Tonight, we say goodbye to Don Draper and the characters we've come to know and love on AMC's Mad Men. The show features an advertising agency in New York City in the 1960's. I've been a fan since the beginning and from time to time would be reminded of my grandmother's career selling advertisement for a radio station in Anderson, SC.
You may be wondering how a group of fictional characters at a large ad agency in NYC who frequently drank hard liquor could remind me of my sweet teetotaler grandmother selling advertising in a small town in the south.
Funny how the mind works.
My grandmother, Shirley Palmer, answered an ad in the newspaper in 1960. She worked for a group of "men from up north" and was essentially their eyes and ears on the ground. She went out and took notes on local businesses and brought the information back to the men. After a period of time, they left town and the radio station talked to my grandmother about working directly for them.
She started out making $49 per week.
Her day to day duties consisted of working up a list of businesses to call on for that day. She would then schedule the amount of commercials the business wanted to air per day and prepare fact sheets on the business for the copywriter to make the commercial.
One of her biggest accomplishments was staying with the company for 28 years and earning a handsome salary. Her challenges were making sells every day and working off of commission. She had to be persistent and it paid off by going from minimum wage to selling more advertising than the man she shared an office with.
She recalled her "boss lady" coming in one day and telling her that the man made more money than she since he worked off of commission even though she was bringing in more business. My grandmother decided that day that she would start selling and working off of straight commission, which was around 20%.
It worked out for her. At one point, she thought the company had made a mistake by giving her too much money in profit shares. She questioned this, being the honest person she is, and the boss told her there was no mistake. In fact, she was one of the highest paid employees at the station.
She remembered getting upset about one particular sell that she did all the work but they ended up buying the ads through the Greenville office, so she didn't get the commission. She had decided that she was done with the job. She went in early the next morning and ended up answering the phone. There happened to be a call from a Michigan prison wanting to advertise their weavers in a Mill. She proceeded to sell $2,000 and earned $400 before 9 am. So she decided to stick it out a little longer!
(Note to self: Get to work early tomorrow!)
She worked her local connections and sold advertising to the likes of McDonand's and Clemson University as well as an array of local businesses over her 28 year career. She told me several times that you have to "work hard" and "you get out of it what you put into it." And that's exactly what she did until she was ready to retire. The station was sold and moved to Greenville. She moved on and was a caretaker for her mother.
I was thinking about which character on Mad Men would most closely portray my grandmother. Maybe Peggy? But I finally decided that she wasn't portrayed at all. She would have been the one outselling the fancy-dressed men from NYC because they "didn't want to work." Meanwhile she was hitting the advertisement pavement day in and day out. Probably driving the men mad.
I remember when I was a student at Columbia College, there was a professor trying to make the point that women in the workplace had changed in a short period of time. The professor said that most of our grandmothers probably didn't work. Au contraire! That doesn't ring true at all for me. Maybe she was advanced of the stereotypical southern lady in the 60's, but my grandmother certainly worked and did so incredibly well.
Cheers (with sweet tea of course) to one particular real Ad Women that has taught me just how much hard work pays off and showed how stereotypes are broken.
