THE CHE GUEVARA POSTER STORY PART 4
THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF ADVERTISING
LEARNING CURVES
It was 1962, and I had just left school after five wonderful and engaging years at Franciscan College, Gormanston, County Meath. My mom had spent every penny of her hard-earned money, working as a millinery and fashion buyer, enrolling me in an amazing new college founded only a year or two before by the Franciscan friars of Multyfarnam.
I often wonder why my mom went to such expense sending me to a very expensive private college when I would have been happy to go to a public school like nearby O’Connells or Joeys in Marino, but she must have had her reasons. I imagine it was so I could have a good start in life, and it did help that this college was very different from the likes of class-ridden outfits like Gonzaga, Blackrock or Rockwell, where the emphasis was on producing more of the same generational, entitled, gene-pool posh boys.
Gormanston College was much more open, very inclusive in its day, democratic, less class-ridden, and more Gaelic-focused in its approach and much, much safer, as my mom explained. “Safer” was her code word for “no perverts”.
She was well aware these upmarket schools were riddled with paedos.
I finished my college education in 1962 and couldn’t wait to start working in the real world. Even before I left college, I had answered a small ad in the Irish Independent for a ‘Visualiser’ in a small Dublin ad agency, J.H. Parker Advertising. I went for the interview just before my Leaving Cert finals and actually got the job while I was still doing my final exams.
On my very first day at Parkers, I quietly asked my work colleague, a youngster like myself, Michael Balfe, a lovely, caustically witty guy, ‘Eh… what is a ‘Visualiser’?
Then the boss and owner, a crazy character named J.P. Dempsey, came into the studio and asked me to prepare a layout for one of our clients, Clarkes Shoes.
I turned to my co-worker Mick Balfe and whispered: ‘What’s a ‘Layout’? He cracked up and explained, so that day I produced my first ‘visual’, an ad for Clarkes women’s shoes with the tagline ‘Serene as a dream’. It was so bad I binned it later, but I remember it well. It was a drawing of a girl with her head back, eyes closed, and realistic airbrushed shoes below her. It even, accidentally, looked slightly suggestive and pornish.
I was so out of my depth for a good while, but eventually, I found my feet, not before I ran into a few people who were of great help to me in navigating the wonderful world of Irish advertising. You have to start somewhere.
That’s how naive I was, not a clue about the business but a very fast learner. I started buying books like ‘Madison Avenue’, the story of how advertising agencies work in New York, which was an eye-opener, and stuff like ‘How to Write Advertising Copy’ and technical books on advertising art and paste-up, etc.
Ireland was pretty backward in the early 60s, and the agency I joined was very basic, with only six full-time staff. However, we had fun, and I learned a huge amount in a very short time.
Back then, we would all go in on any given day, from visual artists preparing artwork and overseeing platemaking and ad preparation and production to running as messenger boys down the quays to pick up what were called ‘Rubber Stereos’ and printing plates and delivering them to the newspapers for reproduction as ads.
Rubber Stereos… Should I explain that one? Maybe not.
But Parker Advertising, as I discovered later, was a bit of an industry joke because it was so behind, even compared to the rest of Dublin, let alone New York.
I was paid the princely sum of £2 a week for my efforts, but I was learning at high speed.
A STUDIO TOUR
By the time I left two years later, I knew every aspect of ad production, from visuals to print and production—skills I would later use in my own career as a graphic artist.
Another lucky break came when my mom, who was a well-regarded millinery and fashion buyer with Macy’s on Georges Street, a high-end fashion store on what was then a great fashion shopping street, asked the Art Director of Kennys, the agency that handled her Macy’s fashion advertising account, to give me a tour of their studio after work one evening.
The Art Director was a lovely guy named Adrian, whom I often met at advertising parties later. He showed me around and explained how the various departments on the art floor worked, from brief to finished art and finished adverts. But what I really remembered with great clarity was when Adrian showed me how to work a huge bellows-driven reprographic camera called a ‘Grant’ with the maker’s name engraved on the side.
It was a beast of a machine and incredibly sophisticated to an 18-year-old kid like myself.
This is the one I got and it’s been with me ever since. I haven’t used it in years but for this demonstration I turned it on and it was still going!
Technology from another era.
Not only could you project solid objects in 3D on the glass plate above and trace off a very accurate image easily with two flexible halogen lights on either side, but by placing a sheet of photographic paper on the glass, you could produce white lines on black paper negatives and turn them into ‘positives,’ fine black line positive photographic paper prints.
I was absolutely determined to get hold of this amazing repro machine for myself, as I could see the potential. And much later, sure enough, when I had a garage studio in my house, the first thing I did was buy and install one myself. That little demo of the workings of an art studio fired me up, and only then did I realize that the agency I was employed by was very backward and basic. It was time to up my game.
