Olympics. He thought it would be fun for me to try out for the N.Y.U. track team as a walker and he also approached a classmate of ours. An event was coming up in Madison Square Garden, the intercollegiate indoor track and field championships. A one-mile walk was scheduled. With that event in mind, Elliot showed us the proper race walking techniques and we practiced with him, using as a track, the sidewalk encircling Yankee Stadium. He then took us to the Bronx N.Y.U. campus where the track team practiced on an outdoor track under the coach, Emil von Elling. As we went around the track doing the heel-and-toe stride Elliot taught us, he spoke to the coach. We were placed on the track team. We practiced for a couple of weeks for the event at Madison Square Garden, which was held on a Saturday afternoon. The Madison Square Garden and I was in it, wearing a competitor’s number at a track meet with a public address announcer calling off events and with people in the stands.
In practices, the other newcomer was faster than I was for short bursts. I was able to outdistance him over the length of a mile. When the race began his strategy was to block me from getting ahead of him. We became involved in a heated duel jockeying for position, preposterously far behind everyone else in the race. My adversary was disqualified for running, was ordered off the track and with a clear path I finished dead last. Elliot won. I was so dead last they were taking up the boards at one end to make way for the upcoming 60-yard dash when someone yelled, “Hold it, there’s someone still on the track.”
Some of our friends came to watch and afterward one of them said, “We were laughing so hard, we almost fell out of the balcony.”
Another event was scheduled at the armory on 142nd Street and Fifth Avenue as part of the indoor season and it included a one-mile walk handicap race where you were given a head start based on your previous performances in competition. My fellow newcomer did not enter. I did and received a 300-yard handicap, the maximum. Twelve walkers competed. Two of the others lined up at my starting position with the maximum handicap. The competition was held with some ceremony, a band played as you went around the quarter-mile track.
I lost control of my pace which was supposed to be based on my practice times of the past month. I went too fast and — in a one-mile walk race — nearly collapsed from exhaustion as I crossed the finish line. They had to help me off the track. I didn’t finish last. Somehow I managed to finish ahead of one of the two who started with me and another who couldn’t make up my considerable head start. I was tenth out of twelve. With that accomplishment, I retired from the track team, sports news which went unreported.
With my college years coming to an end, I was convinced I had outstanding credentials. I would be a graduate of a business college. I had specialized in advertising courses and had been the business manager of my college newspaper. I wrote ads that appeared in the newspaper and also had samples of ads from my advertising copy courses, which I was able to assemble in a portfolio. How many people graduating from college competing with me for jobs would have accomplished that much, I said to myself. I heard that sometimes in an advertising agency you needed to take a job in the mailroom and spend a certain amount of time there as part of your apprenticeship toward becoming a copywriter and that was all right with me.
None of the parents of my Bronx friends were college graduates. We were the first and the expectation was for us to accomplish something with our college degrees. In my case, I had an additional incentive, to not be my father’s son. I was not going to be anything like him. I was going to do something I never heard of anyone in my old neighborhood doing, none of the older men, none of the younger men. I was going to be an advertising agency copywriter on Madison Avenue.
* * *
THE REALITY
* * *
It never happened. Prior to my graduation, I sent my resume to advertising agencies, registered with employment agencies and with the college job placement office and covered the classified ads. I did not hear from anyone. I was aware of the difference in the advertising business between advertising agencies that primarily handled consumer accounts and agencies that primarily handled industrial accounts. The prestige was with the agencies with consumer accounts. As my graduation passed and the weeks went by without an interview, I would have been willing to work in any kind of advertising agency.
When four months passed since my first inquiries, I thought about going into the Army and being done with it. The draft was still in effect. Every male had to factor it in. College graduates were being hired, though. Not every employer was demanding that a candidate for a job had to have his military service out of the way. And I was only twenty. From what I had heard, I had a few years before the draft would get to me. I decided to press on.
In my gloomiest moments in the time that followed, I tallied my miscalculations. I should have had the Army out of the way; I made a mistake by not removing that obstacle. I should have tried even harder, been more imaginative in my approach. Above all else, I should not have taken the job I eventually accepted. It was not with an advertising agency, nor was my second job, and each year that passed without working in an advertising agency, I fell behind the graduates who were hired by advertising agencies, who did their apprenticeships in mailrooms and in junior copywriter programs, who were already copywriters, and it became too late for me. I was too far along the way in the wrong direction.
