This week — this far-off, way-too-hypothetical, dreamed-about-but-dreaded week — has finally come. And gone. How to put it in context?

Quite simply, June 19–25, 2023 marked the completion of the greatest accomplishment of my life: a fiercely stubborn and unrelenting streak of solo road biking that has lasted for 522 weeks (10 years, almost precisely aligning with the beginning and end of my 50s). It has covered 28,906 miles — which, at the 33rd parallel near where I live, would have been enough to take me around the circumference of the earth 1.4 times. That’s an average of 55.4 miles per week, 3.5 rides per week, 16 miles per ride. Every. Single. Week. No time off for illness, no exemptions for busy weeks of business travel, no breaks for bad weather, no vacations. Just round and round on my white Pinarello Due, 1,800 rides on basically the same dozen neighborhood-based routes in Arizona and Colorado.

And on the 3,653rd day Joe rested.

It has been an exercise in extreme dedication, discipline, and consistency by someone whose mercurial life had always lacked those qualities, all set to the soundtrack of tires flying across pavement and the cicada-like clicking of coasting bike pawls.

Ten years. That’s longer than high school, college, and grad school… combined. Far longer than any job I have ever held (albeit I was only able to ride this much because I spent all of my 50s unemployed, underemployed, or self-employed — do not try this at home). Ten years. 16.7% of my entire life. 25% of my adult life. My friend Amber became a parent a few weeks before my streak began; now her remarkably mature daughter Lili and I have our own friendship, complete with its set of rituals, memories, and jokes.

For 10 Junes and 10 Octobers and 10 Februarys I rode, carving out a couple of hours a few days each week, usually throwing the bicycle in the back of the car to start from some interesting venue, meticulously stretching before each outing, recording my mileage at the end, and frequently stopping off for a Victoria’s Kitchen Almond Water, an Arrowhead Sparkling Water, or a Mocha Frappuccino on the way home.

I learned to study the weather forecasts carefully, planning my week’s rides based on temperature, precipitation, and most importantly wind speed. I rode through rain. I rode through wildfire smoke. I rode through street temperatures exceeding 122 degrees. I rode through puddles so deep that they saturated my shoes and socks. On more than one occasion I had to maneuver through snow-covered streets with the ice clinging to my tires and freezing around my cleats so that they wouldn’t clip into the pedals. I started out some rides in pleasant conditions and then had to race home to beat the lightning and rain. And I learned that, just as in life itself, there are days on which no matter how well you plan or how many turns you take, you are always facing headwinds.

Every week I constructed anew the jigsaw puzzle of rides that would compose that period’s statistical opus. I occasionally rode through downtown Phoenix or Denver, or went to a store on an errand. But mostly I meandered on paved trails and suburban streets — which, at least in Scottsdale, pretty much all have bike lanes. I almost never took the same route twice in a row, and even though my rides became very repetitive, I would vary them by, for instance, going clockwise on one loop because I knew I had gone counter-clockwise last time; it’s amazing how much more you see when you simply change the perspective.

I rode past empty acres at the start of my streak that had grown into vibrant neighborhoods by the end of it. I rode through the subdivisions of Louisville, CO before and after they were leveled by the Marshall Fire in December of 2021. I rode by certain homes that were sold multiple times over the 10 years. I encountered balloonists, powered paragliders, river tubers, and kayakers.

My riding world became populated with dozens of familiar objects and characters as if out of some children’s book: individual trees, rocks, road signs, and cars parked in the same place no matter the day or time; three white dogs that came running along their fence every time I went by; the prairie dogs that scurried to safety at my approach; an elderly Indian woman whom I often found sitting alone on a bench in the middle of a field. I became so attuned to every undulation of the road, every business that came and went, every street name, every home for sale… I was like a rolling road engineer, cartographer, and realtor all in one.

I rode when I was tired. I rode in between meetings. On occasions too numerous to count I squeezed in a ride on the same day I took a cross-country flight. I rode when I had the flu, and kidney stones, and a bloody nose, and a broken toe. I rode with a hard splint on my thumb that prevented me from gripping the handlebars. For the past year I rode with a torn meniscus and a bizarre condition that caused my left knee to swell up like an overly ripe grapefruit 25 different times — every two weeks, for three days, so that I could barely walk, let alone ride; talk about consistency.

And on June 28, 2021, after I found out that my mother had died unexpectedly, I went out within the hour and rode — because that was the only comfort I could find.

It was never my goal to engage in some kind of stubborn statistical stunt (even though from 2010 to 2012 I went for a 2-mile+ walk every single day, 500 straight days, in remembrance of the walks I had taken with my cat Amalfi.)

In fact, this all began innocently enough. On June 10, 2013, I went onto Backcountry.com and purchased my new bicycle for $2199 — a 50th birthday present to myself, 7 weeks after I had officially hit that milestone. I had test-ridden a Pinarello at a store in Scottsdale, but this was probably the largest purchase I had ever made online, and one of the first times I had bought any hard goods at all over the internet. I can still recall the feeling of halting uncertainty before I completed the transaction.

The Pinarello arrived a few days later, in parts, and although I had never assembled a bicycle before I laid everything out on the searing stone of my Arizona driveway and set to work.

At that time I was still riding a 90s vintage Bianchi steel bicycle, a durable machine that had been through a side-on full-speed collision with a minivan being backed out of a driveway by a 16-year-old in 2005, and a skidding downhill loss of control due to a flat tire in 2008. The Bianchi escaped with nary a scratch, but I emerged from each accident with a broken left clavicle that required surgery and the implantation of some metal parts. It was sometime after shuttling me to the umpteenth rehab appointment following the 2008 accident that my girlfriend, Julie, said to me, “You don’t have to stop riding; you just have to stop falling.”

But in truth, I was willing to stop riding because biking had never been that important to me. I loved the orange Schwinn Stingray I had in elementary school, but I probably went from junior high through college without riding a bike again. In the Fall of 1992 I turned to pre-dawn biking to help inject some discipline into my life, but that didn’t last for long. I didn’t purchase my first bike jersey until 1997, at the age of 34, and then only as a memento of a visit to Tuscany. I had no friends or family members who were cyclists. There were, in short, simply no signs at all that once I crested the hill of 50 this would become the greatest obsession of my lifetime.

With the gleaming new Pinarello now fully assembled, maybe correctly, I went out on the maiden voyage on Tuesday, June 18, 2013: five miles around the neighborhood. The lightweight carbon frame helped the bike to accelerate quickly, even though I was still using “cages” to hold my shoes onto the pedals and hence was losing a lot of the mechanical energy on the upstroke. I rode 60 glorious miles that first week — reveling at the wind in my face amidst the early Arizona summer temperatures, which climbed to 108 degrees.

This was a pretty relaxed time for me. I had just turned in the final draft of my book, Natural Prophets, which I had been working on for nine months — so my calendar was clear. And I was, at this point, still receiving severance payments from my last job with Sprouts Farmers Market, which had ended in August of 2012. Without the restrictions of a daily commute, I had plenty of time to go out cycling at my leisure in the morning or afternoon.

And I did. I rode several days the next week. And the next week. And the one after that. I surpassed 90 miles in a week for the first time on August 4, 2013, and 100 miles the following week. In all, I did 72 rides in the first 93 days of Pinarello ownership. It became a habit and then a routine — as much a part of the rhythms of my life as a trip to the grocery store or my daily leashed cat walks. I rode 1,101 miles that summer, which I thought was pretty impressive, and I commemorated the accomplishment by producing a little video about it, which one friend declared to be “badass” — certainly the only time that word has been applied to anything I have done in my life.

In the process, my quads and calf muscles began to strengthen, and so did my powers of observation. The world is experienced quite differently at 16–20 MPH. Car speeds are too fast to allow you to observe any details; walking speeds are too slow to present you with a changing landscape. But on a bicycle everything unfolds before you at a comprehensible pace. The mind clears. The memory engages. You experience, as the songwriter Lucinda Williams once said, “The breath from your own lips, the touch of fingertips.”

I found biking to be an incredibly sentient experience. Aboard my Pinarello I could hear the low drone of the bees foraging for pollen around tree blossoms. I smelled the muskiness of the creosote bushes after a brief desert rain shower. I felt the cool microclimate of a hollow as I whizzed past, only to burst back into the warm embrace of the sunshine. I dodged the onrush of cottonwood tree seeds, wafting toward me like a trippy Star Wars-effect 3D snowstorm in June. I ducked under branches extending into my path, bowing to acknowledge their majesty but allowing them to tick the top of my helmet like a royal scepter. I learned to look up to the top of the tree canopy to find a lone mockingbird hopping around while serenading me with its complex song, which came to remind me of declining a Latin pronoun: “Hic haec hoc. Huius huius huius. Huic huic huic. Hunc hanc hoc. Hoc hac hoc.”

Riding also helped me think. Traveling through neighborhoods in Scottsdale that I had visited as a kid 40 years earlier, old thoughts and feelings flooded in. I was, effectively, able to transport myself back to an age when I was experiencing this desert landscape for the very first time. Yet I was very much present, sometimes spotting coyotes, javelinas, rattlesnakes, and even a camel (later, in Colorado, there would be cows, goats, horses, deer, and on one occasion a pair of llamas being walked on leashes).

Before long, I found that I could organize my writing better on two wheels, and sometimes I was even able to write entire chapter-opening paragraphs in my mind while I was biking (indeed, large parts of this article were written while biking). I sometimes undertook complex mathematical calculations in my head. I also became extremely good at estimating times and distances while I was riding, and could often use a sightline to predict the distance to a far-off object within a couple of hundredths of a mile.

By the first of week of June 2014, I found myself nearing the one-year anniversary of the start of my weekly biking streak. That certainly had not been a conscious goal, but as someone who always found great significance in numbers and milestones I was definitely aware of it.

During the 51st week, on Wednesday, June 4, I drove my car to the Home Depot parking lot on 90th Street in Scottsdale (a frequent point of departure for a variety of bike rides), and then rode about 15 miles down to Tempe to do some research at Arizona State University. Along the way I witnessed a horrific traffic accident, which in retrospect might have been some kind of omen — because a few hours later, while returning, I had a life-changing accident of my own.

One moment I was stopped at a red light at the intersection of Weber Drive and Scottsdale Road; the next thing I knew I was flat on my back at what turned out to be the intersection of McKellips Road and Scottsdale Road, with a team of EMTs hovering over me and calling my name. I did not know what happened, and to this day the retrograde amnesia has never cleared up; there are a few critical minutes still missing from my life.

