Somewhere in a closet, there is a solid silver scotch-tape dispenser with my name engraved on it. Nearby is an old copy of the Saturday Evening Post with a picture showing my friend Herb Rowland and me in a college classroom.
The 1947 magazine article was about the 100th anniversary of the City College of New York, which has given college educations to children of people, mostly immigrants, who otherwise would not have been able to afford tuition.
Such is modern life that I didn’t learn until today when another old friend called that Herb had died in February. He had been living in London and then Los Angeles, and we had lost touch.
After that college picture, we went separate ways but in the same direction where, in the second half of what Henry Luce called the American Century, there was freedom and opportunity to transcend our origins.
When he retired 15 years ago, my friend left behind the world’s sixth largest public relations company with his name on it and 600 employees in 34 offices. The solid silver scotch-tape dispenser is a memento of a promotion for the 3M Company, which made the tape.
He had a flair for creating news for his clients in a time when “publicity saints,” the established figures of tradition, were giving way to disposable celebrities who could be manufactured quickly and used up like Kleenex.
We labored in different branches of that Fame Factory, but neither of us ever forgot the lessons we learned in the place that made it possible for us to get there.
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