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I Remember Papa Bear
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.
HOME TO SOUTH BEND
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
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
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.
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 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
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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