It would appear that I somehow lost consciousness while riding the bike and fell right to the pavement — smashing the zygomatic and orbital bones as my face bore the full impact of the fall (and, incidentally, protected the Pinarello from suffering any damage). The photos taken of me in the hospital showed a bruised, bloody, and distended face that was not recognizably mine. The head-to-toe scans they did also revealed a potentially life-threatening aortic aneurysm, which I never knew I had and which would require intensive and regular testing for the rest of my life. Two days later I had a metal plate inserted in my face to stabilize the bones — and although I would recover from that fairly quickly, I was confined to bed for a few more days, and did not get the chance to extend my riding to 52 weeks. Since the streak was not (yet) important to me, I didn’t give it a second thought; but the following week I “got back on the horse” — a bit tentatively — and started riding again. I continued the week after that and I never stopped… until now.

On June 4, 2015, I retraced my route of a year earlier from the Home Depot parking lot to ASU and back, and when I got to the fateful intersection I took a selfie sticking out my middle finger at the camera. (I did that again each June 4 for the rest of the time I lived in Arizona.)

By June of 2016, now two years removed from the accident and three years in overall (having missed riding only during that one week while recovering from surgery), “the streak” began to take on a life of its own as my stubbornness and dedication became a point of pride (perhaps a rare instance of “pride cometh after a fall”?). So although bicycling remained a completely solitary activity for me, I did use the occasion to boast-post about it on Facebook, asking my friends the question: What is your greatest accomplishment in life? Clearly, I thought I had now achieved mine: two straight years of biking after a brutal accident!

Ever hear of false peak syndrome?

In 2016 I had a monster year of riding, tallying 3,749 miles or an average of 72.1 per week — my highest 52-week average ever. 2017 was also a good year, with 3,641 miles. In all, I had now been riding for 185 straight weeks, 236 out of 237, covering 14,909 miles.

In 2018 Julie and I decided to move to Boulder. The many trips back and forth in rented trucks, cars, and airplanes were disruptive — but I still managed to get in 52 weeks and 2,541 miles of riding.

Boulder is of course a mecca for cycling, with a culture that embraces the outdoors, an altitude that aids performance training, and a real-life zoetrope of rolling vistas that go from wide-open plains to sparkling lakes to high skies to the snow-capped mountains of the Continental Divide — often on the same ride. I settled quickly into my new biking routine, carving out solitary routes through neighborhoods that were quiet and mostly vehicle-free, and delighting in the disorienting world of interconnected trails that run beneath the Boulder most people know, cutting through forests and cow pastures, bypassing small farms, and crisscrossing Boulder Creek more times than you can count.

It was, in many ways, too lovely for the mundane task of “getting in my weekly miles,” which increasingly felt like a chore that weighed heavier on me as the streak grew. So in July of 2018 I declared in a Facebook post that I was through: “After 60 straight weeks of bicycling 60+ miles, and 211 straight weeks (262 out of the last 263) of riding, racking up more than 16,000 miles, I am done. No more bicycling for the sake of bicycling or for just keeping the streaks going. I am healthy, content, and incredibly proud of what I accomplished, but I have been doing this every week since turning 50 and it’s just time to move on.”

Yet that changed exactly nothing: right impulse, wrong timing. I was not done. I kept riding every week, and I kept recording the miles. Four years became five years, and six, and seven.

Over the course of my biking decade I met people whose endurance put mine to shame: some who undertook “centuries” (100-mile rides) every week, or who rode cross-country, or who logged 10,000 miles in a year. For me, biking was never about distance; it was about traveling into my heart, mind, and soul. I almost always kept it between 15 and 25 miles a ride, in part because I just didn’t have the lungs or willpower to go farther. During the 19th and 20th miles of my rides, I would note important “years” on my Lezyne cycling computer (19.56, the year my parents wed; 19.94, the year I met Julie; 20.08, the year we left Maryland for Arizona) and I would take note of how startlingly fast a “lifetime” zoomed by. Sometimes I would have a mileage goal in mind but would come up short, so I would engage in what I called “mile-andering” around the streets of my finish line until I hit the desired mark. The most I ever rode in one week was 145 miles, and that was just this past April, during the week I turned 60. “FU, Father Time” I wrote in my mileage log. (Certainly I had no shortage of good-natured me-against-the-world attitude.)

My biking was also not about speed. I almost never paid attention to how long I was on the road, or my cadence, or my mile time. However, I did take pride in trying to exceed the posted speed limit at least once during each ride. And like all reasonably serious road bikers, I became extremely internally competitive when there were other cyclists on the road. If someone silently pulled up behind me at a red light, and I became aware of their presence, I would tear out at full speed as soon as the light turned green, like some testosterone-jacked idiot in a Trans Am, looking back with a smirk half a mile later at the rider left behind in the distance and wanting to flash a sign that would read something like, “You just got smoked by a 57-year-old.” One of the few things I did not track over the years was the number of cyclists who actually managed to pass me on the road, but I would estimate it was under 15. I simply did not allow that to happen.

Along the way there were lots of flat tires — usually fixed on the spot, but occasionally resulting in the need to walk the bicycle a few miles back to the car; when that happened I always turned off the cycling computer because those miles should not count. I saw several bike accidents happen, and stopped to lend a hand. I had a few close calls myself when motorists ignored stop signs or nearly side-swiped me in a bike lane. But I stuck to Julie’s advice: I stopped falling.

At the height of the pandemic, in the Spring of 2020, I rode with a mask on because some articles I read indicated that bicyclists could spew a “viral plume” into the air that would stretch 65 feet behind them. Who knew? I had a custom bike jersey made that warned people to stay back. I called it “The Repeloton” because I figured it would repel all contact. Yet for all the times I wore it, only once — on a ride in Marina del Rey, CA — did someone ever comment on it.

It was also in 2020 that I passed 20,000 miles, and this was another moment I commemorated with a video. My friend John, with whom I had worked at Cal Ripken Jr.’s foundation long ago, posted a comment in response to the video: “Definitely check back when you reach 2,632!” — a reference to Cal’s record consecutive-games streak during his playing days with the Baltimore Orioles. Funny.

But with all deference to Cal and his amazing accomplishments, consider: his streak spanned 429 weeks, including four after he finally took himself out of the lineup on September 19, 1998; my biking streak lasted 522 weeks (well, OK — only the last 471 were consecutive). Moreover, every year of his career, Cal had a 26-week off-season before the streak resumed. In fact, during the entirety of his 2,632-game streak, Cal played for 425 weeks and had 452 weeks off. I had no weeks off. And of course, Cal’s streak ended when he was 38 years old; mine began when I was 50.

In 2022 I passed 25,000 total miles, and for this occasion I not only created another video, but also a new custom jersey touting the “Farewell to My 50s Biking Tour.” Appropriately, I topped 50 miles during every single week of my 9th year of riding, for the first time ever.

By the end of that calendar year, I had been riding for 497 weeks and had logged 27,063 miles. I really had nothing left to prove to myself, and I took comfort in the idea that I could just coast to the 10-year finish line, a mere 25 weeks away, perhaps easing way back on the weekly mileage.

So of course, I didn’t. 2023 turned out to be my best six months ever, with an average of 73.7 miles per week. I rode more miles in the first half of 2023 than in ALL of 2019, and exceeded 70 miles a week for each of the final 12 weeks of the streak. It reminds me of a metaphor my brother Marty coined: “accelerating into a parking space.” You hunt throughout the lot for an opening, and when you finally spot one you go in hard, you go in fast… and then suddenly it’s over.

It is over.

So are my routine, my rhythm, my 50s, and seemingly much of the purpose in my life. I am not sure how I am going to spend my free time, of which I now have way too much. But as the writer John Irving once said, “You only grow by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.”

Time to grow.

And how exactly will I do that in the decade of my 60s? Well, I have given considerable thought to this while cruising along the streets of Scottsdale and Boulder. I could take up tennis in a serious way. I could learn yoga or meditation. I could set a goal of writing four new books by the time I am 70. I could work to read Dostoyevsky in the original language, even though I currently speak nyet a word of Russian. All sound wonderfully ambitious, and frankly more achievable than the far-fetched idea of riding a bike 55 miles a week during every week of my 50s ever would have.

But I think perhaps it will be enough of an accomplishment if I just stay alive for the next 10 years.

That, and maybe find a way to enjoy an occasional bike ride.

Dear Members of the Great Neck South Class of 1981:

An unfathomable 40 years ago this week, nearly 300 of us ascended the stage at Westbury Music Fair to receive our high school diplomas.

The ceremony had all of the usual trappings: caps, gowns, broad smiles, doting parents, Pomp and Circumstance, flipped tassels, group photos, goodbye hugs. One thing it did not have was a valedictory speech. And that’s because I chose not to give one.

Mind you, that wasn’t the plan. The previous year, I had made the trek out to Westbury to attend the GNS graduation as an usher or some such thing. On that occasion, I sat in the back row listening to the speeches and began to imagine what our ceremony would be like. I knew at the time there was a chance that I might become our class valedictorian and hence I would have the opportunity to philosophize and pontificate about whatever essential truths an 18-year-old thinks he might have stumbled upon. So on that late spring day in 1980, I hubristically allowed my mind to drift off and start writing the speech that I might give in 1981. I even jotted down some notes — which focused on the virtues of humility, a topic that had been on my mind for years as I sought to balance my own academic ambitions with my distaste for the shenanigans of friends like Les Nelkin, who would sometimes hold his exam above his head and playfully parade around the room with his impressive grade. In the notes, I chided “my fellow inmates” for being so competitive, and said that I had learned to be compassionate “because there was such a glaring absence of it.” Phew.

For all of his lack of humility, however, Les and I had been friends for a long time. We had known of each other in elementary school, but it was just a passing acquaintance until we were thrust together in 7th grade in the same “SWIS” or School Within a School section. There it became clear that we would be friendly rivals for a long time to come. He was an outspoken conservative and fan of Ronald Reagan, the outgoing 64-year-old Governor of California, and I was an unformed lump of liberal-leaning political clay. He was clean cut and dark haired, while my dirty blonde hair had waves upon waves. He and his family regularly vacationed at the highly polished Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood, Florida, while I had often stayed with my family at the casual ranch-style Jokake Inn in Phoenix. We argued about important issues of the day, such as whether it was ethical for his family to go back to the salad bar at the Steer Barn restaurant as they were leaving so they could take some extra bread home.

In those days Les was confident but a little unsophisticated socially, upright, by-the-books, perhaps easy to make fun of — until he shot up a few inches, began training as a swimmer, and bulked up. But whatever else he may have been, Les was always an outstanding student who (I knew from his post-exam parades) was every bit as good as I was, and maybe better. One time in an English class, the word “sanguine” came up in a reading and Les commented that there were two very different meanings, bloody and cheerful, and then mic-dropped his pencil and looked around the room to bask in the accolades. “How did he possibly know that?” I remember thinking.

