My first job (after the supermarket in my home town) was in the advertising department of S. Klein Department Stores, Manhattan, in 1969. I was 20, and I commuted from a Westchester County town on the Hudson.
Our offices weren't on 14th Street, where the flagship store was, but on West 35th Street. I hired on as a "proof-room kid," a general gofer, who distributed wait-orders (print ads awaiting approval) to buyers, our legal department and ad execs, archived insert proofs (of ads already run), and went out for coffee.
I graduated to Ad Production, where I took input from our designers and copywriters, marked up the copy and sent it with illustrations to newspapers in the NY/NJ/Connecticut tri-state area, received proofs of the provisional ads, sent them around to be okayed by the merchandise buyers, and scheduled their appearances in the newspapers.
The offices were on a few floors with a building cafeteria, as I recall, on the top floor. The elevators had operators, and apart from the slight funkiness of the building, the place was not unlike the private ad agency in Mad Men (in fact my town was just north of Ossining, where Don Draper lived in the beginning of the series) or the offices in The Apartment, Jack Lemmon's 1960 movie (although none of the elevator operators was nearly as good-looking as Shirley MacLaine).
People really kept bottles of Scotch in their desk drawers with two glasses, and pretty much everybody smoked all the time, cigarettes, cigars and pipes.
“In the song ‘Marry The Man’ from the musical Guys and Dolls, the lyrics mention three department stores: ‘At Wanamaker's and Saks and Klein’s.’ In the song ‘Drop That Name’ from the musical Bells Are Ringing, Judy Holliday’s character surprises the high society crowd when she mentions Klein’s and says, ‘I do all my shopping there.’
“Klein’s is mentioned in Season 2, Episode 7 of Mad Men.” (Wikipedia)
I was laid off in 1970 along with about 25% of the company and next became the Assistant Production Manager and Type Director in Gimbels’ advertising department on 33rd Street - but that's another story.
The New York City of 2022 is a far cry from those days and now I live on the beach in North Carolina. Like Graham Greene's Confidential Agent,"who was in love with a dead woman, I'm in love with a city that no longer exists.
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