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My focus in art school was building my portfolio to get a job. It never crossed my mind whether I was being prepared to manage people who may work for me one day. This blog is stories from my forty years in advertising and leading/administrating creative groups at some of the world's largest agencies.

Disclaimer: If people are still alive I have changed their names, if they have passed away, then I have just used their first name. I was personally involved in these stories and have one degree of separation from others (I was involved in working with or managing the people but wasn't there when it happened).

Remember while reading this blog that I have had no training ever in HR or business management, yet as the Executive Creative Director, it was my responsibility to handle these situations. Other than running an insane asylum, I can't think of what could possibly be a stranger group to manage than agency creatives.

New York, New York.

After working in St. Louis at Darcy on Budweiser, I moved to New York and began working at Backer Spielvogel. Bill Backer was the creator of the Coke spot that Mad Men depicted Don Draper creating. Bill Backer was as amazing writer, a real Southern Gentleman and a wildly successful agency owner. My fondest memory of Bill is walking through the Milwaukee airport after having held on to the Miller Lite business. As we were passing a bar, Bill said to me, "you know Jim, that was such a good day, I'm gonna get me some popcorn." So I waited outside the bar and Bill emerged without any popcorn. I asked him if they were out of popcorn and he said, "no, but four dollars was way too much for popcorn."

Bill later told me he started wearing bowties in college because you didn't need to dry-clean them as much as ties, and that he saved a bundle! I later designed a creative award called the "Billy Award" which was a gold bow tie, and was honored to be the first recipient of the Billy Award. 

Before joining  Backer I had previously been to New York several times for work but had never spent  much time there. I grew up in a small town in Michigan and had lived in the Midwest and South all my life. I found a small one bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side and moved in with my St. Bernard and sheepdog.

Growing up in Michigan if you passed someone on the street you would always say "hi," whether you knew them or not. This was a practice that I maintained everywhere else that I had lived. After working in New York for maybe three weeks - I was just starting to get used to old people pushing me out of the way as the subway approached - my secretary came up to me and said, "Mr. White, you have to stop saying hi to people in the hallways at work, they think you're weird, we don't do that in New York." I definitely wasn't in Kansas anymore.

Three months after that, that same secretary stopped coming in to work. Eventually we found out that she had caught AIDS from sharing heroin needles and had killed herself. In typical New York dark humor, one of the creatives said that since a third of the guys in the creative department had slept with her, they had better go be tested for AIDS.

Living in New York during the AIDS epidemic was a traumatic experience. Howard, a gay guy I worked with, had on his office wall a picture of himself with a large group of guys vacationing in Egypt. An X was drawn on the faces of over half of them because they had died from AIDS. Howard passed away from the same disease about six months after I had joined the agency. By that time two-thirds of the faces had an X.

They say if you can make it New York, you can make it anywhere. But I would change it to "if you can take it here, you can take it anywhere."