From Fatigues to a Cheap Suit

In late 1971 I started a job on Madison Avenue in the heart of “Mad Men” country. The timing wasn’t the best. I’d been traveling around the country, living in a VW, prior to landing this writing job for a major publisher (Prentice Hall). The nomad life was what you did when you got out of the military during the Vietnam era. So, I went from car to cubicle and from jeans and a fatigue shirt to a cheap suit.

I loved going to work given that a few months earlier I’d been living in a barracks with men, a few still living the horrors of southeast Asia. Here I was in the heart of New York City, a few hundred feet from Rockefeller Center. At rush hour, which was pretty much all day, people walked by without looking at you—they were living in their heads it seemed to me. It was easy to disappear in a crowd. I took my first camera with me, a Yashica something, and took shots of the human energy I was in. I took the photo of these protesters near my office. I like the taxi zipping by and the hairdressers watching the scene below. Of course, I remember one attractive co-worker asked me about my prior job. Her face dropped, and not in a good way, when I said “Army.”

One more thing about this photo, I look at it and hear taxi horns and protesters yelling.