Don’t Follow the Leader
The past few weeks, I have
been going through more than fifty-five years many years of accumulated narishkeyt
(nonsense) that filled sixteen file cabinet drawers.
I attempted to either sort
or shred as much hubris as possible, and started by examining the contents of
file folders that were connected with my misdirected and my ill-advised choice
to become advertising major in college in Michigan. I sank deeper into the
business mire after I graduated in 1958, when I made a questionable segue into
the real world of advertising and business. I finally escaped with my sanity
mainly intact in 1969, when I began a second career as a university professor.
Go East Young Man
Beginning in November 1965
and lasting through June 1969, I served in several capacities for the Lehn
& Fink Industrial Products Division of Sterling Drugs, Inc. I started in
the L&F manufacturing town of Toledo, Ohio, working in offices in Lynn’s
Annex, about a block away from the factory.
When I was hired as Advertising & Sales Promotion Manager, it was
with the understanding that all of us in the business operations would be
transferred the following spring to a new corporate building in Montvale, N. J.
I was excited to be living just a short
drive from New York City.
When the move was
completed, my wife Rochelle, year-old daughter Amy, our dog Troubles, our cat
named Woe, and I found a rental in the lower level of an old mansion in the
bucolic village of Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, not far from headquarters.
We Forgot to Tell You
After the physical move was
completed and we had settled in, my immediate superior, R. M. Fenner, the
marketing director, invited me into his office to share what he considered good
news.
Fenner told me that I was
to have a new position and exciting new responsibilities as Creative Services
Manager of our three industrial products divisions. John C. Johnson, who had no
previous experience whatsoever in advertising and sales promotion, would now be
my boss, and would inherit my previous title and job responsibilities. Johnson
was brought from Toledo not because he had any special talent, but because he
had worked for L&F in Toledo for twenty years, and understood how each
division functioned. While I was being demoted, Fenner happily announced that
the company was giving me a raise in pay.
Our three industrial
product divisions sold an extensive line of both building and cleaning products
in large quantities, to ensure that all areas within any business were as
sanitary as can be. They included toilet bowl cleaners, urinal blocks
named Sanidomes, bug sprays and a variety of disinfectants. Lysol was the
National Laboratory division’s best selling product, and in 1911, poisoning by
drinking Lysol was the most common means of suicide in Australia.
Over the River
Lehn & Fink
Products was the strict and all-controlling parent company, with headquarters
in New York City. Walter N. Plaut, its President, was constantly checking the
goings on of all divisions, especially those in the hinterlands across the
Hudson River. Of the 50,000 employees working for L&F at the time, there
was only one beard in the company, and it adorned the face of the man in charge
of Givenchy Perfume.
In anticipation of possible
deviation from the straightforward, clean-shaven norms the company had
established, just prior to the 1966 holiday season, President Plaut sent out a
warning memo to all Lehn & Fink employees. It read in full, “The pressures
of the holiday season have made some of us lax in our personal grooming habits.
With our permanent position in the cosmetics field, it is doubly important for
Lehn & Fink Management employees to be impeccably groomed at all times.
Idiosyncracies such as
moustaches, beards, long sideburns, and unkempt appearances cannot be
tolerated. As management of Lehn & Fink, we must be an example at all times
to our fellow employees.”
Take My Razor, Too
My wife surprised me just
prior to the December 1966 holiday season, which is adamantly known and
defended as “Christmas” by conservatives, right-wing Christians, and GOP
candidates trying to capture the Evangelical and Tea Party votes. She announced
that she had purchased airline tickets for herself and our
year-and-one-half-year-old daughter Amy, and was going back for the holidays to
visit her Mother in Detroit.
I was clean-shaven at
the time, although I had beards before, and decided it was time to grow another
one. I started it on the weekend of the 17th, and when I came to
work on Monday the 19th, I had a relatively short, barely noticeable
stubble. We were given an extended holiday weekend from Thursday afternoon the
22nd through Monday the 26th, and when I returned to
work, I avoided meeting with people, and covered my chin whenever I walked down
any corridor. After another short workweek and an extended New Years’
weekend off, when I returned to work in early January, I decided against hiding
my growth. People who saw me with the start of my now 50-year-old beard, either
looked twice or did not notice it at all, but I did hear comments like,
“There’s something different about you,” or “Did you lose weight?”
