Mad Men of an older Philadelphia

The square Art Deco headquarters on Philadelphia's ancient Washington Square, with its heavy bronze doors, houses condominium homes these days.

But the words wrought to sell by copywriters and blazoned across national media by art directors at the pioneering ad agency of N.W. Ayer & Son still echo:

A diamond is forever (for De Beers)
Be all you can be (U.S. Army)
Never underestimate the power of a woman (Ladies Home Journal)

Half a century after they were hired at Ayer, a generation after its last staff moved to New York (the name vanished in a 2002 merger), a graybeard rearguard of ex-Ayer Philadelphia art directors still gathers twice a year to swap old stories and contrast themselves with the "Mad Men" of television fame, their fictional contemporaries. 

Organizer Richard Yeager invited me to their spring conclave at the ancient Black Bass Inn near New Hope last week.They started in on their late boss, Harry Batten, who, Bob Phillips said, lived at the Barclay, stiffed junior colleagues for cabfare, arranged financing for corporate campaigns and speculated early on the Society Hill housing boom.

The rules, Yeager recalled, seemed to consciously defy Ayer's blue-chip clientele: "No air conditioning," even though Carrier was a client. No coffee-breaks -- though Ayer puffed Hills Bros., and later Folgers.

"Why would an art director need a phone?" boss Harry Batten would ask -- even though Ayer represented AT&T for a century, teaching America to "reach out and touch someone."

And no booze, except the occasional furtive drinkers: The offices were too small. No couches. Recreation was outside, in quaint apartments, crowded bars, bookstores, auction houses.

Though every so often, Conrad Vogel would recall, on a quiet afternoon, someone would cackle like a chicken, and soon the art department was a circus of animal noises. They'd launch parachutes out the window into an updraft, once annoying a boss in his twelfth-floor office, Bill Oliver said.

Batten "was a die-hard Republican," Phillips recalled. "When JFK was assassinated he sent a memo saying anyone who went to watch his funeral wouldn't get paid."

Pay started low for recent art school grads: Ayer was a great place to work, "if your parents could afford to send you there," cracked Roger Cook.

Phillips said hiring practices were democratic and inclusive, for the times.

Vogel remembered print-nerdy kerning and font arguments that dissolved into late-night vandals shaving type so it could be set closer. And deadline overtime: "I bought my house that way."

"They wore corduroy pants and chambray work shirts, with narrow ties by Rooster, featuring weather vanes, mermaids, steam engines, schooners, cats and violins. They laughed, loud and often, at least 50 percent of the time at themselves. But mainly they made advertising," wrote Peter J. Curry, in a free-verse ode for the occasion.

"That was the golden time," said Barry Maguire. "You didn't have focus groups. You sat with an ad copywriter, you just came up with an idea. You got excited. You took it to the supervisor. If the client liked it, you produced it. It was pure fun. Before it got scientific."

The glittery Mad Men show, now in its last AMC season, catches "the spirit of what it was like," Phillips said. "It was like a game. All you had to do was convince the account executive it was a good idea. And millions of dollars would be spent. It was a pure creative fun exercise." 

Container Corporation of America was a favorite client. "They made cardboard boxes," said Roger Cook. "So we got them to sponsor the Great Ideas of Western Man. They'd get the best artists in the United States to do a design based on a quote by Disraeli" or a philosopher. "It wasn't about selling boxes. It was about building them into a great company." 

"Then the MBAs got into the advertising business," said buzz-cut Curry, whose clean-shaven chin stood out among the hairy faces.

Despite the "gray temple of commerce" look of the Ayer building, the art directors remember their floor as a freewheeling creative community whose members spent lunch hunting Thelonious Monk records and other new jazz LPs at H.Royer Smith (says Curry), and scouting new arrivals at the Freeman auction house.

Ayer had been known as a highly creative agency, said Yeager. "But over the years, [Ayer] got plans-oriented. It got to where (prospective clients) at, say, Johnson and Johnson would say, 'If only we could combine Ayer's planning with Young & Rubicam's creative." 

Too many rules, maybe. "The Art Department didn't meet with clients in those days. That was for the business people, they told me," said Roger Cook. He left and cofounded his own design agency, dealing directly with clients. "And Ayer went down the tubes." (Revised and expanded)