A Winter Dream

One


Today I had my first big break. Funny term that. Only in business and theater is a break a good thing.

Joseph Jacobson’s Diary





I’m twenty-nine years old and the twelfth of thirteen children—twelve boys and one girl. My father was married three times before he married my mother, Rachel. Only my younger brother, Ben, is my full brother. Growing up, he was the only one of my brothers I was close to.

My father was a better businessman than he was a family man. He’s the founder and president of Jacobson Advertising, a successful Denver marketing firm specializing in retail advertising. If you’ve seen the Ski Heaven campaign for Vail, Colorado—the one where all the skiers have glowing halos—that was one of ours.

My father was not only the President and CEO of the agency, but the main creative force as well, garnering enough awards to cover the walls of our agency. Dad had that rare ability to cut right to the heart of consumer desire, divining what people really wanted and were buying. That’s not as simple as most people think. Most people don’t know why they buy the things they buy.

My father’s given name is Israel, but his friends call him Izzy. Or Ace. My father is an American hero. Before he was a successful adman, he was a decorated Air Force pilot during the Vietnam War—the first American conflict where living Medal of Honor winners outnumbered the dead. My father was one of them.

All thirteen of his children, including my sister, Diane, worked at the agency. I suppose the agency was my father’s way of keeping the children from three broken marriages together. I started as a copywriter, working under my stepbrother Simon, a taskmaster who thrived on impossible deadlines. I spent most of my time writing brochures and radio commercials for our smaller accounts. At that time, my father was still president of the agency, but he’d begun spending less and less time at the office to travel with my mother, leaving the company management in the hands of my eldest brother, Rupert—the agency’s general manager.

My stepbrothers were, understandably, loyal to their mothers—Leigh, Billie, and Zee Jacobson (all of them kept my father’s name)—and resented all the time my father spent with my mother. My mother was younger than my father by more than twenty years, beautiful and, as he often said, “the love of his life,” which pleased Ben and me, but grated on my stepbrothers’ feelings. On more than one occasion I had heard my stepbrothers refer to my mother as “the trophy,” when I was too young to know that it wasn’t meant as a compliment.

My stepbrothers’ jealousy extended deeper than their feelings toward my mother. My father had spent the early years of my stepbrothers’ lives working, building the agency at the expense of their childhoods. Only later in life, with his agency established, did my father begin to enjoy the fruits of his labors, which included spending more time with those still at home—my younger brother, Ben, and me. I really did understand their resentment, but it still didn’t make my life easier.



If I had to pick a day to start my story, I’d peg it at three years earlier on the Friday morning we pitched the Dick Murdock Travel Agency—a Denver-based travel company and one of the top-twenty travel agencies in America. Perhaps it was a test, but for the first time since he’d started the agency, my father sat on the sideline, leaving the pitch totally in his boys’ hands.

Sitting in on the pitch meeting were my brothers, Rupert, Simon, Judd, Dan, Gage, my father and me. On the opposite side of the table from us were three executives from Murdock: the tour coordinator, Bob; the marketing director, Marcia; and the president and company namesake, Dick Murdock, a barrel-chested man who wore ostrich-skin boots and a Bolle tie.

Our conference room had a table large enough to seat sixteen and the walls were decorated with the scores of awards we’d won, nearly all of them bearing my father’s name. We dimmed the lights, and on a pull-down screen we projected our proposed slogan.

Dick Murdock Travel

We’ll get you there

Murdock’s silence screamed. Finally, Marcia, a tall, thin woman with spiky black hair, said, “I don’t get it.”

Simon raised the lights. “We’ll get you there,” he said, taking on the tone of a radio announcer. “It’s a powerful phrase. Travel is a matter of trust. Your clients want to know that their families, their employees and they, themselves, are in good hands. No matter where they’re going, Dick Murdock Travel will get them there, safely, on time, on budget.”

His explanation was met with more silence. I glanced over at my father. He sat expressionless. This was a man who could maneuver a jet while surface-to-air missiles were shot at him—a crash-and-burn pitch was nothing.