Bertie’s Welcome and a New Direction in Advertising

Byron, who’d gotten a job in the art department at Dr. Scholl’s was wrong. I couldn’t find a job anywhere. Not that I knew where to look, really. The want ads were too scary because I didn’t know my way around this huge city. Just looking at the map made me nauseous. And the public transportation seemed extraordinarily complex. The wrong subway or elevated could take you miles out of your way before you realized it. I decided to brave the streetcars. I’d get on a different line every day, get transfers, get on and off looking for a job in the retail stores along each route. The final rent for my half of the North Side apartment I was renting with Sig Eckberg, a high school chum, came due. I was down to five dollars in my pocket and I was supposed to buy the meat for dinner that night. Then it happened. I took the Clark Street Car all the way out to Granville Avenue from downtown. On my last stop of the day, I landed a job selling shoes in a family department store run by the Winsberg’s for a dollar twenty-five an hour and the exact hours I needed. If I ate my lunch on the elevated after class, I could get out there by one and work until closing time at seven plus all day Saturday. Forty hours a week. Fifty bucks a week. Plus twenty percent off on clothes. I could buy those jeans I needed. Mr. Winsberg gave me fifty dollars in advance after he saw me sell one lady five pairs of shoes that very day. He asked, “How did you do that? “I told her five bullshit things about the shoes and one bullshit thing about what nice feet she had.” I said. “Are you sure you’re not Jewish?” he asked. With the name Bernie, I was often mistaken as Jewish in Chicago, but I just smiled. Shortly after I started at Winsberg’s, I met Bertie Davis, who worked there part-time. Her husband, who manufactured pin-setting machines, had recently died and to make ends meet she offered me room and board in her nearby apartment. That really helped shorten up all that travel time. And she was a hell of a cook. Bertie was a severely girdled-in shapely woman of sixty who dressed in skin-tight skirts and silk blouses like she was thirty. She wore more makeup than I’d ever seen on any woman before. She’s the one who taught me how to drink. We started my eduction with Brandy Alexanders at a visit to her daughter’s where I met her son in law, Tom Brown, who worked as copy chief for the famous Leo Burnett advertising agency. He suggested I get into advertising. To see if I had an aptitude for it, he took me through a copy of Life magazine and made me guess what the selling strategy was behind every ad in it. I’d guess wrong, of course, then he’d correct me. It was an eye opener. I had no idea there was a planned scheme to sell to people in ads. I was instantly hooked on the idea of becoming an art director. One look around the Brown’s home told me advertising paid off. After we did the whole magazine, he took me out for a spin in his vintage MG. He gave me the wheel and I cranked that puppy up to one-hundred and ten miles per hour, and we were both swacked on Brandy Alexanders. It’s amazing I remember a thing. Now I was set up. I was in school with a strong career direction and loving it, working at something I knew I was going to like, and I had this terrific new friend, Byron. We did everything together. We went to see foreign movies, to art galleries, and to the beach, and he taught me how to cook. Turned out he was from a large Catholic farm family of thirteen. His parents visited him often and reminded me of our own family a lot. I returned home every chance I got on the Rock Island Rocket. When family members came to pick me up at the depot, I was never happier. Later, I drove home in my new Vauxhall, but the train was my favorite because it was so simple. I got to relax and pull myself together and watch the Illinois scenery go by as I sped homeward thinking about all that was happening in my life. My social life in Chicago was exciting and scary, even daring at times. But I lived through it, somehow. Art school sustained me in every way. I loved the arty people and their Bohemian ways, and I learned to love art. I spent every extra minute I had in the galleries of the Art Institute studying the Paul Klees, Picassos, and Kandinskys. Byron instigated several large art parties during our two-year hitch at Ray Vogue. He’d rent a hall, hire a band and then sell tickets just to cover costs. These were always heavily promoted by our art school clique which included Byron, his roommate, Jim, myself, Donna (a tall foulmouthed redhead from Canada,) Karen (who was secretly going out with a black musician,) and Joanne Posnac, (whose father sent her new clothes every single Monday morning from his department store in Atlanta.) We talked openly of all matters: sexual, artistic, philosophical, and social. We knew about reefers but didn’t smoke them. We were artists, after all; not musicians. I formed all my liberal ideas with these friends and quickly embraced them because they allowed me to accept my own life. All the people around me accepted me for who I was. Period. It erased all those feelings of being second class I had had in high school. My own prejudices melted away as I met and enjoyed the company of a diverse universe of artists. Gay and straight, all colors and all social levels united by art. “No one is free until everyone is free.” I have no idea who first said that to me, but it was so hopeful and so full of truth that I never forgot it. I heard it to mean that if you prejudge someone or oppress them, you are the slave of the injustice you bring to them and can never know true peace yourself. I have never had any moment of feeling inferior in my adult life. I know the meanness of prejudice and discount it instinctively. I think because Mom and Dad loved me so much, and because my brother and sisters have always been so close that I’ve felt, somehow, protected from harm, always.