Author: Jack Byrne
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Don’t Go To Work Today Rev.
Revision for “Don’t Go to Work Today.” created on 15 February, 2015 @ 17:17 [Autosave] Title Don’t Go to Work Today. Content In 1970, the New York City economy was not so hot and getting colder and the menswear industry was colder than that. Denim was hot, but tailored clothing was not, thanks to the…
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A Man in Briefs
These will be short, short stories containing highlights of my long-winded life. Bob Hope Tony Bennett Rocky Graziano Vladimir Putin Gower Champion Tex Antoine Steve Gordon Casey Stengel BOB HOPE In 1967, as executive vice president of an advertising agency (Mogul Baker Byrne Weiss), I hired a one-time Hollywood actor named Roger Anderson.…
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The RIP Roarin’ Russian 90s!
If you ever wondered about how an aging American would dive into a burgeoning “mafiaocrasy” where partners were killed, enemies “taken out”, money easily made and, frequently, stolen and line-tapping was common and lying was a way of life, then, you have come to the right writing. The path that led me to spend nearly…
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Highs and Lows
Intro: Under this umbrella will be shiny and stormy moments, randomly accessed from faulty memory and organized in no particular logical order or significance. Skip around and enjoy. THE EARLIEST DAYS My first eight years were spent living amongst nearly a dozen “lace curtain” Irish: The Byrnes of 1326 Dean Street, Brooklyn, NY. Growing up…
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Man of All Trades …
Stories within this site include my life as a Chief Life Guard, Marine, Soldier, Track Star, Salesman, Ad Man, Actor, Entrepreneur, Visionary in Vision business, Developer of Russian Business, Professional Gambler (Blackjack counter), Real Estate Broker,and, of course, husband and father.
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Arnold Stream, Esq
These will be stories of a New York lawyer who deserved his own Boston Legal series. Arnold was my business and personal lawyer through a few dramatic decades. He was also partner of “Bushkin”, Johnny Carson’s lawyer, in Bushkin Gaims Gaimes & Stream. He represented a rather wide array of clients, from ad guys to…
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The Secret World of Jay & Day
This space will carry the story of how one of the most awarded commercial teams in history: 1. Came to be. 2. Created its illusions 3. Produced earth-shattering sales. 4. Lured Christian Cooper to be Jack Byrne’s wife. Here are a few of the thousands of messages imparted by Jay & Day. 19 Casey Stengle…
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Upbeat Days Down Under …
(Note: These will be tales of Mad Ave and Melbourne initiated by a David Mattingly and his associates, Monahan, Dayman and (especially) Philip Adams. They will be spiced by “heroic” stories of the Great Barrier Reef.) I first met my Australia “connection” in my office at 919 Third Avenue in NYC, home of Jack Byrne…
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My brother, the shipper …
These will be stories of having a protective and combative older brother all your life who inspired and supported and then died at least 20 years before his time . I remember him astride Buppo, my grandparent’s German Shepherd, his beret worn proudly and his leggings locked around the patient beast’s belly. I remember him…
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Diving for Delight and Danger.
As intoxicating as cocaine and as stimulating to the brain, my most fulfilling experiences have been those spent a dozen or two fathoms under the surface of the sea. Here, I will tell of memories that I will cherish for the rest of my life. Some of the more memorable were diving with Skeet LaChance…
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King of the Capers!
This will be the story of helping an apartment building neighbor capture a contract from one of the largest chemical companies in Germany, using an imaginary Board of Advisors and an old Rolex watch. The company was Giulini Chemie Gmbh in Mundenheim, south of Ludwigshafen. The neighbor was a King.
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Seaman stories …
These will be stories of working with Seaman Brothers brothers (Morty and Carl), and about Steve Gordon “10% off for love” commercials, Christian Cooper and Michel Davenport’s radio spokespersons, etc. (To come) 23 Love Discount 24 Marathon Sale
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Helping the Government Clear the Air …
Story of working with the U.S.Department of Health, creating and producing public service announcements with the Johnny Mann Singers … (to come)
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“High Quality, Low Overhead…”
Stories of obtaining and handling the large clothing chain, Robert Hall, highlighting its Spokesperson Team, including Christian Cooper, Michael Davenport, Ted Madison and (name to come) (commercial sample below, story to come) 25 _Rifle Range_
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The birth of Gimbels Market East.
In 1977, a radio barrage featuring the “Busy Bs” (Jack, Christian and 3-yr old ‘KD’ Byrne) created the biggest store opening in history. (See banner photo). This will be story of Jack (with a little help from his family) and Gimbels. 31 Opening _My Birthday_ 32 Opening 36 Opening Interviews 4
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My Daughter, the Mother …
This is the story of my daughter who grew up to be the Mother of Many (sexes and species). (Story to come).
