Word: bowers
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...those slick commercial novels about an ad agency. Instead, it is clumsy, serious and painstaking, and perhaps as a consequence, considerably more enlightening. The agency involved is called Gibbs & Wilson, and at G. & W. creativity is king, writers venerated, research unheard of. The hero is Copy Chief Jim Bower, a dour, taciturn fellow known throughout the trade for lines like (to sell a brand of vodka): "Tell your mother-in-law it's potato soup-she'll love it." When Jim sits down to do an ad, he has nothing in front of him but a piece...
...Then Bower's indulgent boss is killed in a cab accident. His replacement as agency head is George Brice, who looks like a druggist and talks fluent corporatese. Brice's reputation is based on the Relief headache-remedy ad, showing a diagram of a headache inside a head being attacked by little cowboys on horses. The cowboys are Relief's ingredient Sooth-X, and they got into the ad by decisively defeating little airplanes, tigers, rocket ships and genies in consumer testing reports. Brice's goal is to replace Gibbs & Wilson's list of luxury...
Neither Brice nor Bower is a very original character. The kind of crisis described here, in which power switched from creative personnel to research-oriented account executives, was a familiar story along Madison Avenue during the recession two years ago. What the author, who is a vice president of Doyle Dane Bernbach, does very convincingly is to convey what life in a big-time agency must be like: the daily routine, the steps up, sideways and down, the monotonous tides of taste and style, the Byzantine rules of client diplomacy. Though the comparison may seem incongruous, Dillon's approach...
...Minneapolis Tribune, a group of reporters organized themselves in February "to promote quality journalism," held some 20 meetings in their homes and exchanged thoughts one Saturday morning at the press club with Tribune President John Cowles Jr., Executive Editor Bower Hawthorne and Managing Editor Wallace Allen. Cowles agreed that the paper needed more rapport with young readers, though he challenged one reporter's notion that Bob Dylan is as important to this generation as Charles Lindbergh was to his. Other results: follow-up discussions between top editors and individual staffers, and a questionnaire from Allen seeking details of specific...
...wedding night is spent in a bower on the edge of a clearing in the jungle, Merilee and Sam and Girl and Alfred surrounded by oleanders and watched over by the spirit of the jade-eyed jaguar and most of the children of Palenque, who hang like exotic globed fruit in the trees above them. Mean temperature 89 degrees Farenheit. During the consummation Merilee meows and meows. Alfred and Girl hardly blink, the jaguar is not surprised, but the children find it strange and wonderful the way gringos do it, and their curiosity is satisfied...