Making a living at advertising art, and managing an art studio, for about forty years and dealing with artists, who usually are individualists, and meeting with advertising men, who are supposed to have the imaginative touch and good selling ideas. There were many that had that gift in large quantities but they had to be practical too. Advertising has got to be built on new ideas that have to be interesting to read and understood by the certain people you are trying to sell. These ad men are interesting, their problems are interesting, and to work with them you got to get the old noodle working to keep up with them and satisfy them and still be practical enough to hit their money appropriations, get results and still make a profit. Naturally it isn't easy but nothing worthwhile is.

Meeting and talking with the best advertising men, with their thinking man's qualities, was a challenge that I really enjoyed. They are their problems were always different - getting an ad to sell overalls, candies, corsets, automobiles, tooth paste, beer, milk, cow feeds, bicycles or cough syrup all required a different angle.

These angles are many and the paths are full of road blocks and rough spots. Arriving at some definite idea and plan means a lot of thinking, planning, research and a lot of good common sense.

These ad men have a distinctly different training than the average business man whose main problems are productions, finances with production costs, quality and selling prices. The ad man takes over the advertising and publicity which requires a different kind of thinking - something like the door to door salesman who knows all the tricks and psychology of selling, which made the lady of the house buy his can opener or a new mouse trap. The successful advertising man has those qualities maybe modified, or with a few new tricks, but fundamentally he is a refined, better trained and better educated duplicate of that door to door salesman.

We really had a lot of fun in the early studio days - both Harvey Campbell and I. Harvey had a lot of these qualifications and could write a certain quality of poetry which he used to change the verses in popular songs which made them successful as builders of morale in the salesmen's organization of any business.

Harvey could sell art, and he could sell himself, which is a wonderful gift. He had lots of ideas and we sold a lot of them with the layout art and words to agencies and merchants that depended on advertising to sell their goods.

I enjoyed this game and grew healthy on it, but not rich is worldly goods, but I got a feeling I was doing things that brought results - when you get that feeling you got something - even if your banker and wife tell you that you are nutty.

I have met, talked and argued with men like Henry Ewald and I think they always respected me although some of them said I didn't adjust very easily. I was proud of that as most people adjust too easily often without digesting the things they were told in glossy, idealistic and humorous words and found out too late that the music was good but the words didn't mean anything.

Not analyzing and thinking over ideas that are given to you either in a flowery speech, or a highly special piece of literature, can make you a communist or a closed - minded unsure man or a hater of ---- and make you think everyone is all wrong but you. Where if you thought the matter out you might find that you are partly wrong yourself as that is most often the case.

Use the same judgment on advertising when you buy anything. Advertising has a lot of this baloney and it pays you to know the inferior qualities as well as the good ones to be satisfied with your purchase - it only means using the brains that nature gifted you with.

Working with a group of artists required a lot of controlled emotions as they are subject to conflicting emotions, artistic impulses and usually are excitable.

Lots of them refused to work before eleven in the morning, some did most of their work nights, some had to have a few shots to do their best work, demanded recorded music to put them in the right mood.

Usually the lettering men couldn't spell and I often wondered why the people and books that taught lettering didn't make them learn spelling but they all seemed to think that was a minor consideration. We had one cartoonist and lettering man that could not spell any word that had over six letters it but he was lucky and got a job on a newspaper and his misspelling was always considered part of his sensor of humor.

We paid them on Thursday so their wives got some of their wages - Saturday afternoons were usually their time for craps or any other available gambling game.

Following directions was difficult to artists as being creative they always figured an advertising man, or customer, was wrong, knew nothing about art or color and the idea of your client always being right, as he paid the bills, and had no effect on these artists.

I remembered one instance when I made a rough sketch for a paint folder, following the client's idea which seemed to me to be a sensible idea of having a white clapboard house with rose bushes in bloom along the front, a mother and child picking them. There was nothing too exciting about it but should have made a sensible and attractive cover. I turned it over to an artist, he seemed to like the idea, walked back to his brushes and drawing table and I was satisfied I would get a good job as he was a very capable artist although subject to artistic wanderings. I was away for a day and when I got back went over to see how the painting was coming along. Boy I got a shock - on his painting was a brick house, white daisies out in front and he but a dog in the picture instead of the child. Naturally I was shocked and had an argument with him but he felt that he had improved the picture and I should tell the customer so. I told him I would give the job to another artist if he wouldn't do it as the customer wanted. He was not too long on money so he painted it over, did a swell job, but stood by his convictions that the first one was better and felt the world was all wrong.

