Whatever happened to...me?

In 1967 I was a 19 year old “colored” guy who’d barely graduated from Wendell Phillips High School, had just dropped out of the School of the Art Insitute of Chicago, was still living with my parents and 8 brothers and sisters in Robert Taylor Homes (then, America’s largest housing project) and was...er...between one of the many jobs I had and quit since I started working a few years earlier. Oh yeah, and had just barely dodged going to Vietnam. But by 1977, I was one of the first and few “melanous” madmen - with an office overlooking the Oak Street beach, on the 29th floor of the Hancock Building on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. I was a veteran admaker who had a hand in creating ads and commercials for some of the world’s biggest advertisers like McDonalds, Kraft, Bisquick, Kemper, Allied Van Lines, Swift & Co. WMAQ-TV and more. I was working at J. Walter Thompson, the world’s biggest advertising agency. And I was just getting started. Now, at 73, when people ask me how I did it, I tell them half an answer: I was a beneficiary of the Black Lives Matter movement....50 years before it happened. Want to find out the other half? Read on.