It came within a week, and the answer was positive. I had the job and a lot of senior JWT people who had their eye on that assignment were, in a word, upset. The company wanted me to leave immediately, and that’s when I had a hitch in the plans. The lease I had signed with the new apartment building was for three years, and since I was one of the first few tenants in the sixteen-story building, there was no leniency in breaking the lease.
I told the personnel department about the problem, thinking that would be the end of it. I couldn’t imagine them paying thousands of dollars for the term of the lease to send me to Coral Gables. They told me to go back to find out on what terms I could buy out the lease.
The following day, I discussed the situation with the various managers of the complex, explaining that I was being relocated by my company, and returned to Thompson the next day and told them the amount. No questions were asked, and they didn’t bat an eye. I went home on the subway that night with substantial cash in my briefcase, and considering the two subway rides, and the empty field I had to cross when the next building was scheduled to go up in a rough section in Queens, I was nervous as a cat. Had I been held up, and lived, it would have been tough to explain, and I certainly couldn’t ask for cash for a second try.
The next day the lease was released and the company informed. They scheduled the following week in September 1963 for the move and set up the movers. We began packing.
INTO THE EVERGLADES Arriving in Florida, I found a house we could afford to rent in Perrine, about a thirty-minute commute to Coral Gables. It had a screened-in swimming pool in a peaceful community on the edge of the Everglades. It was beautiful.
Since we lived in the Everglades and only a couple blocks from the Atlantic Ocean, I thought it would be great to have a Jeep. You know, safaris and all. Shock absorbers on Jeeps had yet to be invented back then, and when I took Tetlow for a cruise, after the third time her head hit the canvas top, I knew I would be trading it in the next day. I did and ended up with a second-hand Nash Rambler. Not the most macho car in the world but survivable for the commute to Coral Gables.
We were finally ready for another dog and adopted a Belgian shepherd. It was the only animal we wanted but we got gratis many more.
The treasured swimming pool turned out to be a good early lesson, and I’ve never had one since. Aside from the bobcats that came down our neighborhood chimneys, scorpions in our child’s crib, and alligators in our garages when it flooded, snakes often swam in the pool. Spiders, wasps, and mice floated on top, and scum clogged the skimmer. To keep the pool clean, it would have had to be filled with sulfuric acid. After I gave up wearing out skimmer nets sweeping the accumulated live and dead bodies from the pool, I hired a service and quickly found out that it cost me more than I was paying in rent.
We also put up with termites, ants, spiders, and land crabs. Our small community was tucked off a major highway running along the coast. When the land crabs invaded, they poured into our garage and carpeted the ground outside the house. They also carpeted the highway. We learned to drive slowly through them, and they would part like the Red Sea. Many drivers thought it was fun to run over them. But the land crab’s sharp, tough claws wreaked their revenge. We could hear the tires being blown out on the highway from our house and felt good that the speeders were receiving poetic justice.
As creative and account executive for Pan American, I was responsible for all Latin American Division advertising, including television, radio, cinema, newspaper, and magazine advertising and publicity. Our Coral Gables office worked with senior Pan Am management, including Pan Am President Juan Trippe. He allowed me to do some pretty creative things with Pan Am’s sacrosanct world globe logo, even picturing it bouncing along on the tarmac behind a departing jet with the logo missing from its tail. Announcing new flights, the advertising copy read, “Oops! Almost missed our newest 12:45 AM flight to New York” or San Juan or wherever.
The huge Pan Am headquarters of the thirty-seven-year-old company in Miami was set behind a block-long reflecting pool lined with the flags of every country Pan Am served in the Islands and South America. It was a dramatic setting for the Latin-American division of the “World’s Most Experienced Airline,” as its slogan proclaimed.
The division’s advertising was directed, in all languages, to vacationers’ dreams: the islands of Antigua, Barbados, Curacao, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Martinique, Puerto Rico, St. Croix, St. Lucia, St. Maarten, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Trinidad, Nassau, and destinations such as Mexico, Panama, Surinam, British and French Guiana, Honduras, Brazil, and all of South America. Even Aruba, if tourists still want to go there.
We placed ads throughout its service area, and advertised flights from Miami to the New York World’s Fair headlined see toMorrow todAy, and to Rome, Italy, headlined, see yesterdAy toMorrow. We also advertised flights to the Middle and Far East.
Our color magazine centerspreads appeared in Latin-American editions of Time, Life, and Reader’s Digest. One of my ads under the headline Look CLoseLy. this hAppens every dAwn, pictured two jet vapor trails reflected in the pool of the Taj Mahal. These, as the copy read, marked “the swift passage of two Pan American Jet Clippers©—one heading east, the other west—six miles high in the Indian sky.” Airlines flew mostly on time back then.
I was also assigned to creative development for Outboard Marine Corp, the New Jersey and Florida Ford Dealers Associations, and Florida National Bank, which were all handled out of our Coral Gables office.
In mid-1964, Pan Am’s famous headquarters building straddling Park Avenue, and looming over Grand Central Station in New York City was completed, and the Miami headquarters was closed. President Juan Trippe was named chairman of Pan Am, and out of twenty-two people in our Coral Gables office, four were moved back to New York: my boss, Joe Kelleher, our Spanish-language writer, Alfredo Jarrin, our media buyer, Ruth Williams, and me.