Such events eventually made me try to get an insurance policy for ulcers but I found out you couldn't get that. I learned just to get along with these problems and expect anything so I got along fairly well with the artists and their ideas.

They were not always wrong and often came up with good ideas and improvements in subject matter, colors and composition and it paid me and the clients to listen to them.

One artist with strong ideas, ambitions and dreams was Norman Belgedes who eventually became one of the country's top stage and industrial designers. He did some wonderful jobs such as redesigning the setup of one of our biggest circuses. He did a great job for G.M.C. at the Chicago world's fair besides doing numerous smaller redesigning of industrial products and invented wonderful mechanical games for grown ups and egg heads. His studio had good engineers, layout men, designers in all the mediums from weaving to sculpture and he really did a remarkable job. On the side, he produced a daughter that had beauty and talent and became a well known stage and movie star named Barbara Belgedes.

When I first met him he was a commercial artist with a flair for poster work in a style that followed the German artists of that period. It was a simple, strong massive style that almost seemed shocking and cruel in effect but it really was the forerunner of the modern art that was used in the arts during these later years.

He also was playing around with stage decoration and lighting at this time and it certainly was interesting to me. I could see the possibility of the strong and simple affects he was trying for. It required a lot of nerve to fight the prevailing ways of the stage and he had the will to continue and he suffered a lot and kept at it while trying to make a living at commercial art.

We had hired a girl who handled, and tried to sell his posters. He was a little ahead of the times, both from the art side, painting of reproduction and printing. Eventually he had to fight for his stage and industrial art in a locality that used most of these products.

Just before he left he made a large poster and placed it on a table to be cleaned up and covered by our apprentice the next morning. The boy had four photos to mount and he mounted them on the back of his colored poster and then cut each photo out and left the poster in four pieces. He also left the artist feeling sick and mad and I had to calm him down and keep the apprentice from passing out. Eventually I got the affair straightened out but neither the artist nor the apprentice ever forgot that affair. This apprentice became a good artist but he was always troubled with a funny mind - he told me that often when driving home he would get confused and had a hard time finding out whether he was going home or going to work - he made a good living and raised a family with a mind that he couldn't depend on.

After leaving our studio, Belgedes roamed all over the country trying to sell his ideas. He eventually found a man in New York who financed him and in a few short years his name was well known to the stage, decorating and large business who realized that he had some thing that was valuable to them.

Although I had lots of better artists, better designers, I think that through the years he made the most money and got the best reputation of any of them.

I had one artist who was really a character and had a knack of getting in trouble. During the first war he had the right to sketch any place he wanted - he thought. Some of the places being the water front, docks, boats and factories and the police said he couldn't so they continually picked him up and put him in jail and I was spending a lot of time getting him out. One day he walked into a downtown office building and crawled out of a window onto the fire escape and from there up on the roof where he set up his sketching outfit and went to work. He could be seen from office buildings all around him and people began calling the police and notifying them that there was a German spy sketching the water front. Over the police came and back to jail he went. Then never convinced him that he was doing anything wrong and he kept right on sketching and going to jail. Eventually he got a job at the Detroit Times and had to join the union - from there on the Times and the union had a problem on their hands. The Times couldn't get rid of him as the union took his side and the union couldn't get rid of him as long as he worked for the Times - he was as happy as his disposition let him be. The Times had an old garage for the big shots to park their Cadillac’s and Packard’s inside. He decided he had to put his old battered up Ford in that garage, although the car was outside all the rest of its life, and he went to the union. Believe me they had an argument, almost a strike, but they made room for him in the garage. He continued to think up ways to annoy the union and the Times for two years before they got together to get him off their necks - he lost his job but they had to pay his wages for six months which left him a lot of time to go sketching again and annoy the police and army officials. He eventually admitted he didn't like the army or the police but they retarded his art ambitions so he went back to painting scenery out in the sticks and that trouble was over.