In late August 1967, I was reduced to living in my broken-down Buick Special at the site of a farmhouse in rural Michigan that had burned down and was now a secluded Lover’s Lane. I was 20 years old.

     It was the summer of the Detroit riots.  The big hit song flooding the AM radio stations was LIGHT MY FIRE by The Doors, along with ODE TO BILLY JOE, and BROWN EYED GIRL. I’d been fired from my job as a lineman for the phone company.

     I had a Colt Navy .36 revolver and I was looking down the barrel.

     Police rousted me one night and asked if I had any firearms in the car, and I said a revolver was on the floor on the passenger side, and there were various guns in the trunk.

     The cop rummaged and grabbed the Colt and asked me to open the trunk. I did, and he looked at my .22 semi-automatic rifle, an over/under .22/.410 shotgun, and an 1877 falling-block single-shot .22 rifle. He stared at the guns rusting unprotected in the trunk for a minute and said, “You gotta take better care of these things,” and closed the trunk. And handed my pistol back and drove away.

     Then a couple days later my Uncle Bill showed up out of the blue and knocked at my car window and invited me to stay with him and Aunt Grace, my mother’s sister, at their place in a suburb of Detroit at 11 Mile and Woodward, an hour’s drive away from my broke-down location.

     Uncle Bill was an electronics engineer. He had widespread contacts among local police because his job was as a police radio equipment troubleshooter. I only now realize that’s how he knew how to find me.

     He and Aunt Grace took me in and bought me a coat and tie and told me to find work.

     At an Employment Bureau bulletin board I saw a note about an opening at the Sears advertising department. I went to the Sears hub store at the Oakland Mall in Troy, Michigan, and the receptionist at the Advertising Department was baffled because there was no job opening, but finally they let me in to the Ad Manager’s office, and he said there was some mistake, we’re not hiring, sorry.

     That was on a Friday and on Monday morning the ad manager called me and said he liked my chutzpah and offered me a job as a production assistant at $105/week. That was a pretty good wage for a kid in those days, $2.62 an hour while I was accustomed to making only $1.90.

     The Sears ad department produced hundreds of newspaper ads per month for all the Sears stores in southeastern Michigan. My job as Production Assistant had two main portions: proof circulation, and zinc filing.

     Every morning, couriers from the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press and other smaller newspapers delivered page proofs of upcoming ads. I separated the proofs into stacks for each of the 78 Sears departments, assembled them into an efficient path through the store and dropped the ads on the desks of the department managers for each department so they could OK the ads before they ran. This took about an hour every morning.

     I was scared about walking right up to the department manager and intruding on whatever he was doing, but they put up with it. Each department was in a frantic struggle and the ads were important.

     It was scary at first because I had to learn the numbers for each department…maybe Sporting Goods was 32, and Toys was 49, etc. Then I had to lay out the ads in an efficient sequence through the store.

     There was a lot of leeway in the time required to do this part of the job and after I became experienced I took advantage of it to chat up all the good-looking girls.

     After the morning proof run I sorted zincs. It was the tail end of the hot metal era of newsprint. Photos and drawings had to be converted to “zincs:” plates with the image converted into halftone dots photo-etched onto the metal. If a photo of a dining-table set had to be used at a different size or with a variation in the number of chairs, a new zinc had to be made.

     A significant portion of the Production Assistant’s job was finding existing zincs to be included with the package for each ad. Layout artists would call for Zinc 239-25T and I’d go to the zinc drawers and find it. One wall of the Production Department was an array of 80 zinc drawers: four cabinets four feet wide, each with 20 drawers. One drawer for each department. I’d search through dozens and dozens of living room furniture ensembles to find the right one. If the zinc couldn’t be found, or if the existing zinc turned out to be the wrong size,I had to tell the layout person so the Art Department could be notified to create a new zinc.

     At 4pm I went back through the store to each department to collect the corrected & signed proofs. Many times I had to chase down the department manager to get their signature. I took the proofs back to Advertising and dropped them off at each pertinent writer’s cube.

     There were lots of good-looking girls in each department and I enjoyed zooming through their lives twice each day. 

     I’d never had an office job before. I must have been a rough-edged kind of guy. Fresh in from the farm and a job as a lineman for the phone company. Heavy labor. We were not only required to wear ties, but also tie clips. I used a paper clip and the boss didn’t like it. It’s a clip, and it’s on my tie, I said, and converted the disciplinary talk to a discussion of semantics.

     After a while I advanced to full production duties: I’d be given a layout of an ad with all the pictures sketched in, with notes appended for the source of the pictures. The layouts were made on a blueprint machine, which used foul-smelling ammonia chemicals to produce blue prints as big as a full newspaper page.  

     I’d assemble all the zincs and mattes and manuscripts for the text and put them into envelopes for each newspaper.

     I became good at the production job. My official title was Production Assistant but I tried to do all the other jobs, too: art, layout, but especially copywriting. I pressured the boss to let me write ads. I was already known for spotting typos and my general knowledge of typography.

    I had a leg up on the Sears job because I was completely familiar with adbiz stuff because my father was a prominent typographer servicing the automotive industry–you’ve seen his logos for Detroit car brands. He designed the Cadillac logo. I was accustomed to using my father’s typographic equipment at his commercial-art design studio so I knew the typesetting lingo.