This tour of an ad agency like Kennys set me on a huge learning curve, and even though I was only 18, I wanted to work in a real modern ad agency and test myself against the very best. Unfortunately, the very best were all damn good.
It took me years to get anywhere near the top level, but I had some great teachers, both Irish, British, and foreign, in all the ad agencies I worked in from 1962 to 1972. I could never have reached any artistic heights without the knowledge they imparted or that I gained from sharing a space with them.
MEANWHILE, BACK IN J.H. PARKER ADVERTISING…
Things were going well enough at J.H. Parker & Co. I was working with two guys whom I really liked and enjoyed their company. Michael Balfe was a very young Account Executive, and Myles Davenport was the resident copywriter and a skilled visualizer. Both were a few years older than me; I was 18, so maybe they were around 20 or 21, not much older.
Mick Balfe was sarcastic, caustic, sardonic, and incredibly funny when he went on one of his ranting rolls. He could crack us up with just a glance and a screwy expression while we were being briefed by Dempsey on his latest venture.
Dempsey himself could be quite funny when he wasn’t bullying us. I always remember producing about a dozen rough visual layouts for a prospective client, and as he went out the door, he grumbled under his breath loud enough for us to hear easily. “Here we go again, out into the darkness, with hope in my heart and layouts in my arse pocket.” We all nearly wet ourselves when the door closed.
Mr. Dempsey was a strange man, in retrospect. There was nothing nasty about him, though he was curt and could be a real bully at times, especially to a kid like myself who was new to the business, being tall, strongly built, and a bit intimidating.
Being a very formal man himself, he insisted that we were all addressed as Mister or Missus, an Irishism for Mrs. I was Mr. FitzPatrick or just Mr. Fitz. Considering that I had been warned when I was working as a barman in Kilkee never to call anyone “Mister” this was a little odd for me. Even stranger were his titles for some of our clients. A few of them, while not racist or sexist, were quite scurrilous but often quite hilarious.
I remember the printer for our posters was a man named Doyle, whom he referred to as “Paraffin Oil Doyle” a reference to the problem with his print work. We found out the hard way when a client complained that the posters printed faded within a few days. Glorious four-color screen prints faded from full color to blue monochrome almost as quickly as sunlight.
We had two important clients.
One of them was called “Mr. Yid” or “The Yid” obviously Jewish, and back then, just as today, this was an anti-Semitic slur and not very amusing. I was brought to respect anyone Jewish so this annoyed the crap out of me.
The other client was a Protestant advertising manager whom he nicknamed “The Prod” or worse, “Mr. Ed,” a reference to a TV talking horse who closely resembled this poor man.
I was brought up to respect protestants so this bugged me big time also.
‘Political correctness’ had a long way to go in the world of Dempsey and so many others back then.
On another occasion, the cleaning lady, whom he called Mrs. Mopp, was summoned to his office and reprimanded for the lack of a properly polished landing floor, which was made of old linoleum and hard to give a decent surface sheen.
The next morning, when we all arrived in the top-floor office for work, the cleaning lady, a lovely warm and witty woman, took myself and Mick aside and warned us to be damn careful on the stairs and especially the landing floor. We knew exactly what she was up to. She had arrived early and applied buckets of floor polish to the stairs and the landing. We avoided even stepping lightly on it as it looked damn shiny on the brown linoleum.
We waited until Dempsey arrived and we heard the patter of big feet.
Up the stairs from the lift, not a bother, thud, thud, thud, then a colossal crash as he hit the landing in his big brown brogues.
Bang, down he went, in instalments, like a felled tree. We all feigned complete surprise and shock horror at the sight of the boss on his fat arse, cursing like a trooper and roaring for Mrs. Mopp.
He must have guessed she had applied the killer touch with her floor polish or maybe he just wanted to read her the riot act, probably at full volume. But the floor was clean and sparkly ☺
There was no point to his bellowing; the cleaner was long gone. She had already bid her goodbyes to all of us and never came back.
As the great Oscar Wilde once observed: “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”
MY VERY FIRST BAND LOGO
Miles Davenport, our copywriter and visualiser in Parker Advertising, had a guitar band of youngsters like himself called ‘The Inmates.’ And guess what, yep, this was my very first band logo, designed when I was a very green 18-year-old.
If I remember correctly, the logo was designed by Miles while looking over my shoulder as I sketched his ideas very crudely. The lettering, I believe, was a standard wet *Letraset typeface, and for the band name, I used a condensed version. Additionally, I created a graphic of a single guitarist in silhouette, with a heavy dark shadow cast from behind.
Unfortunately, I cannot currently locate a copy, but it was somewhat crude and required a more skilled artist to give it a polished look. However, everyone has to start somewhere.