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One afternoon during the fall of our senior year, Principal Gil Blum telephoned to inform me that I had in fact been named valedictorian (courtesy of an inflated grade point average, courtesy of years of easy Latin tests). I remember my mother being stunned — she had no idea that I had racked up such a good GPA because for years all I had done was bemoan my performance on exams (until the scores actually came back) — but for me, it simply felt like a moment of quiet triumph. I was one of those kids who had always enjoyed a good measure of success at everything I had tried, and thus had long thought of myself as someone with tremendous “potential.” Close friends and family had often whispered about all the wondrous things that lay ahead for me — surely, they said, I was destined to be a smashing success, famous, rich, accomplished, something — and now this academic achievement seemed to validate all of those predictions. Yet I certainly wasn’t going to crow about it, even after Les and some of my friends told me that if I insisted on being so low key about my accomplishments, I should surrender the valedictorian title to someone else.

But the rest of that senior year delivered a series of unexpected jolts: the election of Reagan to the White House, a struggle to escape my linear way of thinking and understand calculus, an injury that forced me to miss some school and resulted in an end to my streak of straight A’s — and then on April 15 a thin envelope from my #1 choice of colleges. At that moment, when I was still deep in thought about what I should say in my graduation speech, for the first time I truly came to understand the way of the world: we do not fully control our own destinies, there will be disappointments, potential means nothing, ambition must be tempered, humility does not get rewarded by others, outcomes will sometimes seem unjust… and there are a lot of other talented people. I couldn’t have quite articulated it at the time, but I think a new reality was dawning on me: my life had already peaked. It would never get better for me than it had been at 17, when there was still so much promise, so much hope, so much confidence that I could become the valedictorian or “be anything I wanted to be.” And that was a reality I couldn’t share with my classmates.

So… I decided not to give a speech at all. Maybe it was my immature and self-masochistic way of trying to teach the world a lesson: you disappointed me, so now I won’t give you what you expect of me. This was the first instance of a pattern I would repeat again and again in life that ultimately prevented me from even coming close to my potential. By denying myself what I truly wanted, I hoped the people around me would shower me with sympathy and praise, which in some way would ultimately make me feel better than if I had just done what I truly wanted to do in the first place.

Only, no one really cared or noticed. I think I may have had one conversation with Gil Blum about my decision to become perhaps the first valedictorian in school history not to deliver a valedictory speech, but that was it. No asking me to reconsider. No second chance. No encouraging pat on the back. Instead, when graduation day arrived, the school made me get up there and bid farewell to eight retiring teachers and administrators whom I did not even know (“I have been asked to read the following,” I pointedly noted), and that was my only moment in the spotlight. Exit stage right, for the rest of all time.

I never again returned to Westbury Music Fair, literally or figuratively.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Today, as I contemplate the decades that have evaporated since June 17, 1981, exactly half of which have been lived without Les Nelkin on the planet, I think I am finally ready to offer some philosophizing and pontification, beyond just an exercise in humility. After all, it’s a lot easier to get to those essential truths at 58 than it ever was at 18.

One platitude I might have offered back in 1981 is that life is short, so we must “seize the day.” Horace, right? Or maybe I would have quoted a lesser prophet, Al Stewart, whose 1978 song “Time Passages” had become a radio staple by the time we were graduating from high school: “Well I’m not the kind to live in the past, the years run too short and the days too fast, the things you lean on are the things that don’t last.”

Of course, at that point the members of the Class of 1981 had lived slightly less than a quarter of our lives, actuarially speaking, so in fact life neither felt, nor actually was, short. Eighteen-year-olds have no sense of time. It is true that two of our classmates never lived beyond that summer of 1981, but for me there was no real sense of carpe diem until much, much later. Even when Les died in 2001 of a pediatric form of cancer, and then just a few weeks later when our innocence came crashing down along with the South Tower of the World Trade Center, it still mostly felt to me like I was planning for a future, the future, my future, climbing the corporate ladder, making short-term sacrifices for long-term ambitions and dreams. Pre-ordained for greatness — isn’t that what I had always been told?

Les ended up finishing, what, 3rd or 4th in the class? But throughout junior high and high school he had done little except study and swim, and so when it came time for the awards to be handed out to our graduating class, he was relatively unknown by the faculty and hence there were none bestowed upon him. As graduation day loomed I dwelled on this, and felt that it was an injustice. Because despite his strong political opinions and competitive spirit, he was a very decent human being and a good friend; and by 1981 he had clearly begun to develop a little bit of the worldliness and sense of empathy that had eluded him years earlier (he even wrote in my high school yearbook: “…now that we’ve made it, I can fairly honestly say that I understand your point of view”). On my way to Westbury on graduation day, I stopped by a bakery to pick up a cake that I had ordered for him. I presented it to him after the ceremony. It said in frosting: “Good Guy Award.” Thanks to him, I guess I had already begun to move beyond my own self-centered world of ambition and gnawing disappointment.

Today, on the 40th anniversary of our graduation, most of our lives are behind us. Our parents are dead or dying, our friends are dying, our kids (well, your kids — I never had any) are in the working world themselves. We are always tired, and we look haggard and world-weary. We have had way too many occasions to worry about some lump or spot or contemplate what is left of our future from inside an MRI tube. We have lived through Challenger, and 9/11, and recessions, and Trump, and most of a pandemic, but they have all scarred us. Time feels precious in a way it never could have before, even had Les Nelkin somehow known on graduation day in 1981 that the 70-year-old President Ronald Reagan, recovering from an assassination attempt a few weeks earlier, would actually outlive him by three years. Seize the day? Hell yeah.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

In my imagined high school speech, I might have also admonished my classmates to not work so damned hard. “Stop and smell the roses,” I might have said, or “step off the treadmill once in a while” (the world hadn’t yet gotten to the more evolved concept of “work-life balance”). Not all of them were like that, of course, and I now suspect that many of them had already at least gotten a whiff of the roses and were better off for it. But I didn’t know much about life then because throughout high school I had existed in an echo chamber of fairly one-dimensional students like Les. It would take many more years before he and I would learn to not work so hard, and then it was only because he was ravaged by cancer and I got shoved off the treadmill by companies that didn’t want me anymore, not because of anything voluntary.

But in 1981 I went right from being a grind in high school to being a grind in college — chasing good grades at the expense of true learning, pulling all-nighters, sometimes going days on end without any human interaction because I was obsessively writing a paper or studying for finals. I did other things outside of school, but only because I slept less and pushed myself to the limits. One time when I was sitting silently at a common dinner table, lost in thought, a stranger on the other side of the table picked up his tray to leave and just said to me, “Ease up!” Wow, was I really wearing my intense self-absorption on my face? By the middle of my junior year in college I had burned out, and took the semester off — to go to work, of course.

Five under-achieving years in the business world later, graduate school would be more of the same. I entered with the best of intentions (learning for learning’s sake, synthesizing a new career path, developing a real social life), but immediately fell right back into my old patterns: keeping to myself, studying too much and too hard, deprioritizing everything else, pursuing good grades even though the highest one you could get at the Yale School of Management was “Proficient.” I seriously considered dropping out. I didn’t — but I emerged from business school no more capable of rose-smelling or treadmill-exiting than I had been in 1981.

In the years that followed I discovered fulfilling work in the natural foods industry and met a woman with whom I would spend the rest of my days, but that work-life balance continued to elude me. The gyrations of an era of downsizing, aggressive mergers and acquisitions, and radical changes in my field of marketing — along with my own restlessness — led to a ridiculous amount of career instability for one who had shown so much promise as a kid. Even after being laid off in 2002, and then — incredibly — being laid off again in 2003, 2006 and 2007, I still hadn’t gotten my own intended message from the high-school-valedictory-that-wasn’t: I was working too hard. I had come to rely on my job for everything, giving it my all but invariably getting little in return.

It wasn’t until my fifth (!) layoff, in 2012, that I finally decided enough was enough. Despite two mortgages and other financial pressures, I would never return to a traditional job again. I started my own part-time education business and wrote a couple of books, and while all three were total commercial failures, they at least afforded me the time to prioritize other things, such as playing with my cats and riding my bicycle — beloved activities that have, effectively, become my life’s work.

And yes, I have a rosebush planted in my front yard in Colorado.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Had I addressed the graduates of the Class of 1981 on that fine June day, in all my already-passe tan pinstriped three-piece polyester-blend suit and too-long sideburns glory, there is one other message I might have tried to deliver. And that would have been something about maintaining goodness in the pursuit of greatness.

Like a lot of kids of our era in our progressive suburban hometown, I always had a strong instinct to lend a helping hand. It wasn’t a sense of what we would today call social justice, because I had led too comfortable and cloistered an existence to understand the inequities of the human condition. But it did include supporting those who were afflicted by diseases, as well as a driving impulse to help preserve the environment. What else could be expected of a boy who spent his 7th birthday joining the first Earth Day celebration by picking up garbage off the streets?

Throughout high school I devoted most of my free time to working with the Community Action Committee, which organized fundraisers for the March of Dimes, United Cerebral Palsy, and other causes. Our biggest and most important event was the Scott Moss Cancer Walk-a-Thon, in memory of a former Great Neck South student. On some occasions, I can recall, I left homeroom to make public address announcements promoting the walk-a-thon, and would then return to homeroom to be gently mocked by Les Nelkin. “Dobrow, why do you waste your time doing these things?” he asked. “They just get in the way of schoolwork. Do you really think the money you raise is going to help cure cancer?” On a certain level he was right, of course. But looking back at it now — Jesus H. Christ, the irony.

Still, that impulse stayed with me throughout my career. Almost all of my jobs were with mission-oriented, purpose-driven, niche organizations. I never got rich, or famous, or even successful. But the psychic rewards were significant, because there is nothing quite so fulfilling as knowing that your efforts are improving the lives of others or helping to save the planet.

