My Old Neighborhood Remembered (17 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was at a pivotal moment, not knowing whether to keep trying or accept the situation and take the best non-advertising agency job that came along. In a newspaper article about the specialization of advertising agencies, this joke was cited: “Someone goes out for a job and is asked, ‘Any experience with consumer advertising?' ‘Yes.' ‘Packaged goods?' ‘Yes.' ‘Cigarettes?' ‘Yes.' ‘Filter-tip or regular?' ” In that specialized field, if I took another job in anything other than an advertising agency I would label myself as someone who had been unable after college to compile any advertising agency experience. A second job not with an advertising agency would be decisive, in my judgment, and I would never get in. As the months of trying for work in an advertising agency built up and I still couldn't get hired, the message was clear, I wasn't getting in — and I needed a job.

An employment agency person recommended I apply for a job that was open with Ziff Davis magazines in the sales promotion department. He said these were consumer magazines —
Popular Photography
and
Car and Driver
among them — and working there would be an improvement over my previous experience with a trade magazine publisher. He told me it was creative work and there was a career to be made working in magazine sales promotion. I understood the implications of a job like that. My hopes of being an advertising agency copywriter would be over. After a series of interviews, I was offered a job there and I accepted.

I worked as a writer of sales promotion material and scripts for sales presentations to help the salesmen sell advertising space in the various Ziff Davis magazines. The department consisted of a director, manager, two writers senior to me, another writer on my level, and myself. All but one were Jewish. Evidently, magazine sales promotion was where Jews who couldn't get into advertising agencies settled.

The one non-Jewish person in the department was Greek-American, Stanley Anton, a fine copywriter, but the hiring of “ethnics” at advertising agencies hadn't come to pass when he started his work life and he was working where he had been able to get hired.

Years later, one of my colleagues from that department, Ken Silverbush, said to me, “Of all of us, you were the most aware there was another advertising world out there, the real advertising world, and we weren't in it.” I was probably good at it, while being acutely aware of the other advertising world out there that I wasn't in.

If you could only see ahead and be able to say to yourself, it's going to be all right. Working in a job where you write trade magazine ads will lead to a job where you'll write scripts for sales presentations and writing them will enable you to get work writing scripts for educational films. And with that as an economic support, you'll be able to try being a writer one day. So don't beat yourself up so badly. Being an advertising agency copywriter isn't crucial. You thought it was what you needed to overcome your family background, but you're going to be doing something entirely different from what you thought you needed to do. If you could only see ahead.

I had written the parodies of songs as a camp counselor and it occurred to me to try writing lyrics for real songs. I knew a couple of people who had aspirations to write music and I collaborated with them. I sometimes wrote lyrics on the subway going between the Bronx and my job with Ziff Davis in Manhattan. Nothing ever happened with these songs, but an idea was taking shape, that there were other kinds of writing I could try.

I began seeing a sophisticated young woman who lived in the next building on the Grand Concourse, Sandy Resnick, who worked in fashion and was a fan of Mabel Mercer and Bobby Short. I was living with a less sophisticated songbook, someone still in the Bronx in an apartment he shared with his mother. In other words, my living arrangement was increasingly unacceptable.

Then came the polar bears girl, she of “If you had your own apartment we could go there now.” I quickly determined I had saved enough money to get my own apartment in Manhattan. In February 1960, I rented an apartment on East 31st Street, a few blocks from the office building where I worked. I was more relieved by the move than exultant. I took my clothing and some books and I left the Bronx.

About a year later, I was fired from Ziff Davis in an economic slowdown. Each department was required to let someone go. I was the youngest and the only single man in the department, and my being fired was presented to me as management being humanitarian in behalf of the older, married men.

In the Army Reserve unit I had become friendly with Herb Gardner who, in his twenties, had written the Broadway hit,
A Thousand Clowns
. As was our custom, after our weekly Reserve meeting, we went to eat in a Times Square delicatessen. I said to him, somewhat awkwardly, that I was thinking of becoming a writer. He told me I shouldn't be so tentative about it. “I can see the way you observe things, the way you express yourself, you can be a writer. Just don't make it into a science fiction movie. I've got a Broadway play on a few blocks away. These things can happen, but they won't happen if you make it into science fiction. I know you. You can do it.”