     One requirement for writing newspaper ads in the hot-type era was that spacing was unforgiving. Copyfitting was an art in itself. After you wrote your golden prose, now you had to make it fit into the available space at a comfortable size for the reader.

     If your copy wasn’t long enough, it left blank space on the page. If it was too long, text was clipped off. It was unforgiving. The type was made from molten lead and if my text didn’t fit right it had to be scrapped and re-made in the newspaper’s Linotype machine, which used a different keyboard: ETAOIN SHRDLU instead of the familiar QUERTY UIOP.

     I made a few rookie mistakes but I became proficient at writing to exactly fit the layout. A useless art today: if the text doesn’t fit, you make it half a size smaller, or compress the leading, or tighten the kerning on your computer screen. Couldn’t do that in the hot-type days.

     I don’t remember any of the ads I wrote. I learned the Sears way. Their model was to make a clear plain explanation of what the customer gets for their money. Just the facts, ma’am.

     Successful ecommerce sites today use the same model. For the rest of my career, when I got stuck writing an ad, I fell back into the arms of Mother Sears and described what’s in the box. Ads are information.

     The only ad I remember was the one I got called into the boss’s office to be chewed out about a flippant headline. The ad manager had taken a couple vacation days and when he got back he looked at what we’d done while he was away. I’d written an ad for the Jewelry Department.

     He called me into the office and put a page from yesterday’s paper on the desk and put his finger on the part of the ad that I wrote. The headline was, TICK TOP TIME TELLERS.

     “What the hell does that mean?” the boss said.

     “Well, um, what can you say about a two-dollar watch?” I said.

     “It’s very creative, Colin, but that’s not what we want here. Creativity is a sign of immaturity.”

     Then the Jewelry Department manager came into the office carrying that same page from the newspaper. “Who wrote this?” he said.

     “It was Colin,” the manager said. “I’ve already talked to him about it and it won’t happen again.”

     “No, you got me wrong. I want him writing all my stuff from now on. Those watches are selling out at every store.”

     My job became half copywriting and half production. I still trotted proofs every morning and afternoon. I talked to a lot of girls every day.

     The babes didn’t want to go out with me, though, except for Peggy in the Toy Department, an angular gal with black hair down to her ass. A Cher lookalike. Pipestem arms, legs, fingers.

     She was just so different both physically and mentally… at lunch one day I talked to her about the novel ROSEMARY’S BABY, months before the movie came out, and she asked to borrow the book. I want it back, I said, and if she finished reading it, I wanted her to sign her name on the flyleaf.

     Okay, she said, and then a week later she was excited about the book and wanted her friend Pam to read it, and I said okay, but the same deal applies, and then I forgot about it, and six months later she gave it back to me and it had 37 signatures on the front and back flyleafs from her friends who had read it.  

     I pursued Peggy for quite a while. We went to the final appearance of the rock band Cream in Detroit in 1968, at the hockey arena. I bought the best seats in the house and we were only two rows away from being able to touch Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, and Ginger Baker. Peggy dressed so snappy that everybody kept asking for her autograph because they thought she was part of the show. I took her to the opening night of the first rock video in history, the Doors’ UNKNOWN SOLDIER, but it wasn’t enough to get into her pants.

     I took Peggy to the Detroit premiere of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in Cinerama. We were seated directly behind “Uncle” Russ Gibb, the king of Detroit rock & roll radio DJs. I’d had a few interactions with his team from the radio side of Sears Advertising and during the intermission I talked to him for a few moments and he turned his attention to Peggy.

     That was our final date–she said I ruined her perception of the radio world, because in her imagination Uncle Russ was this really cool guy, but the real Dr Russ turned out to be a short fat old pig who groped her and then ignored her and dissed her generation.

     Later I found out that each of the Sears girls thought I was fucking all the other girls except her, and were therefore holding out against me.

     During the hectic holiday season of 1968, I was the only person at the Sears advertising department who didn’t catch the flu. I was a one-year veteran in the ad department and I knew all the jobs. I stepped forward and did all the work for the Christmas season, not just my own department but every aspect of the job. I was a one-man ad agency, laying out, writing, and producing hundreds of newspaper ads.

     After things settled down and the department was back to normal in the new year, I went into the boss’s office and told him I wanted a raise. “I’ve been expecting this, Colin,” he said, and opened a desk drawer and pulled out a stack of my timecards and shook them in my face. “You’ve been an average of 7 minutes late every day for the last year. Let’s go to the storeroom and talk.”

     He proceeded to give me a verbal beating, not about my job performance but about my personal life. I had the wrong friends, talked about the wrong things. One of the department managers saw me at a bar and heard me talking about marijuana. I’d never had marijuana but I’d researched it extensively.

     He disparaged me up and down. I was nothing but a collection of mistakes and errors. Then he grandly said that he thought I was salvageable, and he said he was authorizing a raise for me from $2.63/hour to $2.68.

     A nickel an hour raise.

     This was on a Friday afternoon. I went home and my brain frazzled about it for the entire weekend.

     On Monday morning first thing I gave two weeks notice that I was resigning.