Sometime in the spring of 2001, when I was working for Discovery Channel during an interlude between natural foods jobs, I was in New York and stopped by to see Les. By this time he was deep in the grips of Wilms Disease, which had sapped much of his energy, withered his hulking physique, and devastated his helmet hair. His voice was raspy and monotone. He audibly sucked in breaths with every sentence. But there was still hope that he would recover. “Dobrow,” he told me in a gracious and bittersweet confession, “I gotta’ tell you, I have switched to eating all organic food and it’s making me feel better.” I laughed and made a mental note to send him some food samples and recommendations. But I didn’t get around to it. And I never saw Les Nelkin again.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Anyway, members of the Class of 1981, what I can at long last tell you is that I made a bad decision in not giving a valedictory speech. I had been granted the honor not to celebrate my accomplishments but to represent all of you in celebrating our mutual accomplishments; and I didn’t show up to do that. Some of us had been together from the very headwaters of education in Great Neck, through five schools, but all of us shared a deep bond on that day. It shouldn’t have mattered that my humility was couching bitterness, or that I was starting to get swept up in disillusionments about what the world really had in store for me, or that in fact I had nothing of value to say. Had I really stopped to think about it, I would have gotten up on that stage and passed along some of the lessons that my friend Les Nelkin had been trying to teach me. Competition doesn’t preclude friendship. “Winning isn’t everything — but wanting to win is” (his yearbook quote, from Vince Lombardi). And most importantly, sometimes we need to parade our success.

But I couldn’t hear him. I hadn’t lived enough of my life yet, and unfortunately he had.

If I had somehow had the perspicacity to know that, and to truly understand how the years run too short and the days too fast — to know that there would never be another moment on stage — then I would have given a speech, thanking all of you (Jason, Gil, Barry, Marc, Beth, Josh, Gillian, Laurie, Nancy, Ed, Lisa, Gary, many more, and especially my friend Les) for eliciting the best from me and beginning my long transformation into a better, happier, more complete human being.

I hope that these four decades have been as kind to you.

At Brown University in the spring of 1985, History 198R, “The Gilded Age,” met on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2:30 to 3:50; Professor John L. Thomas, presiding.

Thomas was a tall, dignified, old-school historian with a shock of white hair, a twinkle in his eye, and a Down East accent that was as comfortable on him as an LL Bean sweater. He had been at Brown almost continuously since 1953, when he first arrived on College Hill to begin his Ph.D. program, and over the years had charmed and trained many a would-be historian (among them — NPR’s Mara Liasson a few years before me, and historian Karl Jacoby a few years after).

The Gilded Age was his area of expertise — by the spring of ’85 he had already written two books about this era, one of which, The Liberator, had won the 1964 Bancroft Prize; a third would follow. The 20 or so of us in his class, mostly seniors and graduate students, were honored to be there, and I for one wanted to produce a term paper (a 20–25 page “narrative-analytical account of any significant event in the years between 1870 and 1900…based on both primary and secondary sources”) worthy of this scholar whom I so revered.

Thomas asked us to submit ideas for our papers, and I proposed two major topics: the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West.

Regarding the Exposition, I wrote to Thomas, “there are a lot of things about this event that fascinate me, not the least of which is its scale: everything there was ‘the biggest’ or ‘the largest’ or ‘the most powerful’ or ‘the greatest collection.’ Somebody, it seems to me, must have consciously decided to use the superlatives approach in organizing and promoting the event…. I don’t think anything has been written about that.”

The Wild West Show also appealed to me. “W.F. Cody started touring with his Wild West Show in 1883, just about the time… that the romantic image of the cowboy started to rise in and take hold of the American cultural consciousness. Here again, I think I could examine the event as a ‘promotion,’ with the backdrop of the glorification of that western idyll.”

Thomas OK’d both ideas, and I proceeded with the first.

Over the course of the next two months, as spring finally arrived on the Brown campus, I spent much of my time in the dark recesses of the John Hay and John Carter Brown Libraries, stirring the dust from original volumes about the Columbian Exposition that hadn’t felt a human hand in decades, and gently turning the pages of crumbling old newspapers that slowly yielded up their secrets of how the Exposition had been promoted. I became entranced by this magnificent Gilded Age spectacle, the battle between New York and Chicago to host it, and the remarkably sophisticated work of its Chief of Publicity and Promotion, Moses P. Handy — even while the daily Frisbee and Twister games took over the Main Green just outside.

My paper, War Between the City-States: The Promotion of the World’s Columbian Exposition, ran 49 pages, not 20–25, but it earned an “A” from Professor Thomas:

“This is a very good paper and would have been even better if it had been cut by at least one-third!” he banged out on a cover page with his manual typewriter. “In fact, I’m not sure that you don’t have two papers here: the intercity rivalry escapade and the profile of Handy…. [W]ere you to re-do this for publication somewhere, this is what you would have to do: [integrate] the battle of styles — regional differences as reflected in promotional styles… before the whole thing degenerates into a donnybrook.”

He noted that my “breezy style” was appropriate for the material, “and in general is not hard to take” — high praise indeed from JLT! He suggested I should submit it for one of the department’s prizes, although I think senioritis got the best of me and I didn’t do anything more with it.

Until, that is, 2014 — when, having just finished the tour for my first book, Natural Prophets, I began casting about for a new project, and stumbled upon my yellowing term paper from History 198R. The research and writing seemed surprisingly good for the work of a 22-year-old, I thought. What’s more, the intervening years had brought the digitization of old newspapers, producing a treasure trove of “new” source material, ghosting up out of the past like a photographic image in a darkroom fixer bath — not just about the World’s Columbian Exposition, but about Buffalo Bill’s Wild West (the very name of which I probably had not uttered since that term paper proposal early in the spring semester of 1985). The more I looked, the more excited I became. And what ensued was a four-year odyssey that ultimately produced a new book about the promotional styles of the Gilded Age: Pioneers of Promotion: How Press Agents for P.T. Barnum, Buffalo Bill, and the World’s Columbian Exposition Created Modern Marketing (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). It was dedicated to Professor Thomas.

Although I did not realize it until after the book was published — when I unearthed my 1985 proposal as well as an audiotape of one of his lectures from History 198R - the focus and structure of Pioneers of Promotion were almost exactly as envisioned by Thomas and me 33 years earlier.

Chapters 8 and 9, drawn from my college history paper, were split up appropriately into the intercity rivalry escapade and the profile of Handy, just as Jack Thomas had suggested; and the book’s themes and leitmotifs followed what I now understand to be a blueprint that had been drawn up a lifetime ago, but to which I had been at least consciously oblivious during 29 years of incubation and 4 years of research and writing.

John L. Thomas passed away in 2005 at the age of 79. But somewhere in Down East heaven, I know, there is a twinkle in his eye.

###

FOOTNOTE: Professor Thomas was also responsible for another very powerful memory.

I took another course from him on “Literature of the Civil War,” in which each week a student led a discussion about a book we had just read. One week it was the turn of Dave Dornstein, and he clearly hadn’t read that week’s book but instead decided to make a mockery of the class by faking his way through it and drawing stick figures on the board. Professor Thomas rolled to a slow boil, his face getting redder and redder, until he finally pushed his chair away from the table, unfolded his limbs and rose to his menacing professorial height.

“DAWN-Stein!” he bellowed in his Maine accent. “I’m gonna’ run you up the flagpole!”

That was in 1983. Five years later, Dave Dornstein was killed in the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

A couple of months later, Brown University held a memorial service for Dornstein and three other members of the community who had been on the flight. They held a few speeches, and lowered the flag on the Main Green to half-mast to honor the fallen.

When I read about that I couldn’t help but remember John Thomas’ threat to run Dornstein up the flagpole.

Now he was halfway there.

It appears as if live sports will soon be back on television; new dramatic programming, too. And that’s really a shame — because bopping around in the pandemic TV time machine has been so much fun. How else could we have witnessed a knock-‘em-down, drag-‘em-out fight between The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s Murray Slaughter and The Six Million Dollar Man’s Colonel Steve Austin?

Those of us who have dutifully spent the lockdown months motionless on our couches have often rued the loss of live sports, the metronomes of our lives as they slowly tick from season to season. We have missed the competition, the uncertain outcomes, the slow build of momentum and statistics and tension.

But to the attentive pandemic time traveler, substitute programming has had more gains than losses.

Take ESPN’s recent re-airing of the 1998 NBA All-Star Game — in which modern-day viewers were treated to something that those who watched the live event never were: a massive dose of bittersweet perspective about how short and precious life really is.

In the game, an impossibly fresh-faced 19-year-old rookie named Kobe Bryant scored a team-leading 18 points, and the cameras repeatedly flashed to him on the bench, talking to teammates with a broad, wondrous, “is this really happening?” kind of look that is more or less the exclusive provenance of 19-year-olds.

Color commentators Bill Walton, Isiah Thomas and Magic Johnson mused about whether anyone this young and dynamic had ever appeared on the NBA scene. But pandemic viewers knew what they did not: that this season will end with Michael Jordan winning the 6th and final championship of his career, at which point he will figuratively hand off the “greatest player baton” to Bryant, who will go on to a storied career with 17 more All-Star appearances and five NBA championships before he will hand the same baton to another 19-year-old named LeBron James. And we also know that in January of 2020 Bryant’s tragic death in a helicopter accident will leave all of us with a different kind of “is this really happening?” look.

And so we watched this performance, this moment in time, and we marveled at the graceful swoops, the athletic acceleration, the quick elevation, the electric smile — caring not a whit about the outcome of the game, but knowing all the while about the Outcome of the life.

Climb back aboard, spin the chronometer, and (courtesy of MLB Network) we land in 1971, Game 6 of the World Series in Baltimore, with the Pirates leading the Orioles, three games to two. There is little suspense for the modern-day viewer: we know it will end up going to the seventh game and that Pittsburgh will prevail. But we watch with probing insight, also knowing that two Orioles stars — Dave Johnson and Frank Robinson — will go onto long managerial careers, and that two Pirates players — Roberto Clemente and Bob Moose — will be killed in separate transportation accidents within the next five years. But for now, this is their time in the limelight: Johnson knocks in one run and Robinson scores the game winner, while Clemente triples and homers and emergency starter Moose delivers an outstanding five innings.

Astute modern viewers might also be overcome with quaintness as we gaze once again at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium, then 21 years old but with, as it turns out, 21 years remaining before the Orioles will leave it forever. When the broadcast uses the “high home” camera shot, the startlingly nearby houses of the Ednor Gardens-Lakeside neighborhood are clearly visible just beyond the center field wall, and perhaps we remember the good old days when one could park there on a game day for free (as long as one was willing to pay neighborhood kids a few dollars to make sure nothing happened to the car).

And the post-game interviews by Tony Kubek are also a remarkable anachronism, both for their length (more than four minutes with four different players) and their articulate candor.

No matter the sports rerun — a long-haired Roger Federer effortlessly floating around the US Open court to win his third major of the year in 2007 (before mononucleosis would slow him months later and mark the start of a long, steady transformation to that of mere mortal); a disconsolate Red Sox bench in the wee hours of October 17, 2003, watching Aaron Boone round the bases after his ALCS-ending homerun (a year to the day before Boston would begin its curse-reversing comeback from a 3–0 deficit against the same New York team) — there is something pleasingly surreal about watching old contests today, as our minds ping pong across the years. Live sports can never do this for us.