By accepting culpability for my unfulfilled hopes, I did not consider the entire equation. Being Jewish with a Bronx address on my resume, graduating from “NY Jew,” as the school was sometimes snidely called, and breaking into the Madison Avenue advertising world of the mid-1950s, where many of the people hired for entry level jobs went to the very schools the Sarah Lawrence girls visited on college weekends, didn’t seem like an insurmountable obstacle to me. As I neared graduation I had heard at school that Grey Advertising and Doyle Dane Bernbach might be counted on to hire Jews, but it was unlikely with the other advertising agencies, and the only Jews who might be hired by any advertising agency were from more prestigious schools than mine. I disregarded that. I thought I was different and special and with my resume and my impressive college credentials, the prejudices wouldn’t apply to me. My resume didn’t state I was a Jewish boy from the Bronx, simply someone from the Bronx. I didn’t appreciate in that world, coming from the Bronx meant you came from the Bronx. Madison Avenue wasn’t populated with people from the Bronx.
Many years after this, at the home of a friend, I met Phyllis Robinson, a pioneer creative executive in the advertising business and a mainstay at Doyle Dane Bernbach. We talked about that period when I was first looking for a job as an advertising copywriter and she said she never would have hired me. She would not have been favorably disposed to the trade school aspect of my background, that I had actually studied advertising in school and taken advertising copy courses, she told me. She would have preferred an English major who had something unusual about him. This was one person’s opinion, but an important creative person in advertising, who said my very choice of school and my course of study was in her view, misguided.
For something I wrote further along in my adult life, I spoke to an employment agency person who had been active in placing people in advertising jobs at the time I had been looking for a job. This person confirmed that anti-Semitism and an old-boy network definitely existed in the advertising agency business then, and those years were extremely unfavorable to someone who did not go to an Ivy League school, or at least a prestigious school. The undergraduate business school at N.Y.U. might have been slightly more prestigious than the undergraduate business school at City College, but possibly not, and not sufficiently so to represent a difference to Madison Avenue.
A few years later, everything began to change. “The Graphic Greeks” with people like George Lois, began to make inroads into the art departments of advertising agencies.
Then advertising agencies began to hire more “ethnics,” as they were bluntly called, and people like Jerry Della Femina, an Italian-American from Brooklyn, infiltrated the copy departments. Even Della Femina met resistance in his early forays. When he brought his copywriting samples to the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency looking for a job on the Ford Motor Company account, he was told his samples were good, but “they don’t want your kind.”
Eventually, the “ethnics” were hired not only in the creative departments, but in client relations and management positions. Not in the summer of 1956. I was out there too soon. When the changes came, I was beyond caring. But as the time passed that summer, I cared deeply.
I received a call from an employment agency offering an interview for a job as a junior copywriter with a publisher of trade magazines, Breskin Publications, publishers of Modern Packaging magazine and Modern Plastics magazine with offices on Madison Avenue and 57th Street. The job was writing ads that would appear in the company’s magazines for advertisers who did not have their own advertising agencies. This was hardly an advertising agency job, but it was a job writing advertising copy. Desperate to get started, to be working, when the job was offered, I accepted. By taking this job I had begun to close doors on myself for advertising agency work. But they might not ever have been open.
In August 1956, finally, I was a working man. I traveled to work during rush hour on the subway with the other working people from the Bronx who had jobs downtown. I wore suits and ties to the office. In the winter I bought an overcoat, which was a bit long, and an executive’s hat, which was an overstatement. In my coat and my hat, I must have looked like a slightly taller version of Toulouse-Lautrec.
* * *
VOTING
* * *
The first time I voted I was living in the building at 1695 Grand Concourse. I presumed the voting booths would be located at a school, as had been the case when family members voted in the previous neighborhood. The polling place was listed as a street number for a building. I walked over and found a Board of Elections sign at the outside of the service entrance of an ordinary Bronx apartment house on a side street.
I walked through a dark corridor past garbage cans and turned into a space that was obviously a storage room for the basement area of the building. I entered and in a small room with unfinished brick walls and a naked light bulb hanging by a chain from the ceiling, was the polling place. A single voting booth was in the room. An American flag was affixed to the wall behind it. A uniformed police officer stood guard. Two female election officials sat behind a table. Nobody else was there. A more bare-bones polling place could not have been imaginable. I was checked in, closed the booth curtain behind me and voted. I emerged, the only voter. I nodded, they all nodded, and I walked back out past the garbage cans.
This was not a letdown for my first time voting, to vote in such an inauspicious setting. I thought it was excellent, that a system was set up that would include a room like that with an American flag and people on duty no matter how small the room, because every vote counted, and I had no doubt that my vote that day in the Bronx, my first vote, would be properly tallied.
* * *
FULFILLING YOUR MILITARY OBLIGATION
* * *
At Breskin Publications I was able to write an advertising campaign that used cartoons as artwork for a company in the plastics industry. The campaign was the closest in its appearance to coveted consumer advertising of any work I did there and nothing like it was going to cross my desk for a while. I could also see that years might pass before I would move up in the office. I decided to leave after a year, a portfolio in hand of sample ads in the real world, and with hopes I could yet break into the world of Madison Avenue advertising agencies.
