When I got out of the grand institution that deigned to welcome me "to the fellowship of educated men and women," I had to get a job. I was married, with a young son, and awash in debt. And my degree was, god help me, Cum Laude General Studies. [I did not cut the mustard in my senior thesis and orals so the committee declined to grant me the degree in American History & Literature--mox nix, same difference economically speaking.] Truth is I think we were all dilettantes at that bastion of higher learning. That's why most of my peers went on to grad school pretty much straight away. I went job hunting.
I did the dance with the recruiters in the career office, and even ended up making at least one trip to Babylon on Hudson to be interviewed for an executive training program, one of those hot house competitive high potential things that were fashionable at the time. The city was straight out of "Madmen" even then. High powered men mostly playing one up games on each other. Clearly not for me and me not for them.
I was finally down to working with a local employment agency, considered one of the better ones in town. These were the ones where you committed to paying them a percentage of your first year's salary, usually 20% or so, unless it was "fee paid." This was the same period when you could pay a company several thousand dollars, which they would kindly take on installment, and they would remake you into the upwardly mobile man in the gray flannel suit of the day.
As it happened a local trust company doing some other business with that agency was looking for someone who could write, was employable for not much money, and had a degree from one of the "right places." So I ended up being the assistant to the Director of Public Relations and Advertising for this very conservative financial institution. [Basically they defined their customer base as the 3,000 richest families in the state.] They were also beginning an ambitious strategy that would have them found what is now one of the country's premier management consulting firms, and stretch out into markets across the country and a little internationally by acquiring boutique investment firms.
Job was perfect in some ways, if underpaid. I had to write the customer newsletter--mostly fluff--and do various copy writing and editing chores for the bank and affiliates, and to work with the printer doing the production work, all under the gimlet eyed Mr. T, [insert Ivy] class of 1932, gentleman C's. He had been a newspaperman and then did PR work for Ford. "Edsel wasn't a mistake. the market for its competitors dried up, too." During the war he had served with Halsey and at one point got trapped in the ammunition hoist of a battleship. He always walked the nine floors to the top of our building when he had to go up there.
Mr. T., a self-declared "anti comma man," was brutal with a blue pencil, but he suffered me the time to sit down and go over the copy with me explaining why he had made the changes and being willing to listen to why I had written it the way I did in the first place. As time went on, the way I saw it was that I began to win more of the arguments. Probably what was much more likely is that under his demanding tutelage I was getting better. The first time I got a piece of copy by him without a change I was ecstatic.
At the time I think I hated him. I was friends with his secretary. Good way to get things done. She let me know on two occasions when he rescinded raises that he had put in for me. Once when I had let him know I was on the waitlist for business school (so much for being honest with your boss) and the second when another group in the bank had asked if I could be transferred to them. He was among other things a stingy s.o.b.
My most amusing memory was of my last year with him. I was, at my own suggestion, honchoing a project to do the annual report. The previous year we had hired a top tier firm who had designed a product with an ink and paper combination that the color would come off on your hands. The whole run had to be done again with a special lacquer treatment applied to the tune of tens or thousands not to mention the $50,000 the firm had cost (and not returned). I had helped managed site selections for the local photographs and handled those logistics. Kind of a line producer role.
The following year, I had suggested that we get a local person from one of the fine arts schools in town, a student. We would put out an RFP and ask for submissions of ideas, pick one and do the production with our regular printer. We selected a grad student from the museum school and pretty quickly had a design which featured our holding company's logo silhouette on a background made of ascii paper tape--just the hole punch patterns. The point was that we were doing a lot of work in using technology for investment research and wanted to showcase that. The same paper tape patterns ran down the edges of the inside pages. Technology at the time involved communicating to computers using teletype terminals that punched and read paper tape.
Mr. T., bless him, approved, but there was one more thing. I had to provide him with the decoding of what all of the tape used in the publication actually said. To my what must have been incredulous look he gravelly intoned through the cigarette smoke swirling about his crew cut head, "It takes a dirty-minded editor to get out a clean newspaper."
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