THERE CAME AN INTERLUDE after my encyclopedia days, when I was at sixes and sevens for some while. I was "weary" of the trade magazine field, though I had done well at it - and learned many things about many trades, industrial processes and products made in this country. I could not know it at the time, but this was to stand me yet in good stead down the road. As for the stint with the eggheads in the encyclopedia field, that had been great too, and I learned a lot. Not about publishing particularly (for the publications were "put together" by workaday editors housed elsewhere) but mainly about Science, in which I maintained my general - not specific - interests and interesting people and associates.
In the interim, I went to work for my father. This was a disaster. He was still working though near retirement (he having actually retired from Wall Street), and he had started a sort of specialty finance and insurance business pitched just to automobile dealers. His long years in both fields paid off: he figured out a way to combine these two usually scrupulously separated pursuits into one and give the dealers a cut on the side and he was doing very well. A "family business" had thus been created de novo, and it was urged that I "try it."
Since the rent was due, I "tried it."
But this kind of "bizz" was - and still is - just foreign to my interests and native predilections. It was an automobile insurance operation, as I said. My initial booboo came when a call came in about one of the insured's being in a "car crash." "Gosh!," I said, "was anyone hurt?" Yeah - couple dead. "Wow! That's terrible," I commiserated. Later Pop explained: "We don't care about the injuries and fatalities here in this office," he said. "You must always ask first about the vehicle: where is it and how bad is it damaged." A light dawned.
And I put my heart into it. I learned that sailors, musicians, and prostitutes are bad insurance risks and we should avoid "writing them up." (The first because they are always "jumping furloughs" and driving 90mph toward some Naval Base. Indeed the two dead had been just that when a concrete abutment got in the way). Musicians are "undesirable" because they are always on the way to "new gigs" in nightclubs in distant cities at 3 a.m. in the morning and they too, have an affinity for abutments. Prostitutes... well, I guess they are just "bad risks" on general grounds. LOL!
Actually, of course, Pop was right. This was a business and I began to see things from the other side of the fence: banks and insurance companies may be, as popularly held, chiselers and gougers of the Great Unwashed. But let me tell you the Great Unwashed are largely larcenous to the core for their part, and never cease trying to back-chisel their oppressors! LOL! The scammers and the phonies -phony claims - are on both sides of the fence. As Pop used to always point out: "There never was a fender-bender that was not a "total" in the eyes of the owner!" I was still coming out of my "liberal" days back then - and seeing things from this vantage point did much to temper my unconsidered enthusiasm for the Downtrodden...
And so, I set to and cracked the books, and learned all about things like "inherent vice" (why you cannot insure a cargo of wheat say, as it might have weevils in it - which are an "inherent vice" of wheat and grain, according to the Law). I learned of "rights of subrogation", and "like kind and quality" (you crumple a used car fender, you get a used car fender replacement - not an upgrade to current style fenders!), and best of all "...seizure by foreign kings and princes" - and "barretry" and all that sort of Mickey Mouse on the High Seas - but we were strictly vehicles, not boats. But I needed to know same to pass my license and so one fine day I went up to Hartford took the exam and became a licensed insurance agent!
But it was not for me. True, I got so I could roam around the State and rap with car dealers about their "points" and about their "floor planning," and "conversion of funds" and other chicanery that in these fields is just taken as the "way to do business." But Pop was a demanding "boss" and back in the office, he tweaked and re-tweaked everything I did from entries in the tiresome ledgers and account books, to how I adjusted the window shades in my own office (!) and that I "...always hung up the phone backwards in its cradle" (Huh?) - and he would pick it up and turn it around so onetime I said "I'm outta here" and I up and left him and walked out the door and he said - without rising from his desk: "I hope you find something you like to to do in this world, Bernard," and went on with his risk rating...
So I took stock a bit and toward the end of finding "something I would like to do in this world," I began to read the New York Times Want Ads every day. And repair thereto on the old NYNH&H railroad - commuting daily to find a commuter's job.
And an idea began to take shape: during my tenure as one of George's protege editors in his trade-mag stable, I had had to deal extensively with "PR" guys. The way it worked (still works? Somehow I doubt it: America is no longer in the manufacturing racket - all that stuff now being done overseas...) but back then, you see, if a company made a widget of some kind designed to sell in or to "industry," (I only came much, much later to the "consumer" field...), then it would hire an agency to handle its advertising and PR (promotion) to push this product. The PR account men, supposedly "knowledgeable" in one or more "fields" and basically native wordsmiths, would then prepare "Press Releases" on the products in question and then mass-mail them, or bring them in person to the editor of the "specialty" mag serving that particular field (since this permitted of long-drawn-out "editorial lunches" with the editors).
In turn (for I was an editor at that time) we would take these Releases and decode and de-bullshit them, and recast them as "stories" or articles for our readers.
Now I had always been impressed with the "grander" lifestyle affected by many of these PR guys - who always seemed like niftier "types" than the editors among whom I labored. They dressed better, they usually had more extensive educations and world experience, etc. etc. - and the lot of them were quartered in New York City or Chicago. (A later associate once humorously added, London and Paris to this list, as exhaustive of places "where we could live and work!") But most of all, it seemed that these dudes, who were only on the other end of the wordsmithing spectrum from me (they coded - I decoded) made exorbitant salaries compared to the wages of editors.
And so I began to interview with industrial PR agencies in NYC.
BR>
And eventually (though not till after much belt-tightening), I landed a job with O.S. Tyson and Co. in a midtown skyscraper - in fact the old N.Y. Central (later General - because the new owners could inexpensively doctor just that word in the name on the building face...). This was (is!) the building that straddles Park Avenue right where it divides and goes around the Pan Am Building and Grand Central Station. It was (is?) most imposing and almost rococco: the elevators are painted bright red, and at one time had sort of Venetian murals on their walls. It is also the locus just a few floors above the old Tyson offices, of the infamous "Night of the Long Knives" in Mafi history, when a gang of Mafioso, disguised as cops, murdered some grand old Don of the old school - Italian "Black Hand" gangs which were early precursors to the later "familias" - and ushered in the new era in American crime. But I fear I wander....).
Tyson, an old established rather smaller agency, was known in the industrial accounts field. But they were really a sort of bottom-feeder, bottom-line sort of agency. More like the equivalent of Funk & Wagnalls, in the egghead encyclopedia field - which I have earlier mentioned. But just as learning my way in that latter field by being taken in at the bottom and started at pick-and-shovel work first, so similarly was OST a "good experience" for by the time I moved on to a "real" agency (of polished slickers) there were few who could pull the wool over my eyes.
My ace in the hole was (and is!) my verbal skill - for in the agencies, it is very common for the Account Execs to come from many different backgrounds - but not always an editorial one. (Journalists and reporters are common - but journalists and reporters are not your basic copysmith who can work copy front-ways, sideways and upside-down-ways with either his own or others' copy - and this to a ticking clock!)
And so I tested the waters and began to get a handle on my surroundings. Almost at once, I discovered that my immediate boss was a pimp! (How this came about and what it ultimately led to, you shall see by and by). But Jean and I had plumped so long and done so without, to see if I couldn't "get into the agency field" and were so elated when I got my break - that that night when I came home she came glowingly to me and said, "Well, how do you LIKE your new job?"
And I said, "Gosh! Jean, I don't know quite yet: you see I think I am a pimp's assistant!"
Sigh.
And thus began my New York agency career.