Still, it is not old sporting events but TV series reruns that offer the most jarring and sometimes amusing experiences for the pandemic time traveler. We watch Archie Bunker make one insensitive racial remark after another from the relative comfort of 1971’s All in the Family, and then switch to the news and see thousands of masked protesters demanding justice after the killing of George Floyd. We cheer the dawning moral consciousness of ex-Confederate soldier Cullen Bohannon on repeats of AMC’s Hell On Wheels (2011–16), and then see another news report about the statue of a Civil War southerner being yanked from its pedestal.

But perhaps the most entertaining of all anachronistic activities is to watch an old TV show with the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) close at hand — for this allows us to make improbable connections and whipsaw ourselves across time.

The grand prize for this activity might have to go to a 1967 episode of The Big Valley entitled “Brother Love,” which recently re-aired on the INSP network. The Old West series depicts the Barkley family of California, which includes, among others, matriarch Victoria (portrayed by Barbara Stanwyck), and siblings Heath (Lee Majors) and Audra (Linda Evans).

Stanwyck, a longtime leading lady, had been appearing in films since the 1930s. Majors would go onto greater fame as Steve Austin, the bionically rebuilt astronaut in ABC’s The Six Million Dollar Man (1974–78), and Evans would achieve notoriety as Krystle Carrington, the glamorous star of ABC’s Dynasty (1981–89).

In the “Brother Love” episode, a traveling faith healer played by Robert Goulet comes to town. This is prime-of-his-career-troubadour Goulet, not Johnny-Carson’s-second-guest-of-the-night Goulet, and his perfect hair and cerulean eyes make us understand how his visage would later get written into the lyrics of a libidinous 12-year-old in A Chorus Line (“Robert Goulet, Robert Goulet, my God, Robert Goulet!”). Goulet’s faith healer pulls two drifters into his con — depicted by the actors Strother Martin and Gavin MacLeod. And here IMDB helps us to unweave the tangled web of time.

The whiny/gravelly-voiced Martin had already played bit roles in virtually every major western TV series of the decade, including Daniel Boone, The Virginian, Death Valley Days, Rawhide, Have Gun Will Travel, Bonanza and Gunsmoke. But later in 1967 he would display his versatility by acting in the goofball comedy Gilligan’s Island (as a character named, coincidentally, Barkley); and he would achieve Hollywood immortality with his depiction of the impassive rifle-toting “Captain” in the movie Cool Hand Luke (“What we’ve got he-uh is failure to commun-cate”).

MacLeod — nearly unrecognizable in his Big Valley role, with both hair and heft — would of course enjoy a long career in sitcoms as the wry, sensible, balding news writer Murray Slaughter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–77) and as the gracious Captain Merrill Stubing on The Love Boat (1977–87). Yet he, too, was already a well-traveled actor by 1967, having appeared in 20 years of TV series including, among others, McHale’s Navy (good training for Stubing) and My Favorite Martian, in which Linda Evans also appeared.

Evans, for her part, would later guest star opposite MacLeod again, on six episodes of The Love Boat (sometimes with Majors!), and opposite Stanwyck during one season of Dynasty.

Of course, none of this would have mattered to the viewer who cozied-up to the Magnavox on February 20, 1967 to watch the initial airing of the “Brother Love” episode. But after more than 50 years, the mobius strip of time makes viewing this show far more interesting — especially when Martin, MacLeod and Majors get into a rollicking brawl (a failure to commune). In 1967, who cared, but today to see Murray Slaughter and The Six Million Dollar Man going at it — why, we couldn’t be more tickled.

There was one other unexpected actor in that episode, an 8-year-old California girl making her third appearance on television: Eve Plumb, who of course would go on to become the epitome of 1970s middle-child angst as Jan on The Brady Bunch.

After the socially distanced, time-travel whiplashed viewer of 2020 recognized her golden hair or voice on The Big Valley we were left to think about the arc of her career, and to wonder whether perhaps Gunsmoke’s badge-wearing hero Matt Dillon was somehow nearby, lurking behind the faux western Big Valley set playfully tossing a football while he awaited his turn before the camera. Marshal, Marshal, Marshal!

Joe Dobrow is the author of Natural Prophets and Pioneers of Promotion.

The movie has gotten a great deal of attention, and mixed though generally good reviews. And, true to the spirit of Barnum, the studio has put together an all-out blitz to generate a lot of publicity, including a live commercial, a light show atop the Empire State Building, a party on the Queen Mary, and ads emblazoned on the outside of Amazon Prime packages. Impressive.

If the combination of all that serves to bring attention back to P.T. Barnum, one of the most fascinating and charismatic men in American history, then it is a good thing.

But from the historical perspective, we might as well just throw the truth into the chipper-shredder… because there is not a great deal of it in Greatest Showman.

Start with the basics.

Barnum was an impresario, but he was not a song and dance man, and he didn’t often appear on stage. Yes, he was a showman; but his genius — as is well documented in my forthcoming book, Pioneers of Promotion (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018) — was in identifying talent and hyping it, not in performance. Of course, that wouldn’t make for very good cinema, much less a promotional performance on The Today Show. But it’s the truth. He was more Donald Trump than Donald O’Connor.

Then there is Barnum’s American Museum. The building, which stood at the intersection of Ann Street and Broadway in Lower Manhattan, was a museum even before Barnum purchased it. It was fun to see it come to life in the film, which faithfully depicted the exterior (save for the fact that there were elevated trains running in front of it in the movie). But in reality, the Museum was mostly filled with display cases and not performance stages, although it did play host to a number of lectures. It never housed a circus. Indeed, the Museum’s big fire (also depicted in the movie) occurred in 1865, but the “circus” elements truly did not appear in his acts until about five years after that.

Throughout the movie, timelines are shot all to hell. The Greatest Showman conflates the Tom Thumb tour of London (1844) with the meeting of Jenny Lind (1850) and the Barnum & Bailey Circus tours of London (1889). Barnum’s girls, Caroline and Helen, are shown in the movie as being about 10 and 8 years old at the time of the Jenny Lind tour of America in 1850; in fact, Caroline was then 20 and Helen 10. No mention is ever made of Barnum’s other surviving daughter, Pauline, who was 4 in 1850. One of the “freaks,” Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy (a/k/a Fedor Jeftichew), is present during the Lind tour in the movie, although in real life he was not born until 1868.

And there is more.

• In several scenes, such as the one below as Zac Efron and Hugh Jackman perform “The Other Side,” Barnum is shown drinking shots of whiskey and toasts of champagne. In reality he was a famous teetotaler who did not allow anyone in his troop to drink.

• He is shown in the movie to have been a destitute young man who took to selling discarded newspapers on the street. The truth is that he was highly entrepreneurial from a very young age, and long before he got into the business of being a showman he had already been involved with numerous businesses including fruit-and-confectionery sales, hardware, crockery retailing, real estate speculating, auctioning used books, a weekly newspaper called the Herald of Freedom, and state lotteries — which he advertised with extravagant rhymes on handbills, circulars, and posters. These early jobs were critical in establishing the skills and setting the tone for his work as a pioneer in what was then known as “indirect advertising” — what we today call PR.
• The movie also ends at the point at which Barnum is about to get into the traveling circus business, which, it is implied, is shortly after the fire at the Museum in 1865. He restarts his act in a tent, and walks away from that to go see a dance recital of one of his daughters, who is still very young, so no time has passed in the movie. In reality, Barnum was 55 years old when the fire occurred, about 60 when he went into the circus business, and by then his daughters were in their 30s and 40s.
• Tom Thumb is said to be 22 years old in the movie, but when Barnum first put him on tour he was four.
• Jenny Lind is portrayed in the movie by actress Rebecca Ferguson, who, like Lind, is Swedish. But Lind was known to be shy and modest, unlike the Ferguson character, and she never had any sort of fling with Barnum.
• And the movie also creates a character named Phillip Carlyle, a partner of Barnum portrayed by Zac Efron. No such person was a part of Barnum’s life.

All of which, again, is OK. This is a film inspired by real life, not a biopic. It is a fantasy, and Gracey takes many liberties with it, as Hollywood is wont to do, and as Barnum did with many of his subjects.

But, as my research in Pioneers of Promotion shows, Barnum’s contribution as an advertising genius and one of the inventors of the craft of marketing is actually far more important to American society than anything else he did.

So, now that the memorably syncopated brand of Barnum & Bailey is no more, if the “Greatest Showman’s” legacy is to be carried on to a new generation, we must ultimately balance the histrionics with some real history.

Hamilton, the longtime press agent for P.T. Barnum and Barnum & Bailey’s Greatest Show on Earth, was one of the most well-known men of his time. Because of his wild linguistic gymnastics — he once described the trapeze artists’ “turning, twisting, tossing, tilting, transposition in midair” and deemed their act “the most daring and desperate aerial duel with death ever ventured by mortal man” — he was nearly as famous as the circus itself. And back then, the circus was pretty famous, enough so to shut down entire towns upon its arrival.

Hamilton’s words appeared in newspaper articles, ads, and posters (or “placards,” as thy were known), and set the ballyhooing promotional tone not just for the circus, but for the advertising revolution that would sweep across America in the latter half of the 20th Century. Indeed, his style was so popular that the New York Sun reported in 1906 that “the outpourings of Mr. Hamilton’s muse have been more widely perused than any other literary efforts of the age.”

Hamilton was said to have cranked out two million words of promotional copy a year, and to have memorized more adjectives than any man alive — 10% of which he supposedly invented himself. He called C.M. Robinson, Champion Bareback Rider of the World, the “teetotal topmost tallest” man in the universe. He immortalized Jumbo, the “mastodonic marvel,” La Paloma, “the peerless pedestrian puma,” and a pachyderm whose “ebullitions of athletic elephantine power are sometimes stupendous….”

In one apparently spontaneous interview with the New York Times in 1903, Hamilton declared:

This, the greatest show on earth, is a most supremely satisfying, enobling [sic], gratifying, superb, spectacular affair, teeming with life and vivid color, inspiring admiration and abundantly complete with gorgeous sights and the truthfully illustrated art of athletics, the whole forming a blazing kaleidoscopic vision of animated and iridescent splendor that has astonished the crowned heads of Europe and the high officers of the Republic of France.

(The Times then noted sardonically that the stenographer ran out of ink in the fountain pen’s reservoir.)

Mercifully, William Safire had not yet been born when Hamilton declared: “To state a fact in ordinary language is to permit a doubt concerning the statement.”

