A while back, someone I used to work with told me that there were plans to tear down the building that once housed William Eisner & Associates, the advertising agency where I worked 30 years ago—and the gig that moved me to the Milwaukee area from Madison.
As luck would have it, I had a haircut scheduled for that week, and the salon is very near the site of the Eisner Building. I did a drive-by; everything looked stable, and the parking lot was full. I went inside, and the various offices and businesses inhabiting the building—it had evolved into rent/lease space for multiple users called the Valley View Center—were humming along like normal. I even noticed some refurbishing going on.
When I drove out to the main drag, however, I could see the previous Eisner building (smaller, and used before my time there) surrounded by a fence and being dismantled.
So, maybe someone had mistaken the older building (complete with a large “Eisner” sign) with the larger, sprawling one set back in the woods.
However, I made it a habit to drive by the building after every haircut—about once every 45 days or so (don’t judge). During one such drive-by, I was surprised to see a chain-link fence now surrounding the entire “actual” complex, and the parking lot was empty.
Unquestionably, this was the end.
Time to Reminisce
A lucky bit of happenstance in my life is the fact that, after graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and spending a year or two lingering there (who wants to leave Madison?), I ventured out of town for interviews just as we were leaving the 1980s, giving me a pretty clear line of demarcation between my Milwaukee-area era (the Eisner & Associates position) and my Madison days (or, daze).
When I started college at UW-Madison in the mid-80s, I’d gotten a pretty sweet work/study gig at the Wisconsin Division of Tourism (now Department of Tourism). It was a desk job — you didn’t even break a sweat or get dirty. This was quite novel to me because I’d also done Summer work/study gigs in high school (hey - a parochial education isn’t cheap!) which consisted of chores like mowing, raking, and mopping. My job before moving (escaping) to UW-Madison was behind the grill at McDonald’s.
So, I finally had a job that didn’t require getting dirty. Pretty sweet gig.
At Tourism I reported to Gary Knowles, the Director of Communications, and worked with a grizzled veteran (his description) named Don Johanning. Don was an old-school journalist who took care of the press releases, newsletters, etc. and had no qualms about letting me dive in and take my lumps.
I had my first (and certainly not last) cup of coffee while toiling at Tourism.
Since we were in the Communications Department, we busied ourselves with keeping the slide collection up to date so beautiful images of Wisconsin were available to any media outlet that might need them. As luck would have it, this meant occasionally traveling the State to get those images, even if that required going up to the Apostle Islands, getting into a canoe, and paddling alongside the cliffs and inside the caves (as close to “getting dirty” as the job got).
We did the Tourism Newsletter, and Don’s method was to type up stories and then give a file folder full of paper to an outside vender that would create a simple old-school cut-and-paste layout. I’d look over his shoulder as he made notes, and then hike the folder back to the layout people so they could reset the type and make the changes—it was all very mysterious to me.
The game-changer came one day when I ventured to another floor of our building to deliver a box of something-or-other and saw a person creating newsletter pages on a computer screen.
What?!?!?
I invited myself into the glass-walled room (which was inhabited by about a half-dozen other clerical workers) and introduced myself. Her name was Gayle, and she allowed me to look over her shoulder as she assembled onscreen a very nice 8-1/2” by 11” newsletter. She was using something called “Quark XPress,” she said, and it was compatible with the IBM computers everyone used at the Wisconsin Department of Development, under which the Division of Tourism resided (I had not yet seen a Mac; they were still gaining a foothold and a bit “eccentric”).
As it happened, my boss Gary Knowles knew about Quark and invited me to dive in on the office “portable PC.”
So I did. And, as we’ll see in Part Two, my life changed forever.
Stay tuned …