It is a five-hour drive from Ft. Wayne, Indiana up the spine of Michigan’s
lower peninsula to Grayling. But it can seem like a year to a nervous 30-year-old
advertising agency account executive on his way up to meet a hunting legend.
It was the summer of 1966, and I had just joined the Bonsib Advertising
Agency in Ft. Wayne, hired to take over the accounts of Tom Blee. Tom,
the bright, young Phi Beta Kappa vice president had just been promoted
to president of the agency—one of the largest in Indiana at the time. Tom’s
accounts included Bear Archery in Grayling, Michigan and Franklin Electric
of Bluffton, Indiana.
I had graduated from Indiana University in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree
in marketing and a major in advertising. My wife, Alice, whom I had met
in college, still had two years to go to earn her elementary education
degree when we married. So, I worked for the university handling advertising
and sales promotion for their student union and all the facilities it contained.
At the same time I also pursued post-graduate work toward a master’s degree
in counseling and guidance.
Following Alice’s graduation and the birth of our first son, Mike, we
left Bloomington to begin our real life together. Our first stop was in
Indianapolis where I worked for a number of months for a one-man, one secretary
advertising agency. We were tasked with selling the Handy Flame® cartoon
character to natural gas companies around the country. Handy Flame was
the gas industry’s equivalent of Reddy Kilowatt®, spokesman for the
electric utilities in those days. Bill Rohr, Jr., its creator, was a wonderful
person who took me under his wing. One of our other accounts was the Super
Duper Pooper Scooper® for dog owners. My outdoor career could only
go up from there.
After a hot summer in Indianapolis in an old walk-up apartment with
a crying baby, very little furniture, sleeping on a mattress on the floor,
and realizing I did not really want to spend the rest of my career calling
on natural gas companies, it was time for a change. Alice and I loaded
up our young son and all our belongings in our used 1953 Chevy and headed
up U.S. 31 home to South Bend, Indiana where I was born and raised.
HOME TO SOUTH BEND Mom and Dad took us in for a couple of months while I searched for
a job, and it was not easy. It was during a recession in the late ’50s,
and jobs were very difficult to find. Advertising, especially, is a difficult
profession in which to secure a foothold. Fortunately, there was an employment
agency in The Lafayette Building in downtown South Bend where I had worked
during high school and college at my Uncle Bill’s commercial photography
studio, The Lattimer Studios. The owner put me onto a job interview at
The Studebaker-Packard Corporation a few blocks south. I spent three years
there working in the market research department as a market analyst (basically
I was a statistics gatherer), first for Dick Detzler, later for Larry Windecker.
Both taught me a great deal about life, marketing and how to interview
people. Much of the secret, as you may know, is listening more than one
talks. Which, as it turned out, was also one of Fred’s secrets of communicating
with people.
While at Studebaker’s I was one of the contacts with the other
automotive companies exchanging sales data every 10 days. General Motors,
Ford, American Motors and Studebaker would all call one another at the
end of each 10-day period and report on model shipments during the time.
It provided all of us with a yardstick with which to measure our share
of market. I understand they all later ended this 10-day reporting tradition.
One of my other tasks each 10 days was going up to the top floor in
the Studebaker administration building and updating the sales charts in
the board of directors room, just off the president’s office. Heady stuff
for a young kid just out of college. But it also allowed me to see the
continued downward sales trend, and I knew that the company couldn’t survive.
I began looking for an escape route.
CLIMBING THE LADDER My father was a journeyman photo engraver in South Bend, and I had
worked as an errand boy for him many years before, while in junior high
school, delivering zinc and copper advertising printing plates to the many
advertising agencies around town. I got to know many of the account executives
at the agencies. This was bolstered when I later worked for my uncle at
his photography studio and would often deliver photographic prints to them
for use in advertising layouts. It was, thus, due to my family’s reputation
in the advertising field that Paul Fergus gave me an opportunity at his
small, four-person agency. There I worked on accounts for pole barns, a
regional gasoline distributor and Frolic® travel trailers.
After a while at the Fergus agency, I had an opportunity to join the
much larger Juhl Advertising Agency in nearby Elkhart, Indiana. My uncle
Bill had a branch photography studio there to service the many mobile home,
travel trailer and musical instrument companies in the area. Juhl was one
of Indiana’s hottest agencies at the time and was founded by Leif Juhl,
a former sales executive at Selmer Band Instrument Company.