The logo is long gone, but it set me on a course where I discovered my absolute love for logos and working with bands, which continues to this day.
JFK COMES TO IRELAND AND A US FLAG IS DESECRATED
When JFK came to Ireland the excitement was extraordinary. Here was a vibrant young man, newly elected as the President of the United States, proclaiming himself loudly a proud Irishman and eager to revisit his long-lost relatives.
I was working in J.H.Parker advertising, based above the Ulster Bank on Lower Grafton Street, opposite the Provosts House in Trinity College ,when Kennedy came to Ireland.
You can imagine the excitement we felt when we discovered from the newspapers that he would pass by our balcony windows on his way to Dáil Éireann, Government Buildings, on Kildare Street. He delivered one of the best speeches ever heard in the Irish parliament, before or since.
When the day came, we were all on our own in the agency as the boss was away on business. So, myself, my co-workers, Mick Balfe, and Miles Davenport took time off to hang out on the black wrought-iron balcony of the bank, outside the large studio window.
It was a magnificently clear sunny day, and we could hear the roar from the packed street as the Kennedy cortege approached from Westmoreland Street, rounded Trinity College, and headed in our direction. We could clearly see JFK with his red hair shining in the sunlight. His motorcade got closer, and I noticed a few men in dark glasses, probably US security, looking up towards our balconies. I waved to let them know we were friendly, but they kept staring as Kennedy went right past us, even looking up and waving in our direction as we waved madly back.
To be honest, Kennedy really looked to me and the rest of us like some kind of smiling youthful Greek Adonis, such was his powerful persona. He was young, vibrant, and he brought new energy not just to the USA, but to Ireland as well.
His charismatic presence, fuelled of course by some superb personal appearances on Irish Television, was extraordinary as he delivered some of his best speeches ever, full of fun and outstanding wit.
JFK made us all proud to be Irish, which was a novel feeling when we were still under the conservative rule of church and state, and we were still regarded by our British neighbors as some kind of inferior subhuman bunch of knuckle-draggers.
THE STARS AND STRIPES. A HORROR STORY
Then, to my horror, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something very odd. The American flag flying from the bank balcony right beside us, a few feet away, was at half-mast. No wonder the security types in the crowd were staring up at us. We had a new guy working as a junior, and he was one mad bastard always causing trouble and upsetting people, especially one girl temp who he didn’t like. He had ridiculed us for wanting to see Kennedy as if we were all arselickers, but we just ignored his nonsense.
He was a fucking junior and seemed to think he could just push the rest of us around for some strange reason, but we just ignored that nonsense. This was a national celebration. One of the best days ever.
For some reason, he snuck into the office of the MD, Mr. Dempsey, opened the windows, and got his hands somehow on the ropes that held the flag where no one far below on the street could see him, and he decided to mess with the flag.
He claimed it was an accident, but a good bit of force would be required to move the ropes and the huge US flag. This was a serious affair, not just for the ad agency we worked for but for the Ulster Bank too. We were simply paying tenants, not owners.
It was bad enough showing such disrespect for the American flag, but even more sensitive, as I found out later when we were all questioned, was the fact that it happened over the sign for Ulster Bank, a largely Protestant bank at a time when all good Prods made sure to keep a low profile in Catholic Ireland. Back then, they would do nothing to rock the boat or cause any problems, and now here we were with a US flag at half-mast as their president went by.
I knew the moment I saw that flag being lowered by a hidden hand that we were all in serious trouble. In the end, it got sorted, and the culprit was fired in one loud, angry exchange. It was the next day when we came in for work that we all noticed a foul stench. Somehow, in between packing his stuff and exiting the building, he had managed to take a dump on the landing just outside the toilets.
We were all relieved to see the back of that young man. He nearly cost us all our jobs at a time when we were glad to be earning a few bob in a time of depression and mass emigration. I was engaged to be married at that point in time and needed that job damn badly in the hope it could be a stepping stone to better things.
UPWARDS AND ONWARDS. OKB. MAY 1964
My next move was upward, so after two long years on zero wages, I was now 20, engaged to be married, earning €4 per week, working as a dogsbody visualizer, and struggling to even give my mom a few bob out of my miserly pay packet. I finally got a job interview with a truly great ad agency, OKB, O’Kennedy Brindley, after a series of interviews, and I was over the moon. I was on £10 quid a week. That was damn good for my age in that business. Now was my chance to earn good money and do some interesting visual work.
Unfortunately, while my impression of myself was pretty good, I was very young, but I was ‘experienced’ in every aspect of advertising. Why, I had even written copy and headlines a few times myself.
But my first day in OKB was a revelation.
More to follow with the next Blog. The path to the creation of the Che poster was an odd one….
