By King Harris ~
Now that I have been excused from my radio work at KVEC, I find myself once again in that pleasurable position of — What do I want to do next with my life?
Thanks to the support of Brett Colhouer, publisher of the Tolosa Press, I still get the opportunity to express myself on paper and online, which is not so much of a warning, as it is a reminder that I’m still around and not that easy to get rid of.
It has been my experience over the years that if you find yourself on the beach (and out of a job) that one of the first things you can do is to join a non-profit organization so you can continue to help the community.
Or you can go into advertising like my dad did for a countless number of years. He got into radio as soon as he got out of the service at the end of WWII, but decided to join an ad firm called Brooks, Smith, French and Dorrence in San Francisco. It seemed at the time that all ad agencies had four names or more.
We lived in Woodside, a small country community about 40 miles south of the city, and he would commute daily by train. I remember my mom picking him up at the Redwood City train station every night when trains were puffer bellies yet to become diesels.
He became a truly original Mad Man, although he never smoked. He soon started his own ad agency called, Harris, Harlen, and Wood in the late 1950s, and landed the Folger’s Coffee account, which in 1958 became the official roast of the newly arrived San Francisco Giants baseball team.
Some of the stories he came home with weren’t necessarily legendary but they were rather amusing. “Hey,” he would say on any given night, “What do you think of this?” having just acquired RC Cola; “Goodbye Pepsi, so long Coke…”
“Gee that’s fine dad,” I replied, “but is it wise to mention you competitors?”
Crestfallen, he had to think that one over. My favorite line I remember the most came in the form of a joke. “Son, do you know how spot a good ad man?” “No, dad, how’s that?” “He sits with his wife at night and tells her how good it’s going to be.”
Even at the age of 7, I got the idea. By the time I was a senior in college, he had divorced my mom, married a new gal, and moved to Bloomberg Hills near Detroit as a vice-president of the prestigious ad firm, Cambpell-Ewald, who happen to have Chevrolet — the world’s biggest client at the time.
At the end of the summer 1967, I went to visit him for a week. I got to see Motown Record’s Hitsville USA. We traveled to Bradford, Penn., where he tried to land an account with the Zippo Lighter factory, and spent some time in New York City, where he was invited to go as a higher-up in his agency, but the politics had become so severe that he turned it down and quit the business, deciding to move back to the Monterey Bay Area.
I asked him, “What are you going to do now, dad?” “I’m going to write,” he declared. And he did, mostly about his seven Vizsla dogs, which all looked the same.
One story involved his travels with the dogs back to the East Coast. At one motel stop in the Midwest, the female owner of the motel kept seeing my dad walking what appeared to be the same dog for hours, so she called the police charging him with animal abuse. She had no idea he had been walking seven different dogs.
I’m sure if my dad were alive today, he would ask me the same question I once asked him. “What are you going to do now son?” “Well, dad, I’m going to write. About you.”
