Lewis William Selmeier
under construction
The way I'd always heard the story, after graduating from college, he and a friend, John Andrews, a classmate from Principia College, got in a Roaster and headed west to see the country.
Seventy years after it was written, I found this in his things, a rejection letter from an advertising agency in New York City. Copies of his correspondence reveal an all-out push before and after graduation to secure employment.
While still in college he had begun seeking a position in advertising in New York City. He had written to and visited advertising agencies in New York City. His father visited Crosley Radio in Cincinnati trying to help him find work as a writer there.
He had declined his acceptance to Harvard in order to help advance the cause of his religion by bringing his excellent academic credentials to Principia College, which at the time was just growing from being a junior college to becoming an accredited four-year institution. He was an academic star there, and the first student body president of the four-year college, but that didn't help when he was a Rhode's Scholar candidate. He got beaten by someone from an Ivy League school. Then when applying for jobs, once again, it didn't help. Big New York advertising agencies do not hire people from liberal arts colleges of which they've never heard. They hire Harvard graduates and Rhode's Scholars. He was unable to get the work he wanted.
Apparently, since he couldn't find work anyway, he got in a Roadster with John Andrews and headed west. They were going to explore the country from St. Louis to California, but when they got to Denver his father wired him that he had found a job
for him and that he had better return to Cincinnati to take it. So he abandoned his friend and went to work for the rest of his
life.
[Apparently his friend liked Colorado because, after duty as a submarine officer in the second world war, he returned to Colorado and, with is wife Marianne, founded a summer camp for young Christian Scientists, Adventure Unlimited, in Buena Vista, Colorado, elevation 9000 feet, that my sister and I later attended some years apart. While we were there, his friend never said a word to us. He couldn't still have been piqued at having been abandoned by my father, could he?]
A year and a half after beginning his first job, which was writing, but only writing correspondence, he answered an ad posted by a New York publishing company that was seeking an "Ad. Writer" in which he listed the humble jobs and additional education he had gotten since graduating.
He was doing everything he could to climb.
In the letter he wrote "I prefer the writing of advertising copy to any position." After he had passed on, my brother spoke to a man in advertising who had started out a few decades later and said that when he had begun he looked up to our father as a powerhouse in advertising, someone who had built the advertising agency of his dreams
on his own.
But before that it was a climb through a series of jobs, punctuated by relentless attempts to get better ones, until working his way into a company where they advanced him quickly. I have not figured out which of these early jobs he got fired from for writing poetry on the job, unless that happened during a summer job between years of school, but less than three years into his career he was earning about six times what he had been earning at the beginning.
And then there was war.
Along the way, Frannie Block had said she would wait for him until he could afford her if he would make a commitment to her, but he wouldn't and they broke up. In his things I found a newspaper clipping of her marriage to someone else. Then he dated Patsy Dickerman, another classmate from Principia, who was in New York City running her own travel business, by the time he finally was earning enough, but the war. . .
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