Old Neighborhood Read Online Free PDF Page A

located near Fordham Road.
    I rewrote letters to advertising agencies that had already rejected me, I kept calling Evans, the one employment agent who had bothered to interview me. Finally he arranged to send me to the McCann-Erickson agency. I was nervous about the interview for days, but it turned out to be a perfunctory meeting with a woman in the personnel department who said there were no openings, they would keep my resume on file, and did I realize that it was strongly against me that I had not been in the army yet? I was not close to getting a job. I was ashamed of the place where I lived. Was there anybody at the McCann-Erickson agency, or any Madison Avenue agency, who lived in a neighborhood like mine? I hated the fact that I had to put a Bronx address on my resume. I was convinced my address alone disqualified me.
    By summer’s end, thoroughly frustrated, I joined the army. I found an Army Reserve unit where I could complete my military obligation with six months of active duty. This was not what I had in mind. I wanted to be an advertising man. I had the vision. I had the hat.
    I was not exactly General George Patton in the army. A young man who always had trouble with buttons, hooks and buckles, and who is not mechanically inclined, will not find the army a hospitable place. I had one moment of particular notoriety during basic training when our instructor in the lofty subject of “The Assembly and Disassembly of the M-1 Rifle” stopped the class of two hundred to announce:
    “We have heah a man named Robbins. Remember the name, gentlemen. Robbins has just done what ah have nevah seen in mah life. He has attempted to put the trigger housing group of the M-1 rifle in—upside down. Now that’s a first.”
    My parents came to visit, “What have they done to you?” my mother asked, noting my short haircut, green uniform, green complexion and barracks cough.
    “I’m being integrated into America,” I said.
    She brought me a salami and back copies of Fortune. I closed out my career on active duty in delicious anonymity in my job of distributing clothing to new recruits. The supply hero returned to the Bronx and to the ranks of the unemployed.
    Before I was finished with the army, and vice versa, I went into a subway photo booth and had pictures made of myself in uniform. I took the pictures, clipped them to the top of my resume and sent off copies to the people who had driven me into the arms of Uncle Sam in the first place. I wrote across the top, “Back again! Not draftable!” hoping someone, anyone, would think I was, at the very least, resourceful. Walter Evans called me three days later.
    “Still around, I see.”
    “Yes.”
    “You look terrible in uniform.”
    “I know.”
    “Well, you’re trying. It was a nice idea for a mailing piece.”
    He set up an interview with a man named Colby who owned an advertising agency in Los Angeles. Colby had come to New York looking for several people to work for his agency in California. One of the jobs was for a junior copywriter at $75 a week. I went to Colby’s suite at the Plaza Hotel. He was a large ruddy-faced man in his late forties, who had in his possession my resume with the army photo attached.
    “I like this. It’s a zippy notion. Are you zippy?”
    “Very zippy. The zippiest.”
    “A good, zippy answer,” he said.
    He looked over my portfolio, then examined my resume again.
    “I’m looking for New York types. That’s why I’m here. Is that you?”
    “Is the Pope Catholic?”
    “Good. You’re showing me a lot of zip.”
    He looked at my ads again.
    “The people I have working for me—they’re too slow. You’re not slow, are you?”
    I had run out of zippy. All I could think of was to shake my head no, zippily.
    “That’s not an answer,” he said.
    I was convinced by now that he was crazy and I had no chance for a job here.
    “What do you do for hobbies—do you like to sail?”
    I was going to tell him the truth.
    “I’ll