To many people, Hamilton’s stylized adjectival creativity, hyperbole, and stunning use of alliteration were even more entertaining than the acrobats, trained animals and side-show acts of which he wrote. “Octosyllabic artist,” the Washington Times called him (1916). “Word-juggler,” said The Little Chronicle (1903). “Barnum’s cyclone press agent and descriptive epigrammist,” intoned London’s Daily Mail (1898). “America’s representative word-smith! A wild, whirling tornado of breathless adjectives!! An inexhaustible mine of glittering epithet!!!” The Grand Rapids Herald (1916) went even further: “He discovered the adjective.”

Along with men like John M. Burke of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, and Moses P. Handy of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Hamilton was part of the first generation of press agents, the now-forgotten founding fathers of the marketing industry. They capitalized on the Gilded Age explosion in newspaper publishing (an average of two copies per capita by 1900), the increased disposable income available to spend on entertainment, and rising literacy rates to transform marketing into an art and a profession. Barnum himself — certainly the greatest marketing mind of the 19th Century — acknowledged that he owed more of his success to Tody than to any other man.

And almost all of it happened through the one tool that was available to them, the sharpest one society has ever known (albeit one that has now been rendered down to a toothless 140-character pen knife): the English language.

It is true that Tody Hamilton also earned a degree of notoriety — not to mention a huge amount of “ink” for the circus — with another innovation: he was one of the first publicists to manufacture news. In 1884, for example, he arranged to parade the circus animals over the year-old Brooklyn Bridge, led by none other than Jumbo the African Elephant, “This Miraculous Moving Mountain of Flesh, This Most Prodigious Towering Animate Wonder.” In 1899 he orchestrated the “Revolt of the Freaks,” a Gilded Age version of political correctness in which side-show characters including Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, the Skeleton Dude, the Armless Wonder and the Rubber-Skinned Man declared their distaste for the term “freaks” and voted to be known henceforth as “prodigies.” And nearly every year, just before the new season opened, Hamilton gathered reporters at Barnum & Bailey’s winter quarters in Bridgeport, Connecticut to conduct experiments — one time, setting up a press luncheon inside the wild animal cage, and on other occasions allowing reporters to see what happened when polar bears were given whiskey or mice were introduced into the lions’ cage. To the 21st Century observer, who bathes in the unavoidable daily marketing goo, it all reeks of exploitation and publicity stunts; but in Tody Hamilton’s day, when people were accustomed to the dull news of officialdom, it was truly a sensation.

Still, it was Hamilton’s startlingly fresh use of the language and radical departure from the over-starched prose of the day that made him so famous. He announced the coming of the circus as “Marvelous Miracles of Monstrous Moment.” He described an act called Le Autobolide as “the thrilling dip of death, an absolutely unparalleled deed of daring, just as illustrated and costing nearly $2,000 a minute; the sensation of all sensations, which may be aptly termed a fearful frolic with fate.” Under his promotional leadership, the circus became the most popular form of entertainment in the country, so much so that the Arizona Republican could report in 1905 that “there is not a free born American west of the Rockies over ten years of age who has not heard of Barnum’s show.”

Not surprisingly, Hamilton’s work elicited many tributes and imitators.

Another circus press agent, Doc Waddell, said that “Every old time case and compositor, every modern linotype and operator, every printing press, business manager, editor and reporter, every newsboy of every alley and every street knew him, and gladly, willingly, enthusiastically did his bidding.”

Similarly, the humor magazine Puck in 1905 printed a parody song called The Circus Placard (As Sung by Tody Hamilton) which captured Tody’s adjectival artistry beautifully, reading in part:

Radiant, ravishing, lustrous, quotidian.
Fulgent, prodigious, colossal, bizarre.
Enchanting, astonishing, Afric, Numidian.
Shimmering, glimmering spectacular.

Gargantuan, Gog and Magog, Brobdingnagian.
Magical, marvellous, mystical, Magian.
Only live specimen born in a cage ian.
Novel, eccentric, abnormal, unique.
Loop looping, death flouting, killed every week –

Take of these adjectives all that are usable.
Set them in order so they’ll be perusable.
Print on pink paper, and paste by the yard.
And the happy result is a circus placard.

And when 400 of Hamilton’s friends threw him a big tribute dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria in 1907, even the staid New York Times launched into Tody-isms in tribute to the “sanguine, salubrious, stalwart segregator of seductive, seemly, sentimental sentences, strung seriatim and structurally sincere.”

When Tody Hamilton died, other press agents and publicists were there to carry on his playful linguistic style. But eight months later, the country plunged into war and a more sanitized publicity patois quickly emerged under the auspices of the government’s first true press-agent-cum-censor, George Creel and his Committee on Public Information. Tody Hamilton — the “Advance Agent of Happiness,” according to a commemoration in the New York Sun — would be quickly forgotten. And the adjective would not be rediscovered until it was unearthed on Madison Avenue in the 1960s.

####

Joe Dobrow is the author of Natural Prophets (Rodale Books, 2014) and a forthcoming history of the early publicity visionaries entitled Pioneers of Promotion.

By Joe Dobrow

It is one of those decidedly un-summerlike summer days in Chicago, with a westward wind off the Lake that hints of changes coming, and a thick blanket of clouds that renders the sky and the water and seemingly everything in between colorless, undifferentiated, vaguely threatening.

But today none of that matters here in Jackson Park, a few miles south of the Loop, where the ghosts of 1893’s World’s Columbian Exposition still hover, and where someday the Obama Presidential Library will rise. Because these are the games of the XXXI Summer Olympiad, and this is the start of the field hockey competition in the shiny new 20,000-seat stadium.

The park was recently renovated to accommodate this spectacle, this world’s fairy tale — and rising from the lagoons are majestic new structures surrounded by angelic landscaping that still has neat piles of cedar mulch at its base. A thousand flags snap tautly in the breeze. There are boats on the Lake jockeying for dock slips. Vendors are hawking exotic foods. From the numerous bandstands, trombones and baritones blast their brassy voices futilely into the wind. Tens of thousands of people revel in the sights, and a polyglot din can be heard throughout the park. All the world’s a stage, but there is no stage right now as grand as Chicago.

Or at least, that’s the way it would have been if John Murray had gotten his way.

Murray — Marine Corps veteran, former Delta Airlines mechanic, former management consultant, and lifelong proud son of Chicago’s west side — was the Chief Bid Officer of “Chicago 2016,” an organization of civic leaders, industrialists, politicians and others who from 2006 through 2009 worked feverishly to prepare Chicago’s bid to host the Summer Olympics. The effort involved nearly $50 million dollars, scores of people, sophisticated research and targeting, top-tier celebrities, and exactly the sort of elaborate marketing campaign that is required nowadays for a city to recast its image and position itself as a legitimate contender for the right to host an event like the Olympics, the Super Bowl, or the World Cup.

When Chicago officials first made public their intention to bid for the Olympics, in the summer of 2006, the Windy City was certainly one of the favorites to prevail. The last American city to host the Summer Games had been Atlanta in 1996 — Salt Lake City had hosted the Winter Games in 2002 — and Chicago was not only larger and wealthier but was also far more renowned for its long sporting history, from venerable Wrigley Field to the Monsters of the Midway to Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls’ six NBA championships. Chicago seemingly even had justice on its side, since the city had long ago won a bid to host the Olympic Games, only to lose them to St. Louis as part of that city’s 1904 World’s Fair (Pierre de Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympics, did not even travel to St. Louis for the 1904 Games: “I had a sort of presentiment that the Olympiad would match the mediocrity of the town,” he said).[1]

But to win the 2016 Games, Chicago would need to engage in a multi-part competition — first, gaining the blessing of the United States Olympic Committee (U.S.O.C) over rivals such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston, and Philadelphia, and second, winning over the roughly 100[2] members of the International Olympic Committee (I.O.C.), who would ultimately be reviewing the bids of the U.S. winner along with those of Madrid, Rio De Janeiro, Tokyo and others; at least 17 different nations were at one time thought to be preparing bids.[3]

Perhaps more importantly, they would need to win the public relations battle against themselves. Chicago had great civic pride, plenty of money, the Lakefront, and some terrific existing facilities such as Soldier Field and the McCormick Place convention center; but it also had an image as a dangerous, logistically difficult, deficit-riddled, politically corrupt city. And while the prospect of bringing the world to the shores of Lake Michigan was enticing to many, there were other large segments of Chicago’s engaged citizenry that were highly skeptical about the costs, the environmental impact, the disruptions, and the benefits of hosting the Summer Games: a Chicago Tribune/WGN poll in the late summer of 2009 found that 47% of Chicagoans supported the plans for the Olympics, and 45% opposed them. Thus, while Chicago’s prospects would be influenced by politics, and money, and its relationship with the U.S.O.C., and even by America’s standing in the world, at its core the campaign would be all about P.R.

And so, with an exceptionally clever all-out marketing blitz, Chicago set out to win hearts, minds, and the Games.

It began modestly enough in February of 2006, behind closed doors. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley was thinking about the 2016 Olympics, and asked a team from the consulting firm of McKinsey & Company (where Murray then worked) to quietly assess the viability of a prospective bid. Murray and two of his colleagues holed up for a month with a handful of other people from the Mayor’s Office, the P.R. firm Hill & Knowlton, and the architectural engineering firm Skidmore Owings & Merrill. In typically clinical and dispassionate consulting-firm fashion, they produced a cost-benefit analysis and a risk analysis about whether Chicago should bid for the Olympics. Murray’s assessment: he believed they would win the U.S. bid, and they could also win the international bid — so long as Rio De Janeiro didn’t emerge as the primary rival.

Daley continued to test the waters, traveling to Beijing in May as an official guest of the People’s Republic of China, which was deep into its plans to host the 2008 Summer Games. By the following month the Mayor had decided to move forward, and the intent to bid became public. Chicago 2016 soon officially came into being, with Pat Ryan, the then-69-year-old founder and executive chairman of the insurance-and-human-resources-consulting firm Aon Corporation, as Chairman and CEO. Ryan immediately began lining up preliminary commitments from large corporations, wealthy philanthropists, and construction companies. “If there’s uncertainty on the regulatory [or financing] side, we won’t win,” he told a gathering of reporters after Chicago submitted its bid to the U.S.O.C. “We know that. We’re getting rid of the uncertainty.” Ryan predicted that the Chicago Olympics would generate a surplus in the “hundreds of millions of dollars.”[4]

Meanwhile, John Murray remained on McKinsey’s payroll for several more months before joining Chicago 2016, but that was just a formality: his job was now squarely focused on bringing the Olympics to Chicago.

