BTRIPP (btripp) wrote,
BTRIPP
btripp

A funny thing happened on the way to the book fair ...

Last month, when I was getting ready to go vend my poetry collections as part of the Independent Writers of Chicago table at the Chicago Book Expo, I did a "Google my name" thing to see what sort of spread I was getting, especially for the new books (not too much). However, one thing that I found amazing was running across an eBay item of a picture of me at 6 months old! They show both the picture, and notes on the back (click for bigger images):

           


I'm surprised that I didn't mention this in here before now. This is SO rife with family history ... first of all, my dad was still alive then (he died when I was 2), and being identified as a "Chicago clergyman's son" is so weird to me. Also, my Mom must have still had some connection to Swift, as this is (I'm guessing) from the Swift test kitchens, and I'm being held up in front of a shelf full of "Swifti" cans, with a note on the back that I appeared to favor the Chicken a la King. Now, if my recall of "family history" is right, my Mom at that point was with the J.Walter Thompson ad agency, and no longer at Swift ... but maybe she was on that account.

As a child I was used to being "a prop" in a lot of ads and stuff ... as well as "opinion panels" for kid-oriented products (I helped name a couple of brands before I was 9). When people ask how long I've been in Marketing Communications, I usually say "forever", as I grew up in a marketing household (attached to a major agency in New York in the 60's ... basically living in "Mad Men"), and this pic is proof that I learned to point at the product before I learned to walk!

The back of the print was another trip down memory lane, as the pic was signed off by Gaynor Maddox, who was a close family friend when we lived in New York. He and his wife Dorothy were food writers for the Newspaper Enterprise Association wire service, and he was their main food editor (and a noted cookbook author at the time ... heck they even did records!). I guess the group selling the print on eBay had bought out the NEA photo archives and were now selling them off piecemeal.

This made me wonder how many other bits of Ad/PR ephemera of me there might be out there, as I remember having done a lot of "play with product" activities when I was small ... too bad I don't have a clip book from back then.

Anyway ... ran across the pics in my download folder and figured I'd pass them along in here ...


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Tags: photos
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