How Did I Get Here? by Bruce McCall

How Did I Get Here? by Bruce McCall

Author:Bruce McCall [McCall, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-11-24T00:00:00+00:00


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My arrival in Detroit coincided with another epic change: the accumulated cobwebs of the fifties were being broomed away, even here. The nation’s mood was shifting. The era of the befinned, bechromed behemoth as the ideal car for American buyers couldn’t be sustained. The luxury of extravagance was collapsing from terminal fatuousness, speeded by a shove from smaller, cheaper, infinitely more practical European, then Japanese, cars.

The big V-8 had been all but a birthright to most Americans, who deplored the drop in status of a downsized car. Now the Roadblaster El Supremo Limited’s tailfins were losing their novelty: they looked stupid. Chrome bumpers, trim, medallions, and such were becoming gauche. Detroit awoke one day in the early sixties to find the American car buyers’ tastes were changing fast. And so began Detroit’s evolutionary move to safer, sanely sized, fuel-efficient cars styled to look as sober as a judge compared with the blimps of yesteryear. Chevrolet spent big on full-page newspaper ads as fine as any competitor’s. But newsprint can blotch the sexiest car photo, so Jim Hastings, Campbell-Ewald’s art director, skirted this problem. Jim commissioned great pen-and-ink illustrators like Bruce Bomberger to provide big, gorgeous, black-and-white renderings—starring a Chevrolet or two—that filled almost a whole newspaper page, without the blemishes common to photo reproductions.

I knew I would be committing seppuku if I tried passing off my Corvette copy as David E. Davis–style prose. It read the way he talked: breezily laid-back, tossing off casual insights, never heavy-breathing or macho. All four hundred words unrushed and mellow as a summer’s day. A Davis Corvette ad was a feast of delicious word-pictures. What a way to sell a sports car. I swore off imitating the master; I was neither old enough nor worldly enough to ape that voice. Finding my own would require a delicate balancing of confidence and amiability. No chest thumping: not even a car nut would stand braggadocio. And in the end it all had to sound Corvettish.

Campbell-Ewald was too big, its layers of command too complex and individual tasks too varied, to allow an intimate atmosphere. We creative drones seldom even saw our ostensible partners, the account executives. A fragmented organizational system kept Chevrolet car and truck creative groups physically separate. The TV creative department was a ten-minute walk from that of its print coevals. Print copywriters and art directors, the creative infantry, worked in rectangular cubicles no bigger than they had to be to hold a copywriter, his typewriter, and a small wooden credenza. Drawing boards replaced the typewriters in the cubicles where art directors sat. I wish I’d pilfered, or even paid for out of my pocket, the big old Underwood that came as standard equipment in my cubicle. You could drop one of those machines to the street from the tenth floor and it might bounce but it wouldn’t break. What most endeared it to me was its elegant typeface. It transformed banalities into profundity and ad copy into deathless prose. I’d type nonsense just to marvel at the crisp authority it bestowed on everything it typed.



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