While at Juhl, I worked on the Skyline Mobile Home account and Travel
Equipment Corporation’s (TEC) camping conversion for Ford Econoline and
Dodge vans in addition to the NIBCO account. I really enjoyed my three
years at Juhl and found Leif Juhl to be a wonderful mentor. A “prince of
a gentleman” as we would say in those days.
One poignant situation comes to mind that had a lot to do with molding
my character and way of relating to people. Magazine space salesmen regularly
call on advertising agencies and attempt to convince their media directors
and account executives to advertise in their publications. One day a new
media space salesman pulled up in front of the old Juhl mansion on Harrison
Street in Elkhart to introduce himself and to make his pitch. When he got
to the door there was an old man crouched down working on the threshold,
obviously a janitor of some kind, dressed in casual old work clothes. The
new space salesman very rudely pushed his way past the old man saying that
he had an appointment with the president of the agency and couldn’t be
late. The old man moved aside, interrupted at an inopportune moment in
his repairs.
You can guess the rest of the story. When the space salesman was finally
ushered into the president’s office 10 or 15 minutes later, there sat the
old man in his janitor’s work clothes behind the desk. It was Leif Juhl,
the founder of the agency. That ad sales guy learned an important lesson
that morning, but so did the rest of us at the agency once the word had
spread. And the fact that I mention it now 40 years later is evidence of
the fact that it taught me a valuable lesson about how to treat everyone
equally and with respect. That, too, is something that was solidified by
Fred Bear. Fred treated everyone with the same amount of respect, whether
you were a janitor sweeping floors out in the plant, an international celebrity,
a Maharajah, a movie star, or politician that he met along the way.
THE YEAR FROM HELL A Juhl client in Canton, Ohio was looking for an advertising manager,
and the job paid $10,000 a year. I was ready to get out from under my family’s
reputation in my home area and strike out on my own. While I didn’t work
on the Ohio account at the time, I was extremely impressed when I went
over to Canton with the account supervisor and met Woody Simpson, the president
of Kennetrack Bi-Fold Doors and Washington Cabinet Hardware, both subsidiaries
of Ekco Home Products. Woody was a 30-something Harvard MBA. He was a devout
Mormon with a quiet, gentle, no-nonsense manner, and I liked him immediately
along with the other folks I met on that trip. When offered the position,
I immediately accepted it.
Our year in Canton turned out to be a year from hell. Not long after
we moved into a beautiful split-level rental home in a suburb of North
Canton the rains came and our bottom level flooded, ruining many of our
personal items. Then the well went bad. And our oldest son, Mike, started
hemorrhaging from a tonsillectomy, the same thing that had killed my wife’s
brother. Bless her, Alice, did the best she could with three small children
at that time, ages 6, 4 and 2. Our daughter, Beth, and son, Scott, had
been born while we were living in South Bend and they, in addition to Mike,
our oldest, gave her a handful.
Then American Home Products, a giant conglomerate that owned many brand
name companies, decided it would acquire Ekco Home Products Company, our
parent company. The head honcho came to town, had lunch with us in our
small company lunch room, and promptly chopped off the two top levels of
management, including Woody Simpson. I was absolutely devastated. While
I could undoubtedly have stayed with the company and worked there for many
years, the challenge and opportunity of learning so much that I saw in
Woody Simpson was gone.
One day, not long after the American Home Products acquisition of our
company, I noticed a display ad in the employment section of Advertising
Age newspaper. It seemed that an advertising agency in Ft. Wayne, Indiana
was looking for an account executive to work on several of its accounts.
The layout looked familiar, and I remembered that Bob Schumaker, an artist
I had worked with at Juhl in Elkhart had subsequently gone to Ft. Wayne
to work at Bonsib Advertising. Bob had a wonderfully clean style and he
and I had worked closely together during my time at Juhl. I called Bob
to tell him I had seen his ad, really with no thought of applying for the
job, just reaching out to an old friend while I was depressed and lonely
in Ohio.
Bob told me that what Bonsib was looking for was right down my alley
in the outdoor field. He knew of my background in camping and hunting,
instilled in me by my father and my Uncle Jack Ream, with whom I went on
my first deer hunting trip at about the age of 14. Uncle Jack was an electrician
at Studebaker’s and he and my Dad converted the old Studebaker mail truck
into a camper that we took up into northern lower Michigan on hunting trips.