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In the beginning ….
… there was Henry Beirne (later Byrne) professing his love in a way that shamed all of us that “was to folla” wearing his genes. Translation of the message: “This is to certify I willingly profess that Ellen Kiernan is the only girl I love, and have ever loved purely and sincerely; and in professing…
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You are Pierre La Mure !!!
This is about a woman who, once her two boys were old enough to not need her guidance, went to work as a telephone operator in Curtis Brown Ltd., famed British-owned literary agency. And, with less than a complete high school education, became literary agent to Pierre LaMure, Ogden Nash, S. J. Perleman and others. Her name?…
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Going Gaga!
This is the story of my younger son, Kareem Devlin and of a father’s pride watching his work effort lead him to be “Jesus”, lead guitarist for Lady Gaga. (Story to come)
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The Rich and the Famous
Here are people I have known well enough to be worth a story. I hope to write about all of them in posts to come: Ray Abruzzi (Bachelor’s III), Joey Adams (Columnist), Debbie Allen and Phylicia Allen (sisters with separate success paths), Woody Allen (sometime clarinetist), Fran Allison (Kukla, Fran & Ollie), Hardy Amies (Designer),…
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Joe Namath, Tom Jones and me …
In early 1970, the new advertising agency, Jack Byrne Advertising, moved from its temporary quarters at the Shelton Towers Hotel to 770 Lexington Avenue, between East 60th and East 61st Streets. One of the benefits of this move was that JBA was now located but one block from Bachelor’s III which had been my favorite haunt from the…
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The First Muggee….
This is the story of interrupting a 40-year record of non-molestation on one of the U.S. Army’s finest camps. Plus a few highlights of life in Army Intelligence. Fort Meade Md (See last segment of post “I GET A KICK OUT OF HUGH … AND YOU … AND YOU (in Snort Stories))
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Life is a beach!
True stories of life as Chief Life Guard of famed New York beach, Jacob Riis Park. Saving lives. Risking lives. Making moves. Making out. The whole Nine Yards. (Many stories to come)
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My son, the producer…
This is the story of my older son – a courageous entrepreneur who moved to an Island paradise and created and published every golfer’s dream magazine, the Maui Golf Review, created his own golf TV series, Da Game, and has embarked on a four-month solo bike tour of Southeast Asia and has lived (so far)…
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An Intrepid Life in the Incubator ….
This is a many-part story of the two-decade development of the world’s leading three-dimensional technology that never went to market even while collecting over $30 million in investment money amd equipment during that period. (Stories to come)
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“Inproooo…In-corp-or-ated!”
This is the story of acquiring a major project from AT&T and The Bell System (pre-breakup) and the partnerships that were made and broken and the money that was made by all. Project launched AT&T machine-to-machine communications fore-running a hundreds-of-billion-dollar annual business. In 1962, after a decade of clearing my future path through the woods of six advertising…
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The Art of Buying Real Estate in the FSU.
This is the story of how Jack bought a prime-location property in Kaunas, Lithuania for $40,000 but paid $350,000 in cash. (Story to come)
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The Art of Misdirection in Avoidance of Mugging …
This story starts with my father, James Patrick Byrne, who was rather skilled with his fists and even more skilled in his ways of not using them. Until he got Grace Burke’s acceptance of marriage, he was a young (19) professional boxer who had an early reputation for the flooring ability of his wind-up-and-throw punch called “The Mary…
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Bunking The Bankers …
By the early 1990s, Russia and the Former Soviet Union (FSU) had earned a certain fame, summarized by a certain name for its particular blend of business and politics, it was known by its acquaintances as a mafiocracy. Now, those of us who were living in it, like in any society, hardly noticed the big image, we just dealt with our…
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Garbage Disposal: Russian Style
This will present a few examples (from when Jack was in Russia) of the simplistic way criminals went about disposing of unwanted bodies and parts of same. (See BUNKING THE BANKERS.) (Stories to come)
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A Bunch of Clucks …
This is the story of how Jack Byrne Advertising failed to get the chicken farmer’s account even though ten-years later, at Regine’s, Frank Perdue introduced Jack as “The genius who knew I should do my own commercials five minutes after he met me!” (Story to come)
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The Cotton Wars …
This is the story of how the growers and commodity brokers went to war over foreign sales and fought it over the body of the head of Cotton Incorporporated, Dukes Wooters, and how Jack enlisted the aid of “The Old Timer” to resolve the combat. (Story to come) 61 _The More Cotton The Better_
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I’ll Take Manhattan Everytime…
