Almost everything important that has happened to me has been unplanned. I have no natural inclination and certainly no talent for the art. I’m hopeless at the planning stage of a plan and I’m even worse at the execution phase. I have to rely on fate because, it’s all I have. Accidental outcomes have ruled my life.
It was an accident of fate that led me to a job interview at Heckler Associates. I was an unlikely candidate to become an advertising writer. I knew that because a couple of ad execs had pointed that out to me after looking at my portfolio, which was filled with journalism, scripts for radio documentaries, and a few ads from my stint as the copy director for KZOK FM. At that time, I was a freelance writer spending more time having lunch every day with my fellow flaneurs in Pioneer Square than I was working. This situation was racing toward its expiration date when a couple of friends suggested that I apply for a job at an ad agency I’d never heard of.
And that’s how I came to meet Terry Heckler, who hired me in 1978 and changed my life. I’ve told the story of that job interview a few times, in an earlier piece in Post Alley; in the documentary film, Rainier: A Beer Odyssey; and most recently in the forward to the book, Running Wild: The Rainer Beer Campaigns 1974-1987. If this strikes you as a little too meta, I get it. But fifty-two years after the cult of Rainier was created by Heckler Associates, there’s been a resurgence of interest about why it’s still alive and well and going strong. People want to know how it happened. The short answer is: Terry Heckler.
The core group of people in the company that was originally called Heckler Bowker included Terry, Gordon Bowker, Ed Leimbacher and Doug Fast. Terry and Gordon started the company together; Ed and Doug were the first employees. From the beginning, Terry had an instinct for spotting talent. He and Gordon met while working for the short-lived but beloved Seattle Magazine. Gordon, along with his friends Jerry Baldwin and Zev Seigl, had just started a little coffee company called Starbucks that looked like it might go somewhere. They eventually sold it to their employee Howard Schultz when they realized that mogul-dom was not their métier. Gordon’s next project was Redhook Brewery, which became another Heckler client.
One of Heckler Bowker’s first clients was K2 skis. Terry got the idea of promoting the fledgling ski company by painting Chew K2, in the style of faded vintage chewing tobacco ads, on old barns around the Northwest. He had seen Doug Fast’s hand-painted signs—like the epic rainbow mural he painted on the side of the Moore Theater to promote an early production of Hair—and decided he was the perfect person for the job. He was right. Doug went on to design logos for Heckler clients that included Starbucks, New Balance, JanSport, Cinnabon, Panera Bread, and the immortal Rainier “R” logo, which is his redesign of a mark that was originally done by the legendary Herb Lubalin. Doug remains one the best graphic designers in the country; his notebooks are archived in the Herb Lubalin Center of Design and Typography at The Cooper Union in NYC.
Like Gordon, Ed Leimbacher had been a writer at Seattle Magazine. I didn’t know him back then, but when I became his understudy at Heckler, I quickly learned that nobody had a more encyclopedic knowledge of and discerning ear for American contemporary music than Ed did. He wrote and produced radio ads that riffed brilliantly on popular songs from rock to folk, R&B and blues.
You can find bootleg copies of Rainier television ads all over YouTube today, but copies of Ed’s radio spots live mostly in private collections or the archives of the recording studios where he produced them. In the online world, if you don’t have video, you don’t get the views. My favorite is probably Leader of the Sixpack, a parody of the Shangra-Las hit, Leader of the Pack. But the truth is, they’re all my favorites. Ed was a hard act to follow.
Terry, Gordon, Doug and Ed were four of the most creative and least dig-me advertising guys in Seattle. And they were all working at this tiny company thanks to Terry’s exceptional talent radar. The company grew bigger, but there were never more than a couple dozen people working there at any one time. Terry’s radar might have become a little less exacting by the time I came along and slipped into the mix. But I did. And I managed to catch up, keep up, and learn from them all.
Speaking of radar, once the word got out about the work that Heckler Bowker was doing, Terry was on everyone else’s list. Since he wasn’t high-profile, he became an underground legend. Throughout his career, he stayed underground because he preferred it there. He was a very private person, the quintessential opposite of a social butterfly. This resistance to publicity made people even more curious about him. And not just in Seattle, but everywhere. The powerhouse agencies in New York and Chicago had their eyes on him because he was bagging national clients and they couldn’t figure out how a little company in the upper lefthand corner of the country could pull that off.
It’s true that the ads Heckler Associates (the company change its name when Gordon left to devote his time to the burgeoning Starbucks) created went on to win awards at local and national advertising awards, but not because Terry submitted them for these honors. They won awards because the production companies, recording studios, directors and other creatives who collaborated with us submitted the work. It made sense. Those awards shows are how they got their names and examples of their best work out there. But Terry never entered competitions because he thought the awards shows were festivals of self-congratulation, and typical of the ego-driven industry we worked in. And of course that deepened everyone’s fascination with him. Everybody loves a man of mystery.