So over the next few months, Murray spent 60 hours a week meticulously studying the Olympic landscape as if it were an engine blueprint during his time as a helicopter mechanic with the Marines. He traveled to the I.O.C. headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland to spend a week reading through past Olympic bids. He went to Los Angeles to study the archives of the 1984 Summer Games, and to London to speak with people who had been involved in that city’s successful bid for the 2012 Summer Games. Little by little, he started to hone-in on the strategy that Chicago would use for its bid — and that was first and foremost about marketing.

***

Chicago has long had a reputation for self-promotion and outspoken boosterism. Chicagoans love Chicago, warts and all, and don’t hesitate to amplify their flat o’s and elongated a’s in its defense. “Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning,” wrote Carl Sandburg. “The people of Chicago are a proud people — and for good reason,” said former Mayor Jane Byrne. “The city is so unbelievably beautiful,” said actor Jeremy Piven. “It’s one of the greatest cities on the planet. My heart beats differently when I’m in Chicago.”[5]

Perhaps that is a lingering effect of its status as the “second city,” an also-ran in the great parade of municipalities. After all, when Chicago was founded in 1833, New York already had more than 200,000 residents; and even before Mrs. O’Leary’s cow supposedly kicked over the lantern that started the great fire of 1871 — destroying 17,500 buildings, wiping out Chicago’s central business district, and leaving one-third of the population homeless — even Philadelphia, Brooklyn and St. Louis were larger and arguably more important cities.

Moreover, Chicago had often generated strong sentiments among foreigners, to whom Americans often turned for approval and cultural justification, at least until the World Wars. “It is a shame to spend so much money on buildings with such an unsatisfactory result,” wrote Oscar Wilde in 1882. “Your city looks positively dreary.”[6] “It is inhabited by savages,” wrote Rudyard Kipling after an 1889 visit.[7] But love it or hate it or both, everyone who visited seemed to have something to say about Chicago. “Of American cities,” concluded historian Kenneth Rose in his 2014 book Unspeakable Awfulness: America Through the Eyes of European Travelers, 1865–1900, “it was Chicago that excited the most loathing — and the most admiration — among European travelers.”[8]

While John Murray certainly loved his hometown, he was also a student of history and knew that not everyone shared his ardor. So, beginning in 2006, he and his team commissioned surveys and conducted newspaper polls and focus groups around the world, asking people what they thought about Chicago. What he found was at best a “neutral to negative” impression. Some people mentioned Al Capone and called Chicago the murder capital of the U.S. Others said that Michael Jordan and Oprah Winfrey represented the real Chicago. Many people thought the city was land-locked. In some parts of Europe, respondents couldn’t stop laughing about the fact that in April, the Chicago City Council had banned the sale of foie gras.[9] And when the Chicago 2016 team asked respondents which city Chicago most reminded them of, Manchester, England surprisingly topped the list. That set off Murray’s P.R. sensors. “If you have ever been to Manchester, it’s not a pretty place,” said Murray. “They thought we were smokestacks, dirty, very working class, very industrial. That was telling. And so, we said, ‘Gosh, we have a real perception issue.’”

Henceforth, the Chicago 2016 campaign would be about more than winning the rights to host a sporting event; it would be about positioning and reputation management. “It was all based on branding the city and marketing Chicago as a destination. How do you win the war for talent, for investment, for business and for tourism?” It would have to start with changing the way people thought about the city.

Chicago 2016 hired P.R. and advertising agencies to develop messaging and communications strategies. They worked with archivists, historians, and members of the Mayor’s office to tap into the Chicago’s storied past (“We really sought to inject the history of the city into our bid materials and into our branding and marketing,” said Murray, “because we thought it spoke volumes to the spirit of Chicago and the spirit of the Midwest”). They ran lots of expensive ads. And, because it was a problem of perception and not one of reality, they let the product speak for itself:

We realized the single biggest selling point from an Olympic perspective was that the Olympic Games are an opportunity to get your city in front of 4 billion viewers in a positive light. We knew that the opening ceremonies, the opening shot of each night’s TV coverage of the Games, globally, would be that Lakefront view that apparently a lot of the world doesn’t realize exists. Forget about a Lake, this is a sea by European standards. I used to love meeting international visitors and bringing them to the bid office on the 20th floor of the Aon Tower, and having them look out at the Lakefront — you know, you can’t see the other side of the Lake — and they are just blown away. ‘Oh My God, this is a coastal city. It’s so clean, and people are so friendly!’ All these things that are so counter to what people’s perceptions are….

This focus on Chicago’s reputation resonated with the 11 members of the U.S.O.C. At 4:00pm Chicago time on April 14, 2007, the announcement was made at Washington’s Embassy Row Hotel: Chicago would be the U.S. representative in the bid for the 2016 Summer Games. “This contest ultimately is not about the economics, it’s not about the surplus, it’s about the magic that can be created through the Olympic and Paralympic games, and how that by itself can transform a city, can transform a nation, can transform the world,” U.S.O.C. chief executive officer Jim Scherr said. “And so we look forward to trying to earn that prize.”[10]

There was joy in the offices of Chicago 2016, for all of about half an hour. And then the marketing campaign really began.

On the one hand, there was what John Murray deemed “the populist approach.” They circulated beautiful pictures of Chicago to international media, and invited journalists from around the world to visit, learn more about the city, and generate feature stories back home — classic media relations tactics. Within Chicago, they also began to combat the growing doubts about the Games. They produced slick videos to show how the Olympics would transform the Lakefront, and floated messages through the media that this redevelopment was so popular that it would move forward even if Chicago were not awarded the Games. They aired supportive audio messages on Chicago Transit Authority buses from the likes of celebrity Olympians Bart Conner, Nadia Comaneci, and Gary Hall, Jr. (Other celebrities, including Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps, provided additional support.) They held more than 50 community meetings to try to win over the recalcitrant local residents and opposition groups such as No Games Chicago. They developed a social media presence on Twitter and Flickr, and attracted more than 100,000 supporters on Facebook. On their website, they included features such as videos, a counter showing how many people supported the bid, and a list of the top 16 benefits to Chicago of hosting the games, which included lines such as “This is our generation’s World’s Columbian Exposition,” “This is our chance to inspire the world,” “Chicago will become the World’s second home,” and “This will be an incredible source of pride for everyone who lives here.”[11]

They also turned to a tried-and-true 21st Century marketing tactic, the Op Ed piece. Pat Ryan wrote in one such article for the Huffington Post that the “potential legacy for kids…is unmatched” and that “We cannot let naysayers who focus only on the perceived ‘risk’ of participation dissuade us from pursuing a project with so many potential benefits for Chicago’s residents.”[12]

Ryan and Murray knew that not a single person in Chicago would have a vote in determining whether the city was awarded the Summer Games, but from a public relations perspective it would be unseemly if the applicant city didn’t present a more-or-less united front.

But on the other hand, there was the all-important campaign to reach the I.O.C. directly. “At the end of the day,” said Murray, “it is not a popular vote. It’s a vote of 115 I.O.C. members. We needed a very targeted marketing campaign.”

Accordingly, the Chicago 2016 team methodically built its case for why the city would be a great partner for the I.O.C., compiling facts and statistics that were sure to be persuasive to dubious members of that multinational body. Chicago, they said, had an excellent transportation infrastructure: O’Hare was one of the busiest airports in the world and the only one with two hubs, plus daily nonstop service to 70 cities around the globe. Chicago was also a cosmopolitan center, they noted, with 150 languages, 83 consulates, 23 sister cities, 25 communities of 25,000 or more ethnic residents, and the largest Polish population outside of Warsaw. And financing, they argued, would not be a problem for Chicago, even though, unlike other international bidders, U.S. cities do not get full governmental guarantees of funding. The city of Chicago itself had guaranteed the bid up to $500 million if private money fell short, and the state of Illinois another $250 million; but Pat Ryan had also cleverly managed to obtain insurance policies for another $500 million to cover any cost overruns, revenue shortfalls, or natural disasters.[13]

On June 4, 2008, the I.O.C. Executive Committee narrowed down the field of applicants to four: Chicago, Rio de Janeiro, Madrid and Tokyo.

Chicago 2016 then began to refine its campaign, even though by I.O.C. rules they were not allowed to disparage any other applicant city. Instead, they set out to beat the competition using the one discipline with which Americans distance themselves from all other peoples: marketing.

They began by putting together an elaborate 60-page highlight brochure to accompany their Bid Book, entitled “Reaching for a Better World.” It was filled with more than 60 resplendent photographs, illustrations and maps, and breathless optimism about “the untapped power of a new Olympic market in the heart of the country.” It laid out plans for an 8km-wide Olympic Ring of venues in the heart of the city; a beautiful new $1.1 billion Olympic and Paralympic athlete village along the Lakefront (including a private beach, four alternative dining cafes, free WiFi, and a bike sharing program); the 20,000-seat field hockey arena in Jackson Park, and a temporary $366 million 80,000 seat Olympic stadium in nearby Washington Park; elaborate security arrangements, 55,000 reserved hotel rooms, dedicated “Olympic Lanes” on the roadways, and the use of the enormous McCormick Place convention center as an event venue and dedicated media home — the so-called IBC/MPC (International Broadcast Center/Main Press Center). The brochure featured the marketing tagline the Bid Team had developed — “For Sport, For Friendship, For Life” — as well as a fitting quotation from Daniel Burnham, the architect of the World’s Columbian Exposition a century and a quarter earlier: “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and themselves will probably not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work.”

Of course, marketing collateral like this has become a sine qua non of all Olympic bids. Most of the Bid Books, like that of Madrid, came in at more than 600 pages in three separate volumes, answering the 227 questions posed by the I.O.C. Tokyo’s Bid Book contained gorgeous bird’s eye renderings of all its venues (like the “Dream Island Cluster” in Tokyo Bay), along with a pledge from Committee Chairman Ichiro Kono “to showcase a 21st century model of urban sustainability” and “deliver on a binding commitment to leave a 100-year legacy.”[14] In its literature, Los Angeles had exhibited a subtle-but-shrewd marketing strategy, pledging to return the Games to the ideals of chivalry and “springtime of mankind” originally expressed by Pierre de Coubertin. Knowing that it already had the facilities in place from the 1984 Summer Games and hence would not need to build as much for 2016, as for example would Chicago, Los Angeles intoned: “The most significant impact [the Games] can have is on the minds, bodies and souls of people everywhere, rather than on the fleeting urban plan of the Host City.”[15]

But Chicago’s marketing was particularly savvy, highlighting every strength and countering every perceived weakness, backing it up with unassailable research, and presenting it all with glitz and glamour.

And their efforts to woo the I.O.C. members did not stop there.

