My final final final final post on Winston Churchill.

After almost a month of steady and voracious reading, I am almost through with Andrew Roberts' nearly 1,200-page one-volume biography of Winston Churchill. The book has won more awards than a 24-year-old digital art-director, so you can be sure it's well-worth reading. In addition it's been praised in the cheery fascist "Wall Street Journal," as one of 2018's ten best books, praised in the "Economist" as one of the best books of 2018 and lauded in the failing "New York Times" as a notable book of 2018.

If you have a month or a year to spare, I recommend the book highly. Even if you've read, as I have, dozens of books on Churchill and hundreds on World War II, Roberts' volume tells you something new about the man--and the era in which he lived--on almost every page.

You can order the book here.

I know there are legions of Churchill haters out there--for myriad legitimate reasons, most of which I agree with. However, you could make the case that he saved Western Civilization (in addition to world Jewry) from destruction. Had his small island nation not held out alone against Hitler, the Third Reich would have had its way with Russia, gained that massive nation's natural resources, then defeated the United Kingdom, and probably the United States, too. The world might today be just as Trumpian, but we would have arrived there sooner.

In addition to being a mighty political and military leader, Churchill was a prolific writer. For his many histories, biographies and speeches, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953. Something to think about when we are ruled in this country by a president who can't even read.

In any event, I was reading about Churchill last night, when advertising popped into my head. As he was writing "Their Finest Hour," the second of his six-volume history of World War II, Churchill developed a way of labeling various drafts. It made me think of all the people in our business who label files and folders and the like, "final," final final," "final final final final final," and so on ad nauseam.

Churchill's system was a trifle more eloquent than the one most often used in our business. 

His last five versions were labeled: "Provisional Semi-Final," "Provisional Final," "Almost Final," "Final," and with both a respectful and a knowing tip of my Mac to my wonderful clients, "Subject to Full Freedom of Proof Correction."

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BTW, last week I got two comments on my blog. When I was ill, one castigated me for having had two typos in one post. A second celebrated my illness by declaring that it was proof that I am human.

Let it hereby be stated, by me, that I am all too human. I am a lousy typist, a worse proofreader and exceedingly peripatetic, and therefore, given to lapses of concentration and meticulousness. 

I never use the word "final" in the labeling of anything I do. I am reminded that once Leonardo returned to a painting having left it 17 years earlier. He stared at the painting all-day and finally in the fading light, added one dab of ochre. He, like many of us, are always working on their craft. (Though, of course, I am closer to Sheldon Leonard than Leonardo.)

Who's Sheldon Leonard? You can see him in this clip, starting at around :20. The bowler-hatted pianist at the opening of the clip was the great Meade "Lux" Lewis, whose honky-tonk style was one of for the ages.

While I'm at it, a bit more Meade "Lux" Lewis, especially for those uninitiated in his artistry.
I'm not sure who the vocalist is, though it might be Jimmy Rushing.

Yet another Slap-of-the-Week by dear old Uncle Slappy.

When a new boss arrives.

If you've been in the business a while--like, say, three months, you'll sooner or later be faced with a situation where everything changes.

They'll be some big change on the client side, or a new account person will come in, or a new supervisor or some sort, or a new partner, new assignment, a new CCO.

I remember sitting in my office way back in maybe 1992 when Hall-of-Famer Mike Tesch decided to leave his job as Executive Creative Director. (ECD was the highest creative title back then. Long before there were Group ECDs, Vice Chief Creative Officers, Deputy Chief Creative Officers, Global Chief Creative Officers, New York Chief Creative Officers, and North American Chief Creative Officers.)

The agency where I was punching the clock was on a long downhill slide and they decided that the only thing that could fix it was a new CCO. Like I said, I was sitting in my office and my desk phone rang.

"George, this is Mal. Can you come up to my office?"

Shit. I was being summoned to the new boss' office. At that point, I don't think we had even met. Like most neurotics, in an industry filled with them, I was sure I was being fired. I used my 300-foot walk up to his office to figure out what I wanted for severance.

I knocked tentatively at his door and walked in. There was a gaggle of account guys already there, looking as rosy as marzipan, and Mal, my new boss, seated behind a desk that in about two-dozen ways was many sizes too big for him.

But I didn't know that then.

"George," he stuck out his hand to shake mine. He handed me a sheaf of typewritten scripts and said, "Here. I know you're busy, but make these better."

I read the first one. This wouldn't be a hard assignment.

I started backing toward the door.

