Breast cancer is the most common cancer in American women, except for skin cancers. It is estimated that in 2021, approximately 30% of all new women cancer diagnoses will be breast cancer.
At a recent gathering of some of my former co-workers, I looked around the room and wondered what magic had bound us together for so many decades. It was the 11th gathering of former employees of the L.S. Ayres’ advertising department, and many of the attendees were people with whom I had worked, starting in 1987.
I was an artist working in the advertising for Stewart’s Department Store in Louisville, Kentucky when the corporate owners decided to consolidate those duties with the L.S. Ayres store in Indianapolis. Before the decision was announced, the buyers of merchandise for the Ayres stores had been making visits to the Louisville store. I remember hearing some of the copywriters I worked with – all of whom were female – commenting that the female buyers were wearing “suits, and sensible shoes.” (The statement preceded David Lee Roth’s 1991 song, “Sensible Shoes,” by at least five years.) They were amused because the worker bees of our hive had no rigidly defined dress code, and we wore neither suits, nor sensible shoes. In 1987, Stewart’s Department Stores’ advertising operations were closed and most of the employees were sent away. I was one of a few people to be chosen to join the L.S. Ayres operation and traveled north on Interstate 65 from Kentucky to Indiana, where the ribbons of the ties were first strung.
The advertising crew at Stewart’s was a convivial group, but the people I encountered in Indianapolis were fun-loving and congenial. I like to shoot pool and discovered that two of my co-workers also enjoyed the game. Each Wednesday, we would go across Meridian Street to a place that recently opened and shoot away our lunch hour. Most Fridays, many in the department spent “happy hour” in a local pub, decompressing from a hectic week of deadlines. In the era that preceded the use of computers for design and layout, we spent quality time with graphite, ink, and rubber cement, drawing and pasting up “dummies” of proposed catalogs. To determine the length of some catalogs, type galleys were printed out and we would paste them into a mock-up; the number of pages were tallied, and arrangements were made with the printer. Some of us were pinned to the drawing board while others took the layouts to a New York City studio to photograph the merchandise on models.
The people immersed in the creative world are often bound together by the process of bringing to life the sales promotion plans of the corporation that employs them and the challenge of explaining the gap between vision and reality to those same corporate entities. At the gathering, there were pictures of past employees, and samples of both completed catalogs and fake catalogs; the fake catalogs were how we amused ourselves. Many members of the top tier of the department are missing in those pictures, but the fun-loving ones are well represented. I did not work with all the people who attended this reunion but have tried to attend as many of them that I could over the years, even when I had to travel from St. Louis to do so. The administrators, production personnel, artists and writers who did attend were part of a community of creatives, strung together by a common purpose and passion.
And to have another day of reminiscence and fun.