Thomas Murray: Secret stories to shorten the longest workday
Sunday, May 11, 2008
I learned about boring jobs on summer work, first as a timekeeper for a construction company and next as a wing sander for an aircraft manufacturer. Thus when it came time for permanent employment, advertising seemed like a good way to get through the day without watching the clock.
For all the pressures to produce successful ideas for your clients, one of the great advantages of working in a large advertising agency is the constant variety of people, products and problems you're working with. The danger is that you spend the client's money on an idea that doesn't work and maybe get fired. The upside is that you're not wrestling with the same old sales charts, distributors and dealers year in and year out, or facing the same old Mr. Dithers like Dagwood Bumstead.
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New clients make things particularly interesting because they give you an inside look into a new and different corporate family with all sorts of new products and history, often with interesting backgrounds and stories you'd never hear without a close business connection.
One example is how the famous holes first appeared on the Buick car in 1949, which I learned at lunch with some General Motors stylists. It seems that Buick's chief designer was a man named Ned Nickles. A great convertible enthusiast, he ordered a new one every year, usually bringing it into the studio and modifying the styling a bit with some custom changes, sometimes with an idea or two he couldn't sell to management for the production car.
On his 1948 model, he cut some small portholes in the front fenders and mounted some flashing red lights inside them, so the effect was a powerful, flashing fire in the engine compartment, perhaps inspired by the "Fireball Eight" name on the engine itself. Whether he meant to impress his bosses or just have fun, Buick's general manager, Harlow Curtice, spotted the car in the executive garage. Surprisingly, he liked the styling look but not the lights, and told Nickles to quickly show him some similar porthole designs on the ready-for-production '49 models. The rest is history.
Then there was the pleasure boat manufacturer in North Carolina. I spent the better part of a day with the president and founder, talking and touring the plant and going aboard a number of finished cruisers awaiting delivery, two of which I noticed had no engines, whereas most had either impressive looking diesels or gasoline powerplants.
That night at dinner as I asked about the empty engine compartments, I learned something that's still a bit unbelievable to me. "Oh sure," I was told, "some of our owners order the boats without engines. They either want to install their own, or the boat is simply going to be used for entertaining at a dock and won't ever go to sea."
Who, I wondered, would order one of the finest, strongest cruisers made and keep it dockside. I thought he was kidding.
"No," he said. "I could show you two eighty-footers without power right now, one in Philadelphia and the other in San Francisco."
There was another dinner with the public relations vice president of a company called North American Aviation. He told me a fascinating dinner time story.
Before the U.S. entered World War II, the company designed the P-51 fighter plane for England even though U.S. law prohibited the actual sale and delivery of weapons to foreign powers. Dutch Kindleberger, the head of North American, had orders from Washington to buy a Montana ranch on the U.S./Canadian border, install a runway, fly the airplanes there and walk away. Canadian pilots would fly them across the border for eventual shipment to England.
The flow of planes across the border worked well until TIME/LIFE publisher Henry Luce uncovered the activity and for some reason threatened Kindleberger with exposure. Kindleberger could only call the White House for help, reminding them that unless Luce was called off, his only option was to show him the authorizing letter in his possession from Roosevelt or Secretary of State Cordell Hull.
According to my dinner partner, the problem quickly disappeared.
So advertising often gives you an intimate, interesting look into lots of businesses which you might never get normally. Often, your only reason for watching the clock is really for wishing there were more hours in the day.
Thomas D. Murray is a Middletown area resident who returned to this area after a career in writing and publishing. His columns have appeared in the Wall Street Journal.
