May 28, 2005 –Don Continues His Story

May 28, 2005 –Don Continues His Story

What I began in my blog of May 26, my friend Don’s story, I’m continuing below. The remarks are taken from a conversation I recorded with Don and Ev, his lovely wife and lifelong love. Some of the names are not spelled correctly—I neglected to have Don spell them for me as we spoke. Where possible, I’ve tried to find the correct spelling. Also, I’ve tried to keep true to the way Don spoke to me, making changes to correct the meaning of what he was saying. In my previous post, Don has just given up a singing career that had brought him fame and wealth. He was now looking for what to do with his life.

“I had to decide what to do. In my artwork I had been drawing. A little bar I went into on Market Street asked me “how about doing an ad in the newspaper?” So I sat there and designed an ad for him. The Examiner was very impressed with the ad. The Westward Ho bar way up on Market Street where the Fox Theatre was and the Fox Bldg is now.

“We were living up on Telegraph Hill and we were throwing a lot of parties. We lived up near where Mel Belli lives. At one of our parties, Cobina Wright Jr.—you probably haven’t heard of her—she was of the F. Scott Fitzgerald era. She was the reining belle of New York society and a columnist. She (Cobina) was out here with a young man named Stanley Boberick, who was later killed in his own airplane flying to LA over the Grapevine from Hanford—where he owned a newspaper with Dan Hopping. Stanley was a good friend of mine and he had a very close friendship with William Randolph Hearst. He (Stanley) was editor of the Stanford Daily and Hearst came out with “Communism in the Colleges” the red influence on college campuses, which damned the Universities for communists’ infiltration. Stanley wrote an editorial on the Hearst story in the Stanford Daily. (Ev: The Bear—the University of California Berkeley college paper—came out with a front-page story on the Stanford Daily.) ‘If there’s a smug pot in your neighbor’s orchard, (what Stanley wrote in the Stanford Daily) would you call out the fire department?’ In other words, sure there is a left wing influence but is all that big a deal

“Hearst liked Stanley’s story and invited him out to San Simeon. (Ev: He wanted to go to work for Hearst.) Stanley was in Dan Hopping’s class. Hearst encouraged Stanley to start his own newspaper and Dan Hopping’s financed them, one in Chico and one in Hanford. I did the masthead for them.

“Anyway, this all happened just when I had stopped singing. Stanley brought Cobina Wright Jr. to our place on Telegraph Hill for one of our parties and I admired her car, which had won first prize in the New York Automobile Show. It was a 1937/38 Buick Phaeton. (Ev: We had been given a book called The Game of Life and How to Play It [by Florence Scovel Shinn]) by a friend of ours. It was about the Unity Philosophy. One of the suggestions in the book was to make a demonstration of wealth. I thought what greater demonstration of wealth could I make if I want success than to buy this car. So I said ‘I want to buy your car.’ I had neither the down payment nor the cash to pay for it. I was doing (designing) candy boxes for Blum’s (an upscale candy supplier in San Francisco) and I went to the banker for Blum’s and I said I want that car. He said, “I’ll give you the loan on the car but you have to come up with a down payment.” I asked how I would go about getting the down payment and he sent me to a loan shark around the corner. I got the down payment.

“I was driving down Market Street in this new car and the advertising man that handled all the restaurants, hotels, and nightclubs (for the Examiner) jumped in—he had liked the ad I had done for the bar—and said “go down and see Bimbo at the 365 Club.” The Examiner put me into Bimbo’s and the Chronicle saw the Examiner using me and they (Chronicle) gave me an office and a title and brought me in as Feature Editor. They gave me a secretary and I put out a special section for the opening of San Francisco Airport: 12 pages. I sold all the ads and wrote the entire editorial.

“In 1941, I (took over) space where the Domei News Agency was—they must have known it was coming because a month before Pearl Harbor they moved out. I took their office (which was) next to Robert O’Brien, now an editor with Reader’s Digest. O’Brien had taken Herb Caen’s place at the Chronicle because Herb got drafted. They (the Chronicle) asked me do a nightclub column. I went to Bob and asked him, ‘how do you write a column?’ He said, ‘you write just like you talk.’ I said, ‘thank you’ and that was my entry to journalism. For nearly 20 years I had a three-times a week column on the strength of that advice.

“We quickly had about 50 accounts all paying retainers. We found out that we could charge a monthly fee—any where from $50 to $200. (Ev: We had the PR business at the same time as Don was writing the columns.) Nobody blew the whistle on me until Senator Nolan came back from the Tribune to the Chronicle—I had been there for a number of years—and he asked ‘who’s this guy make $30,000 a year and handling PR accounts and doing a column?’

“That’s when I got in with the Japanese. One door closes another opens. We’re having dinner with a guy who was the sales manager for Desilu Productions who asked what we did. I said, we’re in PR. O’Brien had written me a letter two days earlier that said, “get in with the Japanese because they need people. This was around 1959/1960. (The sales manager was also involved with a PR organization called IPR.) He went back to New York and made me the West Coast guy for IPR. This fellow running the operation in New York turned out to be a rat. I had done the Korean Ski Team at the 1960 Winter Olympics (Squaw Valley, California). And he refused to pay me because he said I did a lousy job. I had gotten the team covered by every wire service. O’Brien got mad at this and he had a guy at the New York Post do an investigative reporting job on this guy. They murdered him in print. I called Tokyo and told them that they had a bad guy working for them in New York. He was taking all their money… He had $20,000 to $30,000 coming in from these accounts each month and he didn’t even have a secretary. The Tokyo office sent some one over to fire him and they awarded us four great PR accounts in return: Mitsui, Toshiba, Nikko Securities and the New Otani and we’ve had them for 20 years.”