Whenever anyone in the ad business learned where I worked, the first thing they’d ask is, “What’s Terry like?” I had a stock answer to that question. I’d say that whenever I wanted to talk to him about something, I’d go to his office, where he’d be, more often than not, in a sort of creative trance, leaning over his drawing table, doodling with sumo ink and brush on the 4-by-4-squares of scraps paper that he kept in a small wooden box. I would reel him in from wherever planet of inspiration he and his brain were orbiting by saying, “Hey Terry, have you got a minute?” He would turn and smile and say, “Sure,” and I would run my ideas past him.
I told that story because it answered the question in a general way without invading his privacy. But the truth is, after working with him for two decades, I really didn’t know much about him. He was pleasant and affable, but very private. When he wasn’t working, he spent his time with his wife and children on Vashon Island. Except for birthday and holiday parties at the office, he didn’t socialize with employees and rarely with clients. I had lunch with him maybe twice in 20 years. I visited his home once.
A few years after I was hired, I learned that he was not just a brilliant ad man but a dedicated and disciplined artist. When he wasn’t working at his day job, he was creating remarkable large-scale drawings in his home studio. They were brooding abstract compositions that he made by applying layers and layers of crayon to canvas. The first time I saw one, at a friend’s house, I was astonished. Some of them resembled dream landscapes; others were even more mysterious, filled with dark shapes that might have been people or animals or some mythical combination of both. They revealed an emotional depth and complexity that I think few people who knew him ever saw. But it was undeniably powerful and clearly came from somewhere authentic. They are proof that he was an accomplished and gifted fine artist. But typically, he never exhibited them. He gave them away to friends, family, clients and employees.
When he wasn’t wandering around in his own personal dream works, Terry’s demeanor at work was unpretentious and engaging. At brainstorming sessions, he’d become animated and goofy, jumping up and down, waving his arms in the air, doing character voices, making faces and sometimes sticking a pen up his nose. No one else at those meetings—except for Gordon, who also gleefully jettisoned his dignity when pitching an idea—was as blithe and uninhibited.
One reason is that we were too busy wondering whether our ideas passed muster. Terry’s reactions to them were muted and hard to read. He might smile once in a while as he faithfully wrote the ideas down, but you never knew how he felt about any of them until weeks later, when his storyboards would come out and you’d discover that yours had made the cut. Or not. But once he assigned you to write the script, he would turn you loose to go get it done. His belief in us kept us on our toes. And in the end, he made us all better at what we did.
Like many geniuses, Terry was a puzzle. I wasn’t intimidated by him, but I was often unsure about what he was thinking. Most of us were. Even so, we loved working there because he made it possible for us to do good work without compromising. I wouldn’t have lasted two weeks at any another agency. I was unruly and undisciplined and spoiled by the creative freedom Terry gave us. But as long as I produced the work, he left me alone to follow my muse.
Let me assure you, that kind of freedom is as rare as sincerity in the world of advertising. Terry fought for our ideas. I know that because they almost always came back from client presentations intact. Any clients who were smart enough to hire Heckler Associates were obviously smart enough not to second-guess him.
Terry grew up in Windber, a small mining and manufacturing town in southwestern Pennsylvania, so although he was well educated (Carnegie Mellon and University of Waterloo), artistically gifted, and culturally astute, he also had an instinctive understanding of ordinary folks. It was obvious to anyone who knew him that those were the people he came from and that was the team he played for. It’s why he had such a knack for creating advertising that wasn’t snotty, pretentious or pandering.
Those Rainier ads didn’t have a target audience; they had legions of devoted fans. And they still do. It still amazes me that enthusiasm for those ads hasn’t dimmed in fifty years. Whenever the new documentary about Heckler and the cult of Rainier Beer plays in theaters, the shows are sold out, with lines of people of all ages waiting to see it snaking around the block. In the cynical world of consumer capitalism, that’s what they call brand loyalty. But in this case, it’s also flat-out love.
Can you imagine how much fun it was to write and produce those ads? Well, it was even more fun than you imagine. And Terry was responsible for making it that way. I don’t know if this happens to other people in the business, but people were always telling us how much they loved those ads. It was always satisfying to overhear kids imitating the frogs that croaked “RainierRainierRainier” in an ad made in the early 70’s (yes, Budweiser copied that idea 20 years after Heckler did it), and it’s even more fun now to see a grown man in a movie theater throw back his head and howl RaaaaneeeeerBeeeer while watching a documentary that was made 52 years after that motorcycle shifted gears rounding a corner on a two-lane highway heading toward the Mountain. The spirit of comic anarchy those ads unleashed on the world is as effervescent and energizing now as it was back then.
Like all creative jobs, the work was harder than it looked, but it was worth the effort. What we created wasn’t important or vital. It wasn’t rocket science and we weren’t curing cancer. But we did it well and we were proud of our work. I will always be grateful to whatever twist of fate sent me to Heckler Associates. And to Terry’s sense of humor for hiring me. On the other hand, what he had built was a sanctuary for dreamers, goofballs and misfit toys, so I guess he knew that I would fit right in.
Terry Heckler died on May 5 this year, a little less than a year after his friend and former business partner Gordon Bowker passed away. Their era is over but their legacy of inspired lunacy lives on. Consider that an excuse to raise a glass of Rainier or Redhook, according to your preference, and make a toast to two of Seattle’s favorite sons.
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