(JWT)Ginny Bahr, JWT's longest-serving employee
Forget watching all seven seasons "Mad Men" (the final season premieres this weekend) Ginny Bahr, JWT's longest-serving employee, worked through the entire Madison Avenue era — and she's still working at the agency now.
Bahr has been walking the ad agency's Madison Avenue and Lexington Avenue halls for more than 60 years—57 of them in high heels.
"JWT used to have a dress code where you had to wear a skirt," Bahr told Business Insider back in 2012 (we confirmed with JWT that she's still working there in 2015) over a cup of decaf in JWT's sprawling cafeteria in its New York HQ. "I've been here for 60 years, and three years ago I wore my first pair of pants to work."
Although broken metatarsals from almost six decades of wearing pumps has slowed her gait, Bahr (who takes the phrase "a lady never reveals her age" seriously) presses on enthusiastically in her career.
First day at work
Bahr's first day of work as a secretary pre-dated the "Mad Men" era of advertising. (She had never heard of the show until her niece asked for "Mad Men" DVDs for Christmas). Bahr began typing correspondences for an executive in the PR department on December 17, 1951. "I had just finished business school across the street and wanted an income before Christmas," she said.
Since then, she has worked in almost every department and on every account, including Ford, Pan Am, Rolex, and Shell Oil.
Oh, and former JWT president Stanley Resor threw her the yellow rose in his lapel twice.
"I always got the men, which was very nice," she said.
Sex in the office
(AMC/"Mad Men" via Netflix)Don Draper has his share of women in the office in the "Mad Men" series.
But not for the reasons that Don Draper would have you think. Call her naïve, but Bahr — who blushes at questions about sex in the office, a popular inquiry since people have realized she's a real live "Mad Woman" —states emphatically that "all that stuff went on without my knowing it," and then, trailing off, "maybe it happened on the trips to Chicago …"
Sex and advertising went hand in hand during the 1950s and on through the era of free love. Sources told Business Insider about a hotel that rented by the hour near Young & Rubicam in the 1960s that was a revolving door of Y&R employees during long lunch breaks.
Jerry Della Femina's agency had a frat house mentality, going so far as to hold a sex contest at the end of every year in which employees would go to a hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant, vote on the person they wanted to sleep with, and then the winning couple got a weekend at the Plaza hotel. Second place was rewarded with one night at the Plaza, and third got a romantic evening on supervisor Ron Travisano's office couch. (This contest went on for 15 years).