“The thing that really impressed me as I was growing up was first of all their great elation and joy in being in a place where there was freedom,” says Barbara Feigin, speaking of her parents to American Essence. “Freedom was a tremendously important thing—freedom to be who you want, to do what you want, to read what you want, to say what you want. They had come from a place where that didn’t exist at the time, and so that was hugely important.
Life in the Land of Liberty
Though Ms. Feigin remembers little of this desperate journey, in 2013, her sister Carolyn called with some amazing news. She’d found a journal belonging to their father that detailed the prelude to their escape and the obstacles they’d encountered on their flight from oppression and death. This treasure along with copies of letters written to relatives in Germany describing their new life in Chehalis inspired Ms. Feigin to begin writing her book.“They arrived in Seattle with $10.50 for the entire family and the clothes on their back,” Ms. Feigin recollects. “They had no connections, no money, no job, no nothing. My parents did not speak English, but they found my dad a job in the Sears Roebuck Farm Store. His job was to uncrate these big stoves and put the pieces together, and that’s how we came to Chehalis.”
New Adventures, Expanded Horizons
During her adolescence, Ms. Feigin’s mother often repeated these words to her daughter: “Dream big; work hard; never quit.” As she writes in her autobiography, “My parents continue to emphasize how important it is to be in America because America offers freedom to be what you want, to do what you want, to strive for what you want to achieve. They remind me of the importance of education, telling me again and again that education is the key that opens the door to opportunity.”Ms. Feigin took their words of wisdom to heart and made them a guiding light in her life. After graduating from high school, where she served as assistant editor for the school’s newspaper, she entered Whitman College on a scholarship. In 1959, her academic success and her mother’s advice to “dream big” led her across the country to the Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration, where she embarked “on the most profound experience of [her] life—one that will completely transform [her] sense of the world and my mindset,” she wrote in her memoir.
While her academic studies prepared Ms. Feigin for her career in advertising, the city of Boston also served as her classroom, introducing her, she writes, “to people with intellectual energy and curiosity” and to “cultural and historical wonders and experiences I’ve never known.” Cocktail parties, regular forays to listen to the Boston Symphony, friendships formed with men and women from very different backgrounds, and simply living day-to-day in a city “electric with excitement”: all these and more brought an education all their own.
And, it was here, too, that she met Jim Feigin, who was enrolled in the Harvard Business School. The two eventually married, had three sons, and remained in love until the day he died.
Mad Men, Meet Mad Woman
Following her time in Boston, Ms. Feigin moved to New York, where she began her long and successful career in advertising, one of the few women at that time in that crew of “Mad Men,” a nickname for Madison Avenue ad men. Her first triumph at Grey Advertising came when her team devised a new way of promoting Kool-Aid. After extensive research involving mothers and families, they recommended making Kool-Aid available year-round rather than just in the summers and adding Vitamin C to give it nutritional value. Once these recommendations were followed, Kool-Aid sales surged, and for a time only Coke and Pepsi were more popular.But the work that brought Ms. Feigin her greatest joy and satisfaction was with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Worried by the many teens who were dying or being injured from driving drunk, this government agency approached Grey Advertising and asked for their help in designing an effective ad campaign. After a deep study of teens, driving, and drinking, including the attitudes of young people toward alcohol and driving, Ms. Feigin and her team discovered the importance of friendship for them and came up with the slogan, “Friends don’t let friends drive drunk.”
Passing the Torch
Like all of us, Ms. Feigin’s life was not free of stress and tragedy. She was 11 years old when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and though she lived until 1963 her health was always a major concern. In her junior year at Whitman College, three of Ms. Feigin’s good friends died in a car crash. On July 28, 1990,—“the day my world came crashing down,” she writes her book—Jim suffered a stroke and required care for the rest of his days.Perhaps these hardships explain some of the words of advice Ms. Feigin offers to younger generations. She values the family as a source of strength, inspiration, and comfort. Like her mother and father before her, she believes strongly in the importance of education. She also considers optimism a valuable character trait. She then adds, “I think it’s very important that people understand that there needs to be resilience. All of us in our lives face bumps in the road of one kind or another, you know, a lot of times dire, a lot of times unexpected, a lot of times confusing and confounding, but it’s so important to be resilient and to pick yourself up and move forward the best way you possibly can.”
“Let this be a guiding principle of your own lives as it has been of mine. And just one final thought: have fun and laugh every day. It will do your heart good.”
Ms. Feigin subtitles this epilogue “A Letter to My Sons, My Grandchildren, and Future Generations.” It is, in fact, wise and beautiful advice for all of us.