An Unusual Pecking Order
While Plaut detested facial
hair, I learned that the head of our industrial products group had an opposite
viewpoint, which he discussed with me in a session over adjoining urinals in
Montvale. Jim Peck was a sixty-two-year-old, well dressed, well groomed, but
not that well-informed leader, who wanted to survive at L&F until he was
able to receive a full retirement package in three years.
As I was watering a
Sanidome, I felt the presence of someone to my left, who said in a quiet voice,
“Don’t get rid of it.” Since I was holding on to my urinary organ at the time,
I told him that I had no intention of doing so.
He finished his effort, zipped up, and then looked under the door to the
commode to be sure no one was there.
“No, I mean the beard,” and
then he sadly confessed that he relished his vacation each year aboard his
yacht, for he could grow a beard without any worry about being caught doing so.
“I’d shave it completely
off before I left the yacht, but how I would have loved to keep it, but
couldn’t.” He knew that he could at least be reprimanded or disciplined if he
kept it, and didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize his retirement.
Let’s Wrap It Up
At 90 Park Avenue, Walter
N. Plaut may have been the head of Lehn & Fink, however above him on the
organization chart sat Glenn Johnston, the President of Sterling Drugs, Inc.
Glenn was a genial gentlemen, whom I met when I won a corporation-wide photo
contest in 1966. In 1967, while on a business trip, he noticed that his hotel’s
toilet seat was wrapped with a paper band that listed a cleaning product that
was in competition with our Lysol Liquid Toilet Bowl Cleaner.
He sent a seemingly
innocuous, typed memo to Jim Peck, wondering if any of his divisions were doing
anything similar to promote their products. It bore Glenn Johnston’s firm
signature. Peck attached a typed cover note to Johnston’s memo, and sent it to Fenner,
suggesting that he look into it as soon as possible. Fenner, in turn, scrawled
his concern on this vital subject, and passed it on to my boss, John C.
Johnson.
This activity had all
occurred late in the previous day, and when I came in the next morning, I found
the pleading package on my desk. I instantly noticed it, since John had written
on the top page, “Hot! Hot! Handle Immediately!” and done so in bright red ink.
I went next door to John’s
office clutching the memos, and told him that I was working on three projects
that had important deadlines approaching. With a stone cold look, he replied,
“It came from Park Avenue,” and dismissed me as he turned to other hot items on
his desk.
I reluctantly decided to
follow through, and knew that there were many motels nearby along Highway 17. I
left my office to search for a solution to this penetrating problem. After an
hour of driving up and down the highway, and stopping at a dozen or so motels,
I had captured five toilet bowl bands, and called my wife. I told her to pack a
lunch for the three of us, and that we’re going out on a picnic. She worried
that I may have lost my job, but I assured her it was part of a research
project I had been entrusted with by higher authority.
We had a glorious day
together, enjoying a picnic, hiking and just relaxing. It stimulated my love
for research. When I came into work the next morning, John C. Johnson was apoplectic,
and asked what had happened to me. I proudly held up the enemy’s toilet bowl
bands that I had captured, and said that I knew the importance of following
through on Glenn Johnston’s memo, and spent all of the previous day doing so.
He apologized profusely for
his furor, told me that I had done an excellent job, and thanked me for my
efforts. I went back to my own office, put all the bands I had gathered along
with the memos into a file folder, opened up a file drawer, and placed the
folder in the very back. When I left L & F for academia two years later, no
one had ever asked about my research endeavor and its results.
There’s More to Come
The experience back east
came during the Vietnam War years, and while corporations were fighting for
greater profits, other battles raged. We
became volunteers for the Eugene McCarthy campaign for President in 1968,
attended rallies and marches against the war in New York City, and wrote
letters to newspapers in protest of our country’s ill-advised actions. The lack
of interest within my company, inspired me to go west in 1969, and I began
teaching at San Jose State, hoping to make a bigger difference in our society, other
than extolling the virtues of a toilet bowl cleaner.
