Fire Aftermath
Ric, Brien, Linda, Rob
The fire should have been a bummer, and at first it was. But when you're 25 years old, doing what you love, and you believe you've invented the whole industry (which everyone in the industry believed, we later found out), you make lemonade from lemons. A lot of the credit goes to Rob Riordan, Linda Duczman, and their incredible PR sense. Rob came from a PR family. He saw the opportunity. I (the swing man) backed him up. We cold make real noise with this fire. First, with the articles the Sentinel and Journal were pumping out. Every one of them had quotes from one of us.
Then, with ads we wrote, thanking everybody under the sun from our mailman to our competition, for helping us survive, and reminding people what we did for a living.
Then finally, with tearjerking letters to our clients letting them know "A New Year, A New Location, A continuing Tradition." Tradition? We had been in business three years!
But perhaps the thing that clicked most with our public was our Christmas card. A Watercolor by Dave Sorgel of the Metropolitan Block building emphasized the building's classic architecture, and was set late at night. All the buildings windows were dark, except for those on the second floor-- ours. The card read--
The press led subsequent stories with text from the card: "A Time to Pause and Reflect".... "That's for sure," said Brien Lee.... etc., etc.
SO we entered 1976 none the worse for wear. Borrowing space from client Raintree Publishers, we relocated to the Steinmeyer Building, 205 West Highland. This would be our home for the rest of our career as Sorgel-Lee-Riordan, Sorgel-Lee, and, later, Sorgel Studios. The Steinmeyer was host to an amalgam of people, from a Lithographic Company, to Raintree, to William Wenzel Architects, to the Interface Design Group, and others. It didn't take long to decide we'd relocate there. It was cheap, flexible, and there was lots of open space.
The Wisconsin Heart Association had recently vacated their third floor space. It must have been at least 7500 square feet. We took half of that, but since the space had not been built out, we temporarily used all of it.
Dave Sorgel's carpentry skills came into play, as he built desks, work surfaces, and dividers from plywood, and pretty soon we had a very, very open plan. Offices along the Highland Avenue perimeter had already been created by the Heart folks, so these were given to Ric, Rob, Brien and Linda, with a corner office becoming our conference room.
Third and Highland was a trip. Before it became Old World Third Street, it was just old. Mader's Restaurant anchored it, and Usingers was across the street. The Lincoln Fireproof Warehouse was across from us on Highland, and since their loading docks were on the Highland Avenue cul-de-sac at the River, there was a constant flow of trucks, truck warning back-up bells, and revving engines.
But the most memorable sound to me was the Usingers Bell Tower Bells. There WERE no bells. But there was a continuously looping tape of a handful of old world melodies, which within months, we had committed to heart. They drove me nuts.
Combined with good work, the whole fire episode helped to up our recognition, bidding, and business quickly. We were still broadly defined as far as media went.. We were film slides, video, audio, so long as we could write the script. We were, in fact, Sorgel-Lee-Riordan, The Media People. Our latest logo featured a box with three circles, one of which was die-cut-- a hole. Often the question came up-- "which one of you is the hole?"
PSA's
The first two years at Third and Highland were profitable and productive. We developed a reputation as problem solvers, at a time when ad agencies and PR firms stayed away from "business" audio-visuals. Public Service Announcements and fund raising slide shows were not yet looked upon by agencies as creative opportunities, but we understood that they could open doors, by showing our wares to folks who attended plays in the evening and ran companies in the daytime.
The Milwaukee Rep.
The Milwaukee Rep's Bill McKerighan delivers a standard PSA season ticket pitch, then announces that he wants to make "the spot more memorable".
SPLAT! "Hmm", says Bill...."Lemon Meringue!"
Henry Strozier, as Scrooge, is interviewed by the late Larry Shue, portraying "trusted Anchorman Bob Cratchit". For the Rep's "A Christmas Carol"
"DECEPTION! IS THAT ALL THERE IS TO LIFE?!?", adlibs a character portrayed by Larry Shue in voiceover, as a bewildered potential Rep subscriber (voiced by Penny Reed) lives out her fantasies. A takeoff on Artistic Director John Dillon's heavy Eugene O'Neill season.
The Milwaukee Symphony.
Two buddies compare "season tickets". One's thinking baseball, the other, Brahms. Kenneth Schermerhorn wants you.
