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By Root 354 0

O’Reilly’s assistant. He leads us to this great big room where we are to meet Mr. O’Reilly. I was carrying the regular ad case and Ron was carrying the projector, which is a big thing and must weigh sixty or seventy pounds. Mr. O’Reilly walks in and I extend my hand and say, ‘Mr. O’Reilly, I’m Jerry Della Femina.’ He shakes my hand and then Ron turns to him and says, ‘Hi, I’m Ron Travisano.’ What Ron didn’t remember as he turned to O’Reilly was that he was carrying that projector. When he turned, so did the projector, and the thing caught O’Reilly right on the kneecap. The sound of the projector hitting his kneecap was a sound I used to hear when I was a kid going to watch the Dodgers at Ebbets Field. You would listen to the crack of the bat and you could tell from the sound when it was going to be a home run. Same sound from O’Reilly’s knee. I had my eyes shut when I heard that sound, and I could have sworn that his knee was going to end up in the left-field stands. O’Reilly went down to the floor immediately.

Ron turned to me right at the crack of the bat and said, ‘This is not going to be such a good presentation.’ And like I flipped when he said that. We both went into hysterics. Tears were coming out of my eyes. The guy, he went down and he had a little trouble talking for a few minutes. Ron and I went into such hysterics that we couldn’t move – we were useless for the rest of the presentation. O’Reilly was very nice about it, considering that he might have been crippled for life by the shot. I’m sorry to say we didn’t get the account – which is not surprising – and the guy was nice enough not to sue us for bodily damage with intent to kill.

Just after we went into business for ourselves we had a chance to pitch an account over in Jersey – some outfit that made hair tonic. They wanted to see what we had done in the past and we decided to ship all of our previous ads out to Jersey ahead of time. Ron lives in Jersey and he said he would take the portfolio out there the day before, since it was on his way home. Ron sometimes dresses a little too much. This particular day he was wearing a bright-green sport jacket plus an electric-blue shirt, and to top that off he had on one of those flowered ties. He’s got very swarthy skin and very weird hair and occasionally when you take a look at him he comes on a little strange. He gets out to Jersey with the portfolio and he tells the receptionist he’s the executive vice-president of the agency and they show him to the office of Mr. Jones, the guy we’re supposed to pitch. Jones comes to the door and Ron starts to say that he’s from the agency but Jones takes one look at Ron and figures him for a Mercury Messenger or something. ‘O. K., thanks, boy,’ Jones says, and leaves poor Ron standing there. It was obvious that if Ron had a piece of paper in his hand Jones would have signed it and sent him on his way. Like Ron was destroyed for three days after that. It was the first time he had ever been mistaken for a messenger.

Sometimes presentations turn into disasters because you find out halfway through that you really shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Years ago I worked for a short time at an agency called Ashe & Engelmore. One of the guys at the agency named Bob Hirshberg had met another guy at the bar of ‘21’ and after two minutes of talk Bob figured that the guy was hinting that we should go out and make a very big presentation for the Loew’s Hotel business in Puerto Rico. I don’t know to this day how Bob got that impression, but he came back to the agency and said, ‘This is it, we’ve got a real shot at this account.’

Well, we sat down and I get the bright idea that we’ve got to find out more about how travel agents react to the Americana Hotel. I got a little tape recorder with an attachment to the telephone and we started to call travel agents. I decided that I would tell them that I’m a guy going to Puerto Rico and could they recommend a hotel. If they don’t recommend the Americana, then I would say, ‘Hey, how about the Americana? Is that any good?’ Then we’d take