First, I needed to deal with the Army. I was going for the six months option. A friend from college, Eugene Secunda, told me about an Army Reserve unit he signed up for and recommended that I should, too. The Army Reserve or National Guard unit you joined determined your Army job for the three-plus months on active duty that followed the two months of basic training, and also determined the nature of your weekly meetings and two-week summer assignments during the subsequent six years of your military commitment. This unit was for Army public information. You needed to be qualified to get in. Eugene gave me the name of the Army sergeant to see and I went with a resume and my portfolio — to get into the Army.
The scene in the building on West 42nd Street that was home to the Army Reserve units was a Mack Sennett comedy. Young men in civilian clothes frantic about getting into a unit before they were drafted for two years were racing through the building, up and down stairs, trying to get in somewhere, shouting to each other, “Who has openings?” and on hearing, “Medics,” or “Signal Corps,” they would race to the office that had the openings.
I walked in to see the sergeant in charge of enlistments for the public information unit. You really did have to qualify with experience in journalism or with related experience. I had written press releases at Breskin Publications about articles that appeared in the magazines and I had written ads. He looked at my resume, thumbed through my portfolio and I was hired. That is to say, he signed me up.
I needed to get my enlistment accelerated, wrote to my Congressman, my papers came through rapidly, and I was sent to Fort Dix, New Jersey. The Korean War was over. This was peacetime, which lent an inessential quality to basic training. My company was a combination of enlistees, draftees, and six months people. We didn’t seem to be learning skills that would defeat the enemy and perhaps save our lives, rather skills to get us through basic training. The regular Army training cadre, many of whom had fought in Korea, were putting in their hours and the general idea was to move us along. Basic training was manageable. I did have a mortifying moment during a class on the assembly and disassembly of the M-1 rifle. The sergeant in charge of the class asked the two hundred or so men in the hall seated with rifle parts in front of them to stop whatever they were doing and direct their attention to me. “Never in all my years in this man’s Army,” he drawled, standing over me, “have I ever seen a soldier attempt to insert the trigger housing group of the M-1 rifle in . . . upside down!” He should have seen my work on the lamp in shop.
In the middle of basic training the custom was to have visitors on a Sunday, rather like parents’ visiting day for children at a summer camp. My mother, sister and brother-in-law came and we had a picnic lunch. My brother-in-law, Lenny, was in the Marines during World War II. Like many of his generation, he never talked about the war. Once, I saw his old duffel bag in a closet and on it was written places he had served, including Peleliu, the scene of one of the bloodiest battles of the Pacific Islands. The Army recently had changed its colors from khaki to green. I felt awkward about being in my peacetime, tacky green uniform in his presence. But this was a guy who used to bring me comic books when he was dating my sister. He was not there to make me feel uncomfortable and merely joined in on the day. The people of my time in military service were enormously lucky, serving when we did.
After basic training, the six months soldiers were assigned to work in Army jobs within their Reserve unit’s specialty. I received orders to remain at Fort Dix to work in the post public information office. I might have been a civilian employee but for the uniform I wore. My job was writing press releases about Fort Dix activities and personnel. I slept in a barracks with other soldiers who worked at post headquarters. We needed to conform to Army regulations, inspections, KP, we were in the Army, but we worked a conventional office work week. I was going to indicate the Army on my next resume for Madison Avenue — to not only show the Army was out of the way, to also boost my writing credentials. That seemed amazing to me, to serve in the Army and for it to somehow be a plus on your resume.
On a hot summer Saturday I returned home from Fort Dix for the weekend. Some of my old friends had left New York for jobs in other cities. A friend from college who lived nearby was not around. I was
not dating anyone. I didn’t know who I might call or see or what I might do. Although there was a schoolyard nearby, I didn’t play schoolyard ball any longer. I could have gone to the movies. I could have done that on post. My mother’s move to a more refined section of the Grand Concourse where stores did not occupy the street level had translated itself into streets that were dead in the summer. I no longer had a neighborhood. I only lived in a building.
I did not stay the night and returned to Fort Dix. On succeeding summer weekends, I often elected not to go home. I stayed on post where, temporarily, I belonged.
As a gesture to our men in uniform, movies were made available in the post movie theaters concurrent with their openings in Manhattan. These were single-feature showings, the first at six, the second around eight. I became a movie critic for several people in my barracks. I would usually go to the six o’clock show for the latest new movie, return to the barracks where my Army buddies would be napping. They would peer at me through half-open eyes when I came in and if I nodded, yes, they would get out of their bunks and go to the movie, and if I shook my head, no, they would go back to sleep. This was being a powerful critic.
* * *
ONCE MORE
* * *
Breskin Publications went to the top of my resume. I placed the Army ahead of college. No more ads in my portfolio from college classes or from a college newspaper. I had samples to show of ads that appeared in print in the business world. I re-registered with employment agencies, sent my resume to advertising agencies, and scanned the classifieds. Once more, I couldn’t get a job with an advertising agency.