The Milwaukee Public Library.
"Library People are everyday people"... take that, Toyota.This series defined us... it was twin dissolve slides, with classic Ric Sorgel photography, constant dissolves, killer British library music, Steve Lutomski narration (sped up to fit 30 seconds) and that sweet face at the end. Who was she? Where is she today? Dave Sorgel cameos as a record-listening hipster.
Goodwill Industries.
"Fire at Goodwill". No verbs necessary. Written by SLR writer Dan Melton, who didn't believe (rightfully so) in full sentences.
Goodwill needs your help, so we can get back to work. It worked.
The Swine Flu
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Where were you when the swine flu hit? Did it hit? Remember the swine flu? It was going to plunge us into the next worldwide plague. Didn't happen. But we got the swine flu PSA account, and used some popular populist approaches, like having a couple of the Packers tell us to hit the flu before it hits us. The Packers. That always works-- even in Dan Devine era.
Ok, so, as a New Jersey boy and a certified former hippy, I hated pro sports. (Try wrenching me away from the TV on Sundays now). SO I came up with an alternative-- the gambler, so lucky he'll take his chances with the flu, standing under the patented Monty Python 5000 lb. weight. One problem-- this prop was not tricked up-- it had a solid bottom. But actor Larry Roscioli knew how to take a fall-- luckily!
Milwaukee Public Museum
Steve Lutomski's take on "Taking a Look At Yourself". The businessman learns about society through the dioramas at the museum, which curiously, feature statues that look quite like him!
For many of these, we produced twin dissolve slide shows to be the basis of their fundraising efforts, and Public Service Announcements to up their recognition on TV.
Why were we so lucky to land these accounts? TV stations had not yet begun to look on PSA's as a tool to boost recognition of their newsteams, or to up their images as people who "cared". They just ran the spots cause they had to, in order to comply with the terms of their licenses. Most PSA's were terrible. We tried to make them more interesting, even when produced on a shoestring. The stations usually donated production time to boot, so all we had to do was show up with our raw materials, our script, (I usually pre-produced the soundtrack), the on-screen talent if there was any, and go for it.It was a lot of fun, and at the TV stations we got to meet local celebrities like Doctor Cadaverino, Father Gene Jackubek, and Howard Gernett.
In the mid seventies, the classic "industrial" media, particularly for corporate communications, were films and filmstrips. Budget and need usually determined which would be the chosen medium. And Sorgel-Lee-Riordan produced many films and filmstrips, in addition to our staple of "twin dissolve" programs. Rob Riordan provided excellent work for Harley Davidson; Linda Duczman wrote and directed films for the county; I even got to do a video for WLS in Chicago. We were lucky to have bread and butter accounts like Cutler-Hammer, Preway, Nekoosa, and the sewerage district, where the information was clearly more important than technique-- but they paid regularly, as as the business grew, we knew we needed that.
Rob Riordan at the Steenbeck flatbed editor, which proved we were really into motion projects.
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Larry Roscioli, part of the SLR stock troupe (which is another way of saying we'll pay you 25 bucks and dinner), as a library-user accused of theft in a Dragnet takeoff for the Wisconsin Library Association.
"Joe Friday" and "Sgt. Frank Gannon" examine the evidence-- a library card.
Ric, meanwhile pursued the flaky technology of an emerging field: multi-image. Although we had produced many "multimedia" shows featuring 10 or 15 or 20 projectors, each of these was a risk.Usually these were for business meetings or sales events and were operated by us on site as well, to reduce the risk.We had success with shows for the Journal, TV6, and the Credit Union Executives' Society. But the biggest risk had been the Urban River exhibit show-- 8 screens in the round-- a show that played at the Art Museum (the Art Center) for months, leading the debate on revitalizing Milwaukee's Riverfront (it took twenty years, but it worked. We take full credit :)).
Ric's vision was to embrace a technology that other competitors were afraid of, thereby distinguishing us further. It was a marketing approach that worked, but also worked to begin to emphasize the technology over the message. For the next five years we tried to balance all of the media in which we communicated. Balance in terms of financial investment, labor investment, marketing investment. Eventually there would be a winner: "multi-image".
Click Here for video look at a few of the above described PSA's.