Jerry Goodis died of cancer this fall, out in British Columbia. There was a memorial gathering to celebrate his life, here in Toronto one afternoon in late November.

Among the ad people who showed up, and these are only the ones I know and happened to bump into and recognize, were Alan Gee, David Harrison, Brian Harrod, Doug Linton, Tony Miller, Marty Myers, Michael Paul, Geoffrey Roche, Oscar Ross and Bob Wolowich.

And those were just the ad people there who, for some wild and crazy reason, at some hallucinatory moment in their lives, decided only making remarkable ad campaigns was not enough, and determined to assume the never-ending burden of risk and frustration and drudgery you shoulder when you say, hey, I can do this myself! I can run my own shop! Whoopie!

Undoubtedly, Jerry Goodis had a hand in the fact that this phenomenal over-representation of advertising industry nut cases showed up to say goodbye.

The very first words Jerry ever said to me were Are you Jewish? He was a small man, sitting in a very large black leather pedestal chair in the boardroom of Goodis Goldberg Soren, which doubled as his office, on the second floor of a two-story building at Lawrence and Avenue Road in Toronto. Downstairs was The Guernsey Cow Association. Next door was a car wash. Still is.

No Mister Goodis, I’m not Jewish, I admitted. WELL WE ARE! Jerry continued. And that means the work we do has to be twice as good as anybody else’s if we want to get half as far! Can you handle that?

Yes Mister Goodis I said, I think so. Okay, you’re hired he said. Call me Jerry. And all of a sudden I was not just an unemployed York University history grad with a campus-born cartoon strip running in the Toronto Star once a week, I had my first job in advertising. I was a copywriter! At the breathtaking salary of five thousand dollars a year!

Toronto was a bit different back then. To understand Jerry’s are you Jewish line, you had to have seen my father’s golf buddies up at the club roll their eyes back when dad told them I was working at GGS.

When I brought Hartley Strauss, the university buddy I eventually started my own agency with, into my parents’ home, I believe he was the first Jew to set foot on the premises. Likewise, when I walked into Hartley’s parents’ place over ’round Bathurst and Lawrence, I’ll bet I was the first non-Jew through the door who was not there to fix something.

But as Bob Dylan has mentioned to you, the times they were a-changing, and there was revolution in the air. The Beatles had released A Hard Day’s Night, but Help was still to come. Up at GGS in the suburbs, guys like the wonderful art director and filmmaker-to-be George Pastic wore a full Beatle haircut and impeccably tailored double-breasted bell-bottom suits with a shirt that had half-inch wide black and white stripes.

We drove to Buffalo on the weekends to buy flamenco boots made on American lasts in Spain like John and Paul wore. They cost $7.77 American. I had the first pea jacket in Toronto, cut down from a naval officer’s great coat purchased at a second-hand clothing store on Jarvis Street. It could pass for the one Marcello Mastroianni wore in La Dolce Vita.

Down in New York, another ‘Jewish’ ad agency called Doyle Dane Bernbach was making history with ad campaigns that blew everyone’s mind with their wit and humour and irony and understatement. They used photography instead of illustration, and actors instead of models and announcers. They were dominating awards shows and winning big accounts.

Jerry and his partners and the account people and the creative people latched onto the DDB style with a vengeance. A restless mob greeted the postman the day of the week he delivered The New Yorker, and pushed and shoved to see what the next Volkswagen or Avis or American Airlines ad looked like.

It is no overstatement to say that Goodis Goldberg Soren was the only agency in Canada doing work that looked and sounded New York. The lunatics were running the asylum, and though most of us weren’t Jewish, Jerry and the superb account guy Sam Goldberg would look at a great layout or a knockout headline and say Hey kid, are you sure you’re not Jewish?

At the memorial, Doug Linton read a list of the dozen people who made up the creative department at Goodis about the mid-’60s. We all arrived there as pretty much nobodies, and left as stars, or at least well on our way. That was Jerry’s talent. I never saw him actually write or draw anything on the art board in his office. But he could pick ’em. And he could inspire ’em. Doug figured out Jerry’s total annual salary tab for that shit hot GGS creative department in the mid-’60s. It came to less than a hundred grand.

Barry Base creates advertising campaigns for a living. He writes this column to blow off steam, and as a thinly disguised lure to attract clients who may imagine working with him could be a productive and amusing experience. Barry can be reached at (416) 924-5533, or faxed at (416) 960-5255, at the Toronto office of Barry Base & Partners.