I had no choice but to start my own. In one of his last letters before he died, Rubicam wrote, ‘We knew you before you started your agency. How come we missed you?’ By that time we had become great friends. ‘Friends’ is not the right word. He was my patron, inspiration, counselor, critic and conscience. I was his hero-worshipping disciple. At one stage, long after he retired from Young & Rubicam, he offered to become chairman of Ogilvy & Mather. If all institutions are ‘the lengthened shadow of one man’, it can be said that the two best agencies in the world today are the lengthened shadows of Raymond Rubicam. Next to my grandfather, whom he resembled physically and in many other ways, Rubicam was the most outspoken man I have ever known. He blurted out whatever was on his mind, without considering what effect it might have. One day he would praise one of my campaigns in language which made me blush, and a few weeks later criticize another campaign with a candor which made me wince. The youngest of eight children in a poor family, he left school when he was 15 and spent the next nine years bumming around the country as a shipping clerk, bellhop, chaperone of cattle, movie projectionist, door- to-door salesman, automobile salesman, and newspaper reporter (at $12 a week). When he was 24 he applied for a job as a copywriter at the now defunct F. Wallis Armstrong agency in Philadelphia. ‘I sat in that lobby – on a bench so hard that I can still feel it,’ he later recalled. ‘At the end of the ninth day, I exploded … I wrote the boss a letter calculated to produce an immediate interview or a couple of black eyes.’ The boss stormed into the lobby, waving the letter, and said, ‘Those ads you wrote didn’t amount to much, but this letter has some stuff in it.’ He stayed with Armstrong for three years, but did not enjoy it. ‘Armstrong said that a copywriter was a necessary evil, but an art director was just a goddamned luxury. He lived to outfox everybody.’ In 1919 Rubicam moved to N.W. Ayer, then the largest agency in the country. There he wrote campaigns which have been included in every anthology of great advertisements, including ‘The Instrument of the Immortals’ for Steinway and ‘The Priceless Ingredient’ for Squibb. Then, after four years with Ayer, he teamed up with an account executive called John Orr Young to start Young & Rubicam, on a shoe-string. Their