Confessions of an Ad Man (Jim Johnson, Not Ogilvy)

Wayne Cranford and Jim Johnson

Jim Johnson is sitting in the Heights Starbucks in shorts and a CCLR ballcap, waiting for a decaf and trying to cough a tickle out of the back of his throat.

At 82, his mind is sharp, roaming through the decades he spent in advertising in Little Rock, beginning in the “Mad Men” days. “That show really captured the times,” Johnson says as his “Tall” drink arrives, dwarfed by a companion’s “Venti.”

He had come to discuss his old colleague Shelby Woods (see Page One), but conversation drifted to the AMC cable series that glamorized Johnson’s profession and his era.

“Mad Men” made a splash in 2007 and ran seven years, detailing the tense ad pitches, office intrigue, extramarital liaisons and constant drinking and smoking on Madison Avenue in the ‘60s, its heyday as America’s advertising mecca.

Johnson, a Hot Springs native who retired from the ad world in 2000, says the series missed the mark on only one behavior, at least from his Little Rock vantage.

“We didn’t drink in the middle of the day,” he said. “I tried a martini at lunch once and had to go back to the office and take a nap.”

Johnson started in the late 1950s at the Thomas C. Hockersmith Agency in Little Rock, ushered in by a tall, intelligent writer named Wayne Cranford. Eventually their names would resonate together in Little Rock advertising as surely as Young & Rubicam or Ogilvy & Mather did on Madison Avenue.

The two formed Cranford Johnson in 1961, and it grew through several iterations into Cranford Johnson Robinson Woods, or simply CJRW, the state’s largest home-grown ad firm. “Neither one of us had a single class in advertising,” Johnson said with a laugh. “But Wayne Cranford is one of the smartest guys I know [high school valedictorian in his hometown, Bald Knob].

“Wayne was a word man and I was a picture man, but we had no idea if we’d be able to make it,” Johnson continued. “Our first account was the Irma Dumas Dress Shop in North Little Rock.” Cranford recalled that two other early clients were the Southern Equitable Life Insurance Co., which had the building where Cranford Johnson rented offices, and Garnette Mullis, a dress shop in Pine Bluff.

After a year’s struggle, they won the business of First National Bank, which had assets of some $80 million. By the 1970s, Cranford Johnson was thriving and Johnson was working on his most famous creation, the “Arkansas” logo that has appeared for a generation on license plates and all manner of promotional items for the state.

Johnson recalled that another promotional work, a poster, was the key to it all.

“When I was a senior at the University of Arkansas in 1957, my instructor urged me to design a poster for a contest sponsored by the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission.” Johnson’s poster took first place, even though it was “probably ordinary by today’s standards.” His instructor’s entry finished third.

So after a brief stint drawing cartoons for Hallmark Cards Inc. in Kansas City and six months of active-duty military service, Johnson joined the Hockersmith firm. “Wayne told Tom Hockersmith that he knew a young man who was a good designer and had won this award for the poster, and that persuaded him to give me a shot as an art director.”

Some 60 years later, Johnson’s still painting, and his works, often in pastel colors, are for sale at the Local Colour gallery on Kavanaugh Boulevard. He also draws 9-inch-square cartoons that the gallery hawks as “perfect gifts.”

After a half-century playing rock ’n’ roll guitar with the Rockets and other groups, Johnson still gets together weekly with some of the fellows, never mind his two hearing aids. But more often he’s “sitting on the front porch, playing along with Barbra Streisand.” Barbra, it turns out, is singing out of his stereo.

Meanwhile, much has changed at CJRW. Johnson dropped by the firm after its move to Third and Main downtown in 2015, saying he was a former employee and asking to see the mailroom.

The receptionist found him an escort, who asked when he’d worked at the firm. The starting date of 1961 rung a bell. “She said, ‘Wait, that’s when the firm was founded.’ I said, well, yes, I’m Jim Johnson, as in Cranford Johnson …”

He got a full tour.