Bob and I had often fished together when I worked at Juhl, and he convinced
me to come over to Ft. Wayne and interview for the Bonsib opening. After
a good interview with Tom Blee and Jack Kerley, I was offered the job.
I accepted and went to work in June 1966, on the account of an archery
company in northern lower Michigan headed up by a man named Fred Bear.
BONSIB AND FRED BEAR
Fred Bear and Dick Lattimer in planning meeting for the Fred Bear Museum
:
Fred and Mrs. Bear at the Bonsib offices in Ft. Wayne to go over
the proposed brochure for the new Fred Bear Museum. Left to Right: Mrs.
Bear, Fred Bear, Dick Lattimer, John Bonsib and Mike Haller (with back
to camera).
Fred had hunted polar bears twice before, in 1960 and 1962. One bear
plunged through the ice after being arrowed and was lost. Another charged,
and Fred’s Inuit guide had to stop it with his rifle. It dropped just nine
yards from Fred and could no longer be considered a bow and arrow kill.
Finally, in April 1966, Fred headed north again, this time with a film
crew from the ABC-TV “American Sportsman” television program. Film star,
Cliff Robertson, who had just portrayed John F. Kennedy in the movie, “PT-109,”
also went along on the trip.
Fred and the group arrived in Alaska on April 19. They camped out in
tents on the polar ice, sometimes with temperatures of minus 30 degrees
and windstorms of about 30 knots for almost a month and never saw a polar
bear. Cliff Robertson had to leave for another engagement on April 28,
but Fred, his hunting buddy, Bob Munger, and the film crew stayed at it.
Finally on May 11, after 25 days on the polar ice, Fred was able to down
a polar bear with his bow. This time the bear neither fell through the
ice nor charged the hunters. It counted as a bona fide bow and arrow kill.
It was evening, just a month or so after Fred got his polar bear, when
Tom Blee and I pulled up in front of the Bear Archery plant on my first
visit. I was almost physically sick I was so nervous. I knew that if Fred
and his sales director, Bob Kelly, did not like me, I would not be asked
to work on the account. Then what would happen? I had heard from Tom on
the drive up about Bob Kelly, a fiery Irishman, who was a stern task-master.
So in addition to meeting a legend, I was about to meet a marketing dynamo.
Both scared me half-to-death. Was I up to the challenge?
Fred, Kelly and Charlie Kroll, Bear’s advertising manager at the time,
who was also Fred’s son-in-law, had come back after supper to meet with
us. I was introduced first to Charlie, then to Kelly and finally taken
in to meet Mr. Bear. His huge paw swallowed mine when I shook his hand,
and his clear blue eyes looked deeply right into mine as we were introduced.
After Tom and Kelly got us settled, they left the room to talk about some
of the advertising plans we had driven up to talk about, including inserting
a photo of Fred’s recent polar bear trophy into the back cover of the 1967
Bear Archery catalog already in production. It really looked out-of-place
on our back cover, but it was shorthand to America’s bowhunters that Fred
had finally downed a polar bear with his bow. In 1966 Fred was also inducted
into the Sporting Goods Hall of Fame and was a guest on the “Tonight Show.”
When Tom and Kelly walked out of Fred’s office I was left to squirm
in my chair. Fred asked me to tell him something about myself. And I briefly
did, including the fact that while I loved the outdoors, fishing, camping
and the like, I was more of a fisherman than a hunter. Other than the couple
of deer hunts I had gone on earlier with my dad and Uncle Jack, I really
was too busy working and getting started in my career in advertising and
public relations to go off hunting on my own.
Fred seemed to like my honestness, and we discussed a couple of things
we’d be working on together. After mentioning these things, Fred realized
that I had not written anything down and he pulled a small spiral notebook
out of his shirt pocket and told me that he wanted me to start carrying
one. He said there was no way I could possibly remember everything that
we’d talk about in the future and that he had found that carrying such
a pocket notebook had always been a good thing to do. Almost four decades
later I still carry one every day, even though I am now retired and almost
70 years old. Fred then said that he didn’t really know if I’d work out,
but that he would give me a chance to work on his account. I said that
was fair enough. We shook hands on it and that was that!
GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS Little did I know that before it was over both Fred Bear and Bob Kelly
would end up treating me like the son they had never fathered. Kelly had
an adopted boy, Mike, and an adopted daughter, but neither man had any
natural children of their own. Mrs. Bear raised a nephew, Mike Steger,
whom she considered a son. Fred liked Mike, who taught at the Air Force
Academy and later worked in the space program, but neither Kelly nor Fred
really had someone they were around everyday at that stage in their lives
that they looked upon as a son. Kelly had recently gone through a divorce
and remarriage prior to my first visit to Grayling. He and his adopted
son never really seemed to relate too well to one another.
But all that relationship with the two men was off in the future. Fred
took Tom and me out to see the foundation being laid for the new Fred Bear
Museum while we were in town. I left Grayling the next day with Tom, after
those first meetings, pumped up and excited about what lay ahead of me
with Bear Archery and in the archery industry.
The Fred Bear Museum was a very successful Grayling venture for many
years, logging about 150,000 visitors each year. It was a beautiful facility
with a huge trophy and artifact room at one end with a cathedral ceiling,
a fully stocked archery pro shop and gift shop at the other end, and a
good-sized theatre upstairs in an A-frame design. Fred also had a small
hideaway on the second floor. Just outside the pro shop doors there was
an outdoor archery shooting lane for people to try out Bear Archery products.
The museum opened to the public in September 1967, with two huge fiberglass
bear replicas guarding the entrance. Alaskan totem poles framed each side
of the entry.
Bonsib’s Mike Haller and I, along with photographer, Dale Stedman, of
Ft. Wayne, went back to Grayling and photographed the museum and its contents
shortly after it opened for a well-received Fred Bear Museum booklet. Fred
and Mrs. Bear journeyed to the Bonsib Advertising Agency offices in Ft.
Wayne, Indiana to approve the final copy and design. The copy had been
written by the agency’s Bill Aurelius, who wrote much of the Bear Archery
advertising in those days prior to my move to Grayling in late 1971 to
open the “in-house” advertising agency for the company. Aurelius was a
very talented writer and a super guy. Frankly, I learned a great deal about
copywriting from Bill that I later applied when I opened the in-house agency
for Fred and later wrote all the advertising myself. I had taken a course
in copywriting in college, but nothing beats doing it out in the real world
with real products that one is responsible for promoting.
One adventure probably better not told involved what happened to Mike
Haller and I the night prior to the photography shoot at the new Fred Bear
Museum in Grayling. We were staying at the old Au Sable Motel. Mike and
I were sharing a six-pack in the motel room when I asked him if he’d like
to see where I had been out bowhunting with the guys from Bear Archery.
We piled into the old, heavy, Bonsib Buick and headed west toward Camp
Grayling, the permanent National Guard Camp just outside town and west
of the Fred Bear Museum. We drove in the dark west of the camp roads toward
Sharon Trail and then along it until we reached the area where I had been
bowhunting. Wanting to show Mike where the deer had been crossing, I decided
to just drive a bit farther down the sandy road that was all torn up by
training tanks. As I said, the Buick was heavy, and the sand was deep,
and before we knew it we were stuck. No amount of rocking the car back
and forth would work, and we knew that we had to abandon it and head to
the Camp Grayling headquarters area many miles to the east over the rolling
hills in the dark of the night. We did not even have a flashlight. And
there were black bears in the area.
Mike Haller had served in Vietnam as a Navy medic, so I knew I
was in good hands. Still, I really started to worry. I was exhausted,
more
than a bit spooked in the dark, walking along a rolling road I could
hardly see, and it was getting later and later. And I had to be up
fresh in the morning to supervise the important photo shoot, or my butt
would be grass, and Tom Blee would be the lawnmower.
Mike and I walked for what seemed like hours and finally reached the
Camp. We were both totally breathless as we staggered into the office of
the officer on duty in the only lit-up building that we could find. When
we told him that we were stranded out on Sharon Trail many miles from his
office and needed a tow, he informed us that the Camp telephone could only
be used for government business. Needless to say, we were irate. We faced
another three- or four-mile walk in the pitch-black dark back to the small
Grayling community before we could stumble into a Shell station and tell
them our woes. In the morning they drove out, picked up our vehicle on
a hook, and we proceeded with our photo shoot.
That’s one night I’d just as soon forget!
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