Chapter 3

I could still feel his hand on my face when my plane came down at O'Hare the following Monday.

They'd reopened the place two weeks before, and the snow was still piled higher than the parking meters on Michigan Avenue, gray as old dishwater.

The cab radio was playing "Kind of a Drag," by a local band. It was the number one song in America, and I took it personally.

The Chicago office of Ashworth Stoddard was the eleventh floor of a building on North Michigan, over a furrier.

The manager, Stuart Nagle, had been told in 1951 he'd be back in New York within the year, and he still hadn't bought a real winter coat, on principle.

Spencer had said nine men. There was also a tenth person he hadn't counted.

She was at a drawing board by the window with a T-square under one arm, burn holes in the cuffs of her cardigan, and a cigarette she seemed to hold up with her lip.

Lois Wojcik was forty-three, the art director, and for nineteen years men had been telling her she'd make somebody a wonderful secretary.

She looked at my Brooks Brothers shoes.

"You're the promotion."

"That's me."

"Nobody gets promoted to Chicago. Who'd you make mad?"

"Nobody. I'm doing great."

"Sure you are." She went back to her board. "Your yacht's on the desk."

The yacht was for Altmeier's Beer, of Sheboygan, Wisconsin, one of the accounts nobody in New York wanted to touch, along with the floor wax and a little airline.

New York sent the ads, and Chicago took the client to lunch.

This one showed a man in a dinner jacket on the deck of a yacht, holding a pilsner glass up to the sunset, over the words "For the Man Who Has Arrived."

Spencer had knocked it off himself in about an hour in 1965.

"There's boats in Sheboygan," Lois said, not looking up. "They've got perch in them."

Spencer taught me one thing before he taught me anything else, in 1962, with his feet on the desk.

"Find what the client's ashamed of, kid, and put it in the headline."

That's how a funny little German car got famous, and a rental outfit that came in second.

It took me twenty-five years to try it on myself, and you're reading it.

So in March I rented a Ford and drove up to Sheboygan to find out what they were ashamed of.

Phillip Altmeier was sixty-one, third generation, built like one of his own kegs, and he saw me in the tasting room, a long oak cellar under the brewhouse.

He apologized for the cold. He apologized for the chairs. Then he poured me the best beer I ever had in my life and apologized for that.

"It's a shame," he said, looking into his glass. "We don't cook it like the Milwaukee boys, so it doesn't travel. Past Toledo it goes off. My grandfather couldn't sell it past Toledo and neither could my father."

He said the next part the way a man tells you about a son who didn't work out.

"Nobody east of Toledo has ever heard of us."

I wrote that on a coaster while he was still talking.

I always did that. I did it at my father's funeral.

Lois gave me a white page with one bottle on it and the words at the bottom in plain black type.

Nobody east of Toledo has ever heard of this beer. Keep it that way.

She took the cigarette off her lip, which I later learned was applause.

"Who signs this? Everything goes through New York."

"Nobody signs it."

Going around Spencer's desk was a firing offense, and I'd like to call what I did courage. I'd just run out of things he could take.

I drove it up there myself, and Altmeier laughed until he had to sit down on a barrel.

It didn't occur to me that a happy client calls his agency.

The first week of April I walked into the tasting room for his signature, and there at the long table was a gray suit and a winter tan, drinking the beer and asking after Altmeier's grandchildren by name.

"Hello, kid," Spencer said.

He'd brought a projector and a can of film.

We sat in the dark, the three of us, and he ran sixty seconds of color on the whitewashed wall: a sailboat, a lighthouse, a man lifting a glass, Lake Michigan looking the way it has never once looked. It must have cost more than Altmeier's copper kettle.

When the lights came up he took my white page in both hands and read it with real pleasure.

"That's very funny. He's the best kid I ever had."

He set it down, gently.

"Mr. Altmeier, this boy wants you to pay money to tell Wisconsin nobody's ever heard of you. Your grandfather crossed an ocean to get out of some village. You've spent sixty years trying to get past Toledo. I came here to take you past Toledo. He came here to tell you that you never will."

It was the best argument I ever heard in a room. I nearly fired myself.

Altmeier turned his glass around on the oak a few times.

"How many times you been to Sheboygan, Mr. Talbot?"

"Not nearly enough, sir."

"Twice. Nine years." He reached across and pulled the white page over to his side. "You came twice and told me I was a king. He came up in the snow and told me I was from Sheboygan."

He found his pen.

"I know where I'm from."

Spencer shook his hand, finished his beer and told him it was a good beer, he'd always said so.

It was snowing again, in April, and he was putting the film can in a rented Lincoln when I came out to the parking lot.

I'd been looking forward to his being angry for eight weeks.

"You went around me," he said. "Good. That's what I'd have done."

He lit a Parliament out of the wind.

"You know what they're saying in New York? I had it from Advertising Age on Tuesday. Talbot's a genius. He sends his best kid out to the sticks, and six weeks later the sticks are on fire. They want a paragraph. 'The Talbot Touch Goes West.'"

He opened the car door.

"It's my name on your door, kid. Every line you write out here goes in my column. Thanks for the beer."

I stood there in my thin New York coat with the first thing I'd ever won, watching it turn into his.

He started the engine and ran the window down, and I thought he had a note on the copy.

"Joanna says wear a scarf."