How I Succeeded as an Advertising Guy

Selling Alaska: The White-Collar Adventures of an Advertising Pioneer by Kay Guthrie

Way back when, long ago, say the early 1960s, a play premiered on Broadway called How I Succeeded in Business Without Really Trying. It was a huge, smash success that ran for nearly five years and was followed up by an equally successful movie. If you ever get a chance to see the flick (it’s a musical) I strongly recommend it, if for no other reason, than it beautifully conveys a romanticized Mad Men ambiance of how we fantasized back then about climbing the corporate ladder. While Kay Guthrie’s memoir of sorts does not purport to sing hallelujah praises to the righteous cause of slaying corporate dragons, I got the distinct sense, traipsing through his self-congratulatory life reflection, that Guthrie very much viewed himself as that white knight who rode into early ‘50s Anchorage and knocked off that pesky beast. After all, ain’t that what an “Advertising Pioneer” is supposed to do?

There are memoirs and there are memoirs. Some individuals reach deep down into their psyche to share personal vignettes that shaped their existence. Others choose to highlight a period of their life filled with excitement and thrills, which they believe might attract some readers. Guthrie chose a different path. Possibly inspired by the likes of the rising advertising neophytes from the aforementioned play, he decided to depict himself in settings where the sun shone down upon his brow, casting him in the most perfect light. He rather liked that self-image—pretty much, that’s the only Guthrie his readers are exposed to.

However diligently he tried to paint himself in such a warm, memorable way, he failed to pull it off. It’s not that he doesn’t try hard; it’s just that it doesn’t work. In one part of his book he extolls his prowess as a nascent political operative for Howard Pollock, a Republican candidate for Congress in 1966. Guthrie gleefully describes how he wrested victory from the jaws of defeat by devising a plan to capture the Alaskan Native vote, which had since the inception of statehood, belonged to the Democrats. What gets in the way is his description of Alaska Native people. The time warp conundrum does him in. It may have been socially acceptable in the 1960s to refer to Alaskan Natives as Eskimos, regardless of what tribe they represented; today, it is not acceptable or responsible to label an Inuit an Eskimo or to address all of Alaska’s indigenous peoples in that same way. He commits that mistake and in doing so, removes himself from that sheen of perfect light.

What does he achieve in this flimsily constructed memoir? What he doesn’t do is tie it all together with any coherent connectivity. Though his book is relatively sequential, that’s not a driving force. It appears that Guthrie only included what he believes are colorful nuggets from his life’s oeuvre. The problem with this tact is that he’s recalling these incidents from years in the past and his memory has only managed to hold onto a minimum of facts. Result—some of his chapters are no more than a page or two. The episodes are all rather like extended adverts—get out the message, position your product glowingly (himself), then wrap it up and move on. The effect is one of feeling that you’re reading a weekly high school assignment of what exciting things you did on your summer vacation.

Occasionally, he’ll hit a riff where sections are thematically linked to one another. For instance, he writes about his involvement in booking entertainment acts into Anchorage. Of his 28 chapters he devotes about seven to this period of his life. He humorously relates how he brought first rate entertainers like Louis Armstrong, Johnny Cash, Bill Cosby and others up here. This entertainment interlude, like much else in his book, is noted for its brevity. The longest chapter in this ode to musicians and comics is five pages—the others are relegated to a snappy two pages a piece. They were more like press releases than anything else.

What’s the take-away from this quick read synopsis of an advertising executive’s success in Anchorage? Well, he had an interesting life, filled with comical and tantalizing exchanges with a cornucopia of individuals. There’s no question that he had all the raw material to write a fascinating retrospective of his life. But, here’s the thing—a memoir is not an advertising campaign. It requires a degree of introspection, a smidgen of insight into the man’s character. Apparently, Guthrie missed that lesson.