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Instead, he chose to tell me a story that says much about what advertising was and what it has become. Because Bowman is a pro who has been speaking before groups for years, he even has a title for it: “Paying Back Joe Larkin.” According to Bowman, one day when he first started out, Larkin, a senior executive at Ayer, asked him what his dream job was. “I said creative. So he let me shadow his creatives.” Bowman tore a piece off the edge of our paper tablecloth and dropped the thin sliver in front of me.

“One day Joe Larkin came to me and dropped a piece of paper just like this on my desk and said, ‘What would you do if it was a battery?’ DuPont had just invented a paper-thin battery. I went home and told my wife, ‘Someone wants to know what I think!’ He helped me realize my dream. He was very sick then. His last day before he left and died, soon after he had me transferred into the creative department. At its best, Ayer was a family. To this day when I go to work, I think about what it was like back then and wonder what I can do to repay Joe Larkin for what he did for me.”

Sappy, yes. But because I know Bowman, and saw him gracefully perform under the most stressful of circumstances, I believe him.

Several hours after my lunch with Bowman, I had oysters and drinks at the Grand Central Oyster Bar with the man who fired me from Ayer and who had asked me that day ten years earlier whether I wanted to be a great adman or a great novelist. In addition to firing me, Stephen Feinberg, now chief creative officer of the Seiden Group, was the creative director who supervised and improved just about every worthwhile piece of advertising I created at Ayer. He had been a supportive creative supervisor of mine on everything from Pep Boys to US West. We hadn’t exactly gone to war together, but we did stand shoulder to shoulder on Omaha Beach. As with many of the others, especially those still in the business, Steve seemed guarded at first. He wanted to know what I was after, what exactly I was looking to get. “Context” was the best word I could muster, because I wasn’t sure. What I knew from talking to Bowman and some of the others is that it felt good to talk about something that had consumed so much of our lives. I told Feinberg that I remembered his young daughters schlepping in from Westchester to keep him company and draw on sketch pads during many of the mandatory weekends we had to endure under the Fenske regime (later, at Y&R, my daughter would do the same). They’re in college and beyond now. Then he told me how he first came to work at Ayer when his agency, Cunningham & Walsh, merged with it. He connected the dots on how he came to meet his first partner, his first boss, and the woman who would hire me after leaving Ayer and become my boss for six years at Y&R, and many others. Personal histories I knew nothing about when I worked there.

We were too busy then, glancing over our shoulders and furiously spinning the wheels of the never-ending idea machine.

Less than a week later, more than a hundred former employees of America’s first advertising agency gathered on the second floor of O’Brien’s Irish Pub and Restaurant on West Forty-sixth Street. I was late because I was coming from the opposite of a dead-agency reunion, a party for a brand-new agency, Howald & Kalam, owned by two friends and former colleagues from Y&R. The first party was in a downtown loft, where house music played, the drinks were free, and waiters made the rounds with trays of sushi and other gourmet hors d’oeuvres. The principals, Ahmer Kalam and Rachel Howald, were beaming. They were on the cusp of something. There was a kinetic sense to the party, and as I looked at them, one word came to mind: “possibility.” Of course there are two sides to the possible, failure and success, as well as the constant atmosphere of risk, all of which, of course, represents the thrill of such a venture.

If the first party was about beginnings, the Ayer reunion was about what comes after the end. For starters, you pay for your own food and drinks.