Chicago 2016 also conducted focus groups with participants who were carefully selected as proxies for each of the I.O.C. voters. This was not unlike the tactic used by clever lawyers prior to jury selection, or by Congressional whips prior to an important piece of legislation; when every vote counts, you don’t want to leave anything to chance. Focus group participants were chosen because they mirrored the demographic, socioeconomic, and work backgrounds of the actual I.O.C. members. Some were wealthy, some were middle class. There were academicians and business people, career athletes and people who had come to sport later in life. “We tried to do a segmentation strategy to figure out how we could get each of those people to vote,” said Murray.

Additionally, though unable by Olympic rules to contact the I.O.C. members directly or invite them to Chicago, Chicago 2016 nevertheless found ways to reach them. They ran banner ads and placed stories on GamesBids.com and AroundTheRings.com, two websites that serve as information clearinghouses and are thought to be read by I.O.C. members. In October of 2007, when Moscow was dropped as host of the World Boxing Championships, Chicago scrambled to step in — because they knew that key I.O.C. members like Wu Ching-Kuo of China would be in attendance. On another occasion, after determining that almost all of the I.O.C. members would be together at a conference in South America, Chicago 2016 made arrangements to wrap the newspaper being distributed by the host hotel with an advertorial about Chicago. “When they woke up on the morning of the conference it was Chicago front and center,” said Murray.

There was even some surreptitious merchandising. Chicago 2016 created reusable bags made from recycled materials, imprinted with the bid logo and beauty shots of the city. These were distributed all around the international events in the hopes that the families of the I.O.C. Commissioners would pick them up and take them home.

The Chicago 2016 bid was officially submitted to the I.O.C. on February 12, 2009.

Seven weeks later, the 13 members of the I.O.C. Evaluation Commission came to Chicago for four days of meetings and inspections, and Chicago shifted its P.R. campaign into high gear. They cleaned up trash from the streets, turned on the magnificent Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park earlier than usual, and distributed 10,000 t-shirts to downtown residents.

At the swanky Fairmont Hotel, Mayor Daley and the Chicago 2016 host committee — all dressed in matching green ties to emphasize the bid’s environmentally friendly components — welcomed the I.O.C. to the Windy City. Later, the Commissioners were driven around town in a hybrid bus — and in an age-old promotional tactic driven by a modern marketing methodology, Chicago 2016 brought out the masses to line the bus route by sending out 30,000 e-mails and text messages urging people to show up and wave signs of support. During their stay, the I.O.C. Commissioners were also treated to a dinner with Oprah Winfrey and blues legends Buddy Guy and Koko Taylor at the Art Institute of Chicago, featuring locally grown food prepared by Chef Tony Mantuano of Spiaggia, the city’s only four-star Italian restaurant; and they were shown a four-minute videotaped message from President Obama in which he proudly stated: “Chicago is that most American of American cities. Once you discover the Chicago I know, the city I made my home, the city where my wife grew up, the city where we raised our daughters just blocks from where these Games will be held, I’m confident you’ll discover that you’re already in the perfect host city.” Daley also held a reception on the 94th floor of the Hancock Building for 200 members of the foreign press corps who were in town to cover the I.O.C. visit. In short, after being confined to stealth marketing and indirect communications tactics, Chicago 2016 made the most of its key face-to-face meeting.

By the middle of 2009 the campaign to bring the Olympics to Lake Michigan had already spanned 3½ years and had cost about $50 million. It had involved an astonishing array of consultants, architects, urban planners, financiers, insurance executives, volunteers, athletes, and politicians, and had employed some of the world’s most sophisticated and clever marketing strategies.

But it wasn’t over yet. In October, when it came time for the final presentation to the International Olympic Committee Congress in Denmark, Chicago 2016 added some last-minute glitz and celebrity firepower to the marketing campaign. They brought in Oprah Winfrey again. They chartered a 747 plane with the Chicago 2016 logo on the side, and flew hundreds of supporters to Copenhagen. And they also persuaded the President and First Lady of the United States to fly a different 747 with a different logo on the side and come wield their influence. (For their final presentations Madrid trotted out Queen Sofia and former I.O.C. President Juan Antonio Samaranch; Rio had Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and soccer legend Pele; and Tokyo had new Prime Minster Yukio Hatayama.) It was certainly an emphatic ending to what had been an impressive campaign, one that cost the four finalists a total of $179.4 million.

Certainly, if the battle had been decided by imagery, P.R. dexterity, showmanship, and promotional skill alone, it would have been a walkover. But it wasn’t. In the end, Chicago fell short — shockingly, earning the votes of just 18 out of the 94 participating I.O.C. members in the first round (dead last), and losing out to a city, Rio de Janeiro, that astutely marketed its appealing fun-in-the-sun, rise-of-the-third-world image to overcome many technical and logistical concerns about its own suitability.

The “Olympic Watch” viewing parties in Chicago’s Daly Plaza and Washington Park shut down quickly, while the day-long sambas on Copacabana Beach in Rio perhaps ticked up a decibel or two. Within days, John Murray and his team were back in the Aon Tower, wrapping up the books and closing down the corporation.

Just what went wrong was never clear. The Olympic Games bidding process is about as transparent as the Olympic ice skating judging process. There are untold layers of politics, side deals, bloc voting, national and continental preferences, implicit strategies about future years’ bids, and all sorts of other intrigue.

Pat Ryan blamed it on a “miscalculation” about the voting strategies. I.O.C. members voted for their own regions out of loyalty on the first ballot, he told the Executives’ Club of Chicago a few days later, “and I think people said ‘Chicago is strong enough to get in the second round, my vote won’t matter.’” He also felt that some members who had pledged support while the Obamas were in Copenhagen backtracked once they had left; and that there might have been some backlash from the strained relations between the U.S.O.C. and the I.O.C.[16]

For his part, John Murray harkened back to his original assessment from 2006: Rio was the wild card. Since South America had never hosted the Olympics, and since Brazil had become one of the world’s fastest growing economic powers, and since Rio had already won the rights to host the 2014 World Cup, it was possible that no other city could stand in its way, regardless of how effective the marketing campaign. Nevertheless, he called the loss the biggest disappointment of his career.

Then there was the post-mortem offered by one former I.O.C. executive, Michael Payne of Great Britain, who felt that perhaps Chicago’s proclivity for injecting politics into everything may have ultimately undermined its marketing efforts. “An Olympic bid is increasingly a communications campaign and in the end people will vote for who they like best, who they believe in most, who they can trust,” he wrote in an article in SportsPro magazine. So “it was a surprise to watch a… legendary political machine so finely tuned and experienced as Chicago, who prided themselves as no other U.S. city on their ability to manage elections, telling people how they are going to vote before they even approach the polling station, so totally miss the plot.” [17]

Whatever the combination of reasons, Chicago had lost the battle for the Olympics. But in so doing, they had reinforced and perhaps redefined the central role that marketing plays in influencing people, events and outcomes in our society. Theirs was a high-powered if somewhat disparate promotional campaign, incorporating nearly every tool in the marketing playbook — market research and reputation management, community outreach and media relations, bus ads and Internet videos, shiny collateral and advertorial wraps, op eds and athletes’ endorsements, manufactured crowd support and celebrity appearances. But it began to pave the way for more refined marketing campaigns that would soon bring events like the Big Ten Basketball Tournament, the NCAA Hockey Championship, the America’s Cup Race Series, and the ITU World Triathlon Grand Final (an Olympic qualifying event) to Chicago.

John Murray co-founded the Chicago Sports Commission in 2011, and went on to create Arena Partners, a consulting firm that develops marketing and sponsorship strategies for companies and municipalities that want to be involved with large-scale events.

On October 2, 2014, five years to the day after losing the Olympic bid, the city won the rights to host the 2015 NFL Draft — not as plum a prize, to be certain, but a coup nonetheless. “It was bittersweet, but it proved out what we said,” Murray told Crain’s Chicago Business: “that there’s a strong legacy that came out of the Olympic Bid.”[18]

Nevertheless, as the real Games now begin in Rio, there will be a lot of people tuning in around Chicago and dreaming about what might have been.

Joe Dobrow is the author of Natural Prophets (Rodale Books, 2014) and the forthcoming book Pioneers of Promotion, about the early visionaries of the marketing industry.

[1] As quoted on History.com, http://www.history.com/news/8-unusual-facts-about-the-1904-st-louis-olympics, accessed March 27, 2015

[2] The I.O.C. Charter stipulates that the maximum number of members is 115; in fact, the number who ended up participating in the vote for the 2016 games was 98

[3] See http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=115411

[4] “And the 2016 Summer Olympics will be held in (read story to find out),” Sports Business News, January 26, 2007; accessed at http://sportsbiznews.blogspot.com/2007/01/and-2016-summer-olympics-will-be-held.html on March 30, 2015

[5] See http://thelocaltourist.com/cities/chicago/quotes-about-chicago and http://chicago-quotes.tumblr.com/page/6

[6] http://thelocaltourist.com/cities/chicago/quotes-about-chicago

[7] Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel part II, as quoted in Pierce, pp. 253–254.

[8] Kenneth Rose, Unspeakable Awfulness: America Through the Eyes of European Travelers, 1865–1900, 72

[9] In December of 2006, Mayor Richard M. Daley called this “the silliest law” that the Council had ever passed; it was eventually overturned in 2008. See “Let ’em eat foie gras, they declare,” Chicago Tribune, December 21, 2006

[10] “Chicago picked by USOC to bid for 2016 Olympics,” Associated Press, Yahoo Sports, April 15, 2007

[11] http://web.archive.org/web/20080130025238/http://www.Chicago 2016.org/benefits_to_chicago.aspx

[12] Pat Ryan, “Chicago Games: Benefits Far Outweigh the Risks,” Huffington Post, August 13, 2009; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patrick-ryan/chicago-games-benefits-fa_b_230511.html

[13] See “Boston 2024 bid calls on Chicago idea,” by Philip Hersh, Chicago Tribune, January 9, 2015. This article states that the insurance policies were for $1 billion though previous articles cities the $500 million figure.

[14] http://i.usatoday.net/sports/olympics/_2009/documents/s090213_tokyo_bid.pdf

[15] http://www.sccog.org/webapp/images/stories/2016/bid/sccog2016usBidSummary.pdf, 1

[16] David Roeder and Lisa Donovan, “Why Chicago Lost,” Chicago Sun-Times, October 6, 2009

[17] “Bid Never Connected?” by GB Admin, GamesBIds.com, http://gamesbids.com/eng/summer-olympic-bids/chicago-2016/chicago-2016-bid-never-connected/, posted November 18, 2009

[18] Shia Kapos, “John Murray Leaves Chicago Sports Commission. What’s Next?,” Crain’s Chicago Business, October 18, 2014

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