"I'll have something for you tomorrow." I stammered like Billy Budd--my shyness asserting itself. "But I should ask. Is there anything that resembles a brief?"

The marzipan collective laughed at that phrasing. Laughed some more, and didn't answer.

The next day I brought back a dozen scripts, half of them circling around a fact I had found in one of Mal's.

"Oh, I made that up," he said, talking into the floor.

There's a point in all this.

The first thing people usually say when they get a new C-something in their lives is this: "Shit. I have to prove myself all over again. I had built up some equity with so-and-so and now I'm starting at square one."

Of course, there's some validity in those statements. It's no picnic meeting someone new, learning about their enthusiasms, tastes and work styles. You also never know if they've been given the mandate to gallop in like a Cossack and cut people into quarters with two stokes of their sharper-than-a-razor cavalry shaskas.

There's not much you can do, if that's their agenda. You can hope that your reputation is strong, your client relationships sturdy. But if there's a bullet with your name on it, as Kurt Vonnegut might say, 'so it goes.'

When you're old--at least old in this 'young person's business' and you get that new boss, or boss' boss, or boss' boss' boss' boss, you never quite know what will happen. I've heard stories about new CCOs that ride in and 'make redundant' anyone over 50, or even 40.

I guess this is all to say that there's not much you can do when a new boss arises. As for proving yourself all over again, well, that's what we do every day, with every assignment. That is, you do your best, you try you hard, you try to carry the day.

And one more thing. 

You hope for the best.

Sick as a dog.

Yesterday I did something I haven't done since I was involved in a horrible car crash in 2013.

I called in sick.

These days, it's harder and harder to call in sick. In fact, just about a week ago, the Times ran an article called "The Death of the Sick Day." Its subhead says, "For many office workers, “working from home” has replaced a day spent recovering under the covers." You can read the article here.

Of course, like any other day, I had a slew of calls I could have called into. There was a passel of emails I could have answered. And I might have done nine or a dozen other things if I were at the age where I was still interested in accumulating brownie points.

But, I was sick.

In the parlance of an old Bugs Bunny cartoon, my tongue had a coat on it.

I was achy and feverish and my joints cracked like glaciers sliding off a coast into the sea. It was all I could do to throw a leash on Whiskey and walk her a couple times around the block. 

I have prodigious powers of concentration, but when I tried to read I went over the same paragraph three times, or five. My head was as fuzzy as an old pair of woolen socks.

Around five, the fog seemed to lift, however. My cough abated. My vigor seemed to return.

I got up out of my chair and went downstairs to our building's gym and put myself through the paces. Nothing Herculean, mind you, but I sweat out whatever remaining sickness was in my blood.

It's late now, as I write this. I didn't have it in me to write any earlier.

But sickness or not, I try to write every day. And sickness or not, I've kept this going for about 12 years.

To quote Woody Allen--politically incorrect, I know--showing up is 80% of life. So, though I didn't show up yesterday, I will today.

That's what I'm best at.

Showing up.

Robert Caro and working hard.

There is a small gaggle of writers at my agency who have taken on the modern-day 12 Labors of Heracles. We're not cleaning the Nemean Stables, or slaying the nine-headed Hydra, but we have made our way through Robert Caro's four-book series on Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Caro, in my humble opinion, is the world's greatest living historian. He's won two Pulitzer Prizes and two National Book Awards along the way. Caro, now 83, has completed four volumes of his anticipated volumes on LBJ. And there are Caro-istas all over the world who are hoping he finishes number five before he's called to the great typewriter in the sky.

In early December, it was announced that Caro is coming out with a new book in April. You can preorder the new book here.

The reaction among many Caro fans has been similar to my brother's. "Why is he wasting his time on this, and not finishing LBJ?"

Yesterday morning, my digital issue of "The New Yorker" arrived and in it was a longish excerpt from Caro's new book, "Working." Not LBJ #5. You can read it here, though there may be a paywall.