Early in 1983, my partner, Jim Fischbach, and I had just about given up hope for the success of, or even the continuation of, our new enterprise, CARMA (Casino and Restaurant Marketing Associates). Our big client for whom we were contracted to reposition, redesign and market five casino hotels in Las Vegas (including The Silverbird, the Silver Nugget and the…
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Reese’s Pieces …
Stories of Jack’s ad relationships with child-star Mason Reese and how, as a couple of clowns, they won the International Film and TV Festival Silver Award in 1973. (Stories to come)
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“Too tied up to talk …”
How Jack called Tony Bennett’s agent in a huff and was told by his secretary that she was “too tied up to talk…” Jack was less offended the next morning when he found out the agent’s office had been in the process of being robbed and she was truly tied up (to her chair) by the…
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“Howdy to The Good Folks at Dow Chemical”
How Jack created a national radio show starring a legendary country music star and how, on the day he presented the concept to Dow Chemical for sponsorship, the press reported the star had “busted his wife in the jaw!” (Story to come)
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Trumped by the Trumps
How Jack and his partner son, John, created a brilliant campaign for Williams Island behalf of the owner who had called Jack a “Genius” for making him millions of dollars only to have the campaign rejected by the owner’s teen-aged daughter. (Story to come)
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Cast of Thousands!
This is story of how Jack Byrne and Rocky Graziano cooked up a scheme to get a couple of thousand “actors” to work 12 hours for a Lee Myles Tee Shirt. (Story to Come with photos by Julius Spedale) m
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Raised Fist up H.K. Smith’s Butt!
This is story of Vince Matthews loss of his Olympic Gold medal for his shuffling during the play of the Star Spangled Banner and of H.K. Smith’s reaction and Jack Byrne’s counter-reaction. (Story to Come)
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Bubka and Byrne Break a World Record.
This is how Jack’s letter to the New York Times changed Madison Square Garden operations to better suit the needs of the participants in its track meets and helped Serge Bubka produce a World Record in the pole vault. (Story to Come)
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Vanquishing Vegas!
The Jack Barnes School of Winning Blackjack has its own book full of stories (See “By Hooker by Crook”, “Qa-Qa-Qadafi!”,”Stossel vs Reasoner”) but its spinoffs have their own books as well. One of these is the story of CARMA. Soon after I started the School of Winning Blackjack, in October of 1980, I received a call from a Jim Fischbach,…
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“The most religious experience of my life …”
This is the story of the break-through wedding of Jack Byrne to Christian Cooper and Bobby Short’s reaction to it.
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“Stick his pencil in his ear …”
This is story of getting the Robert Hall account and a tough president who resented an ad columnist, Bernie Gallagher, demeaning his company.
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Byrne Roams while MJA Burns!
This is the story of how Jack engineered a family move back to NYC (his hometown) from MJA’s Michigan office and included a tour of 35 nations in the trip.
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Ya Buncha Crooks …!
This will tell the tale of Lee Myles Transmission operators stealing engines and how Jack handled the franchisees who were upset (with the help of Rocky Graziano).
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Bombs Away in Lithuania …
This will tell the story of how three of our four Vision Express stores in Lithuania were simultaneously bathed in grenades one Monday morning at 1am and how the Mafia group who did the deed eventually apologized and paid for damage repair. When the USSR folded back into its constituent states in 1991, I was already…
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Rape Veronica ….
I was an American running a British joint venture in the former Soviet Union with offices in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and Riga, Latvia. My partners in Riga were all of Russian descent whose parents had arrived during Soviet occupation of that small and gentle country. After three years of our operation, I discovered that my partners had…
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Nothing but The Truth …
In Russia, there is a way of embellishing truth, through exaggeration or misdirection or reduction of facts, that is considered an art and a legitimate exercise in daily dialogue and debate. It is called “vranyo”. One is considered very out of line and even rude if one challenges the fabricator of this fabrication. IN 1992,…
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Just Wear a Smile and a ………
In 1961, I was hired by a small but ferociously creative agency named Hockaday Associates, headed by Margaret Hockaday and employees who called themselves “Hockadaisies”. I was hired to help to bring a “Big Agency Image” and “Masculinity” to help solicit an enormous client for the Hockadaisies, bigger in gross annual income than the total…
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Knock-Knock-Knocking at my front door ….
I was an American building a retail business in Russia for an English company. It was only the third year of our very successful business when suddenly, my Russian partner was assassinated. Since we did not know why he was done in, some felt I could be next. I lived in a two bedroom Russian…
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Home Alone.
