stories

Take a letter, Miss Henry

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‘How a rubber chicken got me to New York’

Today is a big day here in Lutheranliar Land. Not only does The Child start her new job as a software engineer at this cool company in Boston called Kensho. (She told me it was okay to tell you, so read more about it here). But it was also on a Monday in October — the 22nd of October in a year long ago — that Yours Truly started a new job in a new city. As a copywriter at Ogilvy & Mather in New York.

I’ll leave it to The Child to tell you of her path to Software Success. Since this is my blog, I get to tell you my story. I will spare you the stuff about how I got interested in advertising in the first place. (Though I may eventually run short of blog material and decide to mine that vein.)

So let’s fast-forward to Kansas City, Missouri. Where I am doing pretty nicely, thank you very much, as a copywriter at a fair-to-middling agency writing ads for Safeway, Phillips Petroleum, and Fleishmann’s Yeast. Heady times. I had gotten to that stage, career-wise, where Continue reading

Small towns, Big City

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‘Where I’m from is a lot like where I am’

Ah, hiking in the Catskills. A great way to get away from the City over Columbus Day Weekend. Also a great way to set the mind to wandering (along with the feet) and think about random stuff like why people like me and my friend Phyllis (both from teensy towns) tend to feel well, at home, here in Big Ole New York. If you feel one of my theories coming on, you would be right.

Get ready for my ‘New York is Really a Bunch of Small Towns Smooshed Together’ theory.

First, a bit about my home town. Which is Carlyle, Illinois. That is a recent (you can tell by the cars, if nothing else) picture of it at the top of this post. Carlyle is smack dab in the middle of Southern Illinois — nope, not anywhere near Chicago. ‘Our’ Big City (where you’d go for baseball games, the zoo, or to buy your wedding dress) was St. Louis. Which was about 50 miles due west of us.

Quick note: if you ask someone from Chicago where they are from, they will say ‘Chicago’; if you ask me the same question and I say ‘Illinois’, it means I am not from Chicago. Otherwise, trust me, I would say so.

Okay. Back to Carlyle. If you’d like to delve into the town and its demographics (including, interestingly enough, the number of sex offenders who live there), Continue reading

Karl Malden’s nose

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‘Don’t leave home without it.’

Fair warning: if you are related to Karl Malden, or are the president of his Fan Club or anything like that, you may wish to stop reading this post. Switch to the one about the silo. Or the one about Bruce Dern and the sweepstakes.

Because this is an Ad Story in which Karl is the butt (as opposed to the nose) of the joke. But he deserved it. As you will see. To mangle a phrase, ‘Hell hath no fury like a bunch of creative women dissed’.

First, a little (probably necessary) background. Karl Malden was a movie star once upon a time (terrific as Mitch in ‘Streetcar Named Desire’; good in ‘On the Waterfront’ too). But it was his run as a police detective on a TV show called ‘The Streets of San Francisco’ (with a youngster named Michael Douglas as his sidekick) that got him his looooong lucrative run as the Spokesguy for American Express Travelers’ Cheques (‘Don’t leave home without them’).

Karl Malden and his nose (and Michael Douglas too) in ‘The Streets of San Francisco’

It grieves me to realize that I just explained who the hell Karl Malden was and now I have to explain ‘travelers’ cheques’. (Do they even make travelers’ cheques anymore?) Anyway, travelers’ cheques were these things you’d get before going on a trip to use instead of cash because, if you lost them or (gasp) if a bad guy stole them, you didn’t lose out. American Express would replace them, and you’d be fine.

In order to get people to use their travelers’ cheques instead of dangerous old cash, AmEx (as we who worked on their business affectionately called them) ran these commercials where pathetic travelers who used cash were duped and/or robbed and lost their money. Then Karl, wearing his trademark tough-guy hat, Continue reading

My Mom, the ‘Party Girl’

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‘Special Happy Birthday Edition’

Karl Malden — and his nose — will just have to wait. I was all ready to hit the ‘publish’ button when I realized that today is Mom’s birthday. So I’m putting Karl’s story into the blog equivalent of Tupperware, and writing a post about Mom instead.

Now I realize that you readers have perfectly good moms of your own. You might very well be asking ‘why the heck would I want to read about Lutheranliar’s mother?’

Well, she’s hilarious, for one thing. Once, while driving us all somewhere, she told my fidgety brother Roger to ‘get in the back seat if you want to wiggle your behind.’ Another time, she and Dad had to go out of town unexpectedly and she had to leave us on our own for a couple of days. (There were five of us; I was the oldest. Big surprise.) She puts a few bucks on the kitchen counter and says ‘Here’s some money. In case you run out of bread.’ My brothers hooted and called her a ‘beatnik’ (which was kind of like a ‘hipster’, in case you’re wondering).

Also, hilarious things would happen to her. When we lived in Memphis (see ‘That’s my Bob’ for colorful family detail), she kept getting weird phone calls. Guys asking her Continue reading

That’s my Bob

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‘Your family is who you think your family is’

My Middle Younger Brother Roger is many things: filmmaker, banjo player, wind miller, and maker of the best chili on the planet. Who knew he was also a trailblazer? Yes, Roger was a member of a ‘blended family’ way before ‘blended’ was a term stuck on the front of ‘family’.

That’s Middle Younger Brother Roger standing behind the couch and behind Mom

See, back when Roger was just a tyke, my dad was transferred to Memphis for his job and our young family landed (somehow, I’m not sure how or why, I was only seven at the time) in a very large house near a university. To help pay the rent, my parents took in boarders — a couple of college guys, one named Bill Something-or-Other and another named Bob Sipowich. They lived upstairs, kept to themselves. Everything worked out fine. Except for the time we kids (there were three of us at this point) all came down with the measles over Christmas at my Gramma Peterson’s so we had to stay there till we got well and the boarders didn’t feed or water our parakeet Petey while we were away and he (gasp) died.

Anyway. That was traumatic. Just had to get it out.

That’s Roger, practicing Dad’s “Whoa-Back” move, at about the age of this story

Back to the story. Continue reading

(Silly) Signs of the times

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Jury duty today. Lots of downtime, so no more excuses for ‘post procrastination’. While hanging about waiting to be funneled through the metal detector, I noticed several rather daunting signs involving incarceration. Which set me to musing about other signs I’ve seen, some rather (unintentionally, I can only assume) hilarious.

A few of these: The Our Lady of Perpetual Help Business School, the (ahem) Karen Horney Clinic, and the Master Cabbie Taxi Academy — where, during a particularly exasperating period of freelance fatigue, I imagined myself working. I practiced answering their phone, in my best receptionist tones: ‘Master Cabbie Taxi Academy. How may I direct your call?’

But few signs please me more than the punny ones. Laundry and dry cleaning establishments seem to have a corner on the market here. Among my favorites: Continue reading