Like most of Caro's writing this grabbed me by the metaphorical lapels. Section I: "Mr. Hathway" starts like this:

In 1959, when I went to work for Newsday, on Long Island, the paper had a managing editor named Alan Hathway, who was an old-time newspaperman from the nineteen-twenties. He was a character right out of “The Front Page,” a broad-shouldered man with a big stomach that looked soft but wasn’t. His head was shiny bald except for a monklike tonsure, and rather red—very red after he had started drinking for the day, which was at lunch. He wore brown shirts with white ties, and black shirts with yellow ties. We were never sure if he had actually graduated from, or even attended, college, but he had a deep prejudice against graduates of prestigious universities, and during his years at Newsday had never hired one, let alone one from Princeton, as I was. I was hired as a joke on him while he was on vacation. He was so angry to find me there that during my first weeks on the job he would refuse to acknowledge my presence in his city room. I kept saying, “Hello, Mr. Hathway,” or “Hi, Mr. Hathway,” when he passed my desk. He’d never even nod. Ignoring me was easy for Mr. Hathway to do, because as the low man on the paper’s reportorial totem pole I never worked on a story significant enough to require his involvement.

Later, after Caro gets a lucky break and lands a major story, he is summoned into Mr. Hathway’s office.

I ran into June [Hathway’s assistant] just as I entered the city room; motioning to Alan’s office, she told me to go right in. Walking across the room, I saw, through the glass window, the big red head bent over something he was reading, and as I entered his office I saw that it was my memo.

He didn’t look up. After a while, I said tentatively, “Mr. Hathway.” I couldn’t get the “Alan” out. He motioned for me to sit down, and went on reading. Finally, he raised his head. “I didn’t know someone from Princeton could do digging like this,” he said. “From now on, you do investigative work.”

I responded with my usual savoir faire: “But I don’t know anything about investigative reporting.”

Alan looked at me for what I remember as a very long time. “Just remember,” he said. “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddam page.” He turned to some other papers on his desk, and after a while I got up and left.

That advice—‘turn every page,’ and ‘never assume anything,’ seemed to make sense to me—a mere advertising copywriter. They tell me what I so often tell myself: work hard, work harder, and work still harder.

Caro, more than any other writer I have ever encountered works hard. I once heard him tell this story. He realized, when he was writing the fourth volume of his LBJ books, that he had interviewed every one of the people in the famous photograph of LBJ’s inauguration aboard Air Force One, on the flight back to Washington from Dallas.

Then it hit Caro.

He had failed to interview one person. He flew off to interview the photographer.

Turn every page.

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Remembrance of King.

I was 10, my brother 12, my sister just eight when Martin Luther King was shot to death at a Memphis, Tennessee hotel at 8:05 in the evening on Thursday, April 4, 1968.

My parents had gone out that evening, and my brother and I had been given permission to watch "Dragnet," a TV cop show starring Jack Webb, that didn't come on till nine. Past our bedtimes.

In that more serious era, Dragnet was, of course, pre-empted for news coverage of the assassination/conspiracy that resulted in the death of King at just 39. 

I was just 10 and didn't know a lot about King. Frankly, both my brother and I were upset that our favorite TV show wasn't being televised and news of King's death was.

I'm sure there were pre-teens all over the country who were more aware than my brother and I about King, the Civil Rights movement and the rest of the tumult of the 60s. 

But we were kids, back then.

At least we had been on the night we lost our innocence.

Five Minutes with Our CBO.

Ad Aged:

Good morning and thank you for taking the time to meet with me today. Why don’t you take a moment or two and tell me what a Chief Budget Officer—a CBO—does. Is CBO anything like a CFO?

CBO:

Well, I can see how you would be confused. In the parlance of today’s modern marketing landscape, a CBO is no longer a Chief Budget Officer.

Ad Aged:

I’m intrigued. What does CBO stand for then?

CBO:

I am Chief Bucket Officer.

Ad Aged:

Chief Bucket Officer? What is it that you do?

CBO:

Primarily, I put things into buckets. Let’s say you’re selling an incandescent lightbulb. I’ll issue statements like this one: “I think we have to put our customer set into three buckets. Bucket one is heavy lightbulb users. Bucket two is light lights. Your light lightbulb users. And mid-range lightbulb users, they’re in bucket three.”

Ad Aged:

I see. So you organize and categorize things?

CBO:

Not quite. I put things into buckets.

Ad Aged:

Give me a for instance, for instance.

CBO:

Look at it this way. Clients come to us that need utility—they need their content bucket filled—whether that’s social, advertising, anything else. We fill those buckets.

They also need their media bucket filled. Their television bucket. Their online bucket. Their outdoor bucket.

We even have buckets filled with other buckets. And if those bucket-filled buckets overflow, we can fill new buckets.

Ad Aged:

A regular bucket cornucopia.

CTO:

You might say a bucket-full of buckets.

Ad Aged:
Beautifully said.

CTO:
I'll put that in my 'you're welcome' bucket.

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