It had been a very busy Friday. In the morning, we (2000 of us) had honored my assassinated partner (“LIFE AND DEATH IN THE PALACE OF CULTURE”). In the afternoon, we had buried him (“THE TSAR IS DEAD”). Through the night, we had toasted him and vowed to avenge his death (“HEAD OF THE TABLE”).…
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Boris Schmoris …
Valeriy Solovyev, my cherished Russian partner, was kaput. On Saturday morning, 2000 heartbroken employees, friends, business associates and one lover had honored him at the Palace of Culture. That afternoon, half of those at the Palace of Culture assisted at his frozen earth burial in Northern St. Petersburg. That night 600 employyes and partners toasted…
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The Wall Street Infernal.
NOTE: WRITE INTRO TO CONNECT WITH REST OF STORY. IF NEEDED. E. Dean Butler was a man with inside information. He had been inside Procter & Gamble for six years and had risen to a high inside position. The Wall Street Journal had a lady reporter who had been nosing around P&G for nearly a…
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QA-QA-QADDAFI!
Come on now, how many ad men have ever been asked to help decimate the economy of a foreign nation? Three? Four? No more than a half dozen right? Well, I’m one of them. It started out, not as an ad man, but as an operator of a Blackjack school. And, it wasn’t as Jack…
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Show Me da Money!
Rocky Graziano, middleweight champion of the world, was born New Year’s Day 1921. Sixty-five years later, in December 1986, at about 4:15 in the morning, he couldn’t sleep. Deciding “not to fight it”, he got up, slipped on a pair of sneakers and a raincoat and went out to get an early newspaper. Rocky lived…
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No Biz like Show Biz…
Billy Martin is not the only threat I ever met in Shepheard’s. I mean, New York is not all Lindy’s cheesecake and The Children’s Zoo. The Booking was Christian and the Lions first ever, in Summer of ’78, in the prettiest club on the East Coast, Shepheard’s, operated by the Loews Hotel Corporation in the…
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Billy, Mickey and Me.
Creativity is where you find it. And the more limited the budgets of your clients, or the more adventurous the levels of impact you wish to achieve, you better find it in places other than the client’s reserve fund. The synthesizing of unrelated elements is often the key process in creative “inventions”. (When opportunity knocks,…
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“A JING IS A JOY IN SAVING!”
Harold Smith, a top buyer for Robert Hall, had left the dying company and decided to open his own chain of women’s specialty shops in the growing market of the middle south. He planned to call them JONNA’S, an anagram of his two daughter’s names. And, he called me and pleaded for Jack Byrne Advertising…
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How to Make Money Without Really Trying.
All right, Class, settle down. Here is the key question on your final exam in Advertising 101: What is the single most important contractual factor in assuring, from the agency’s point of view, that a satisfactory agency/client relationship will exist? No, it’s not the “duration of the contract”. It’s not the “stipulations” of responsibilities. It’s…
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The Greatest Impressario since Flo Ziegfeld.
When I first met my wife, Christian Cooper, she was an actress. My early courtship included shuttle flights between New York and Boston where she was appearing in the pre-Broadway run of Prettybelle, an Alexander Cohen production, directed by Gower Champion and starring Angela Lansbury. However, prior to her acting career, she had been a…
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BS from B&S.
BS from B&S. My first job after graduating from Columbia College in ’49 was with Procter and Gamble as a merchandiser and salesman. That lasted a year. I didn’t have the P&G family spirit. My next step was to attend the NYU Summer Television Workshop. I felt my future would hold the most promise in…
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That Dirty Daug Mindaugas
Vision Express had opened three stores in Lithuania, the first in Panevežys which was nearest to our Latvia headquarters in Riga, the second in Vilnius, the capital and largest city, and the third in Kaunas, close to Vilnius in size and thriving. All three cities met our population and economic criteria, but one Lithuanian city…
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The Greatest Little Coupon in the World.
OK. Here’s a problem for you. It’s March 1970. Your new agency is two months old. You have left your partners at Griswold Eshleman Baker & Byrne, New York and Cleveland. Former partners (Charlie Farran, Jim Johnston, Sidney Matthew Weiss, Milton Guttenplan, Perry Brand, and Norman Cohen) were all behind you now. From the beginning…
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It’s not Hanes until…
Everybody in the business of new business solicitation has a story to tell, often tragic, often comic, often both. But, my $100 bill is put aside for anyone who can tell one any wilder than the one I am about to narrate. Let me first set the stage. In April of 1962, a lanky Hungarian…