Jane Trahey: 

Women and Power

Jane Trahey’s accomplishments read like those of a half dozen people put together, all talented. 

She was a leading fashion copywriter, the first adwoman to earn more than a million dollars in a year, and among the first to establish her own New York City agency (with such clients as Calvin Klein, Bill Blass,  and Elizabeth Arden). 

She wrote a half dozen books of humor, including “Pecked to Death by Goslings,” a novel about living in the small town of Old Gosling — i.e., Ridgefield. It described her conversion of a New Road barn into a home, a place she called Versailles, “not because it looks like it, but because it costs as much,” she said.

Her novel, “Life with Mother Superior,” retitled “The Trouble with Angels,”  was made into a Hollywood movie starring Rosalind Russell and directed by Ida Lupino. 

Trahey was a playwright, the author of  “Ring Around the Bathtub,”  which was on Broadway. 

She had also written screenplays, cookbook parodies, and regular columns for Advertising Age, The Chicago Tribune, and Working Women. 

She was a leader in the National Organization for Women, wrote and lectured extensively about women and power, and was a founder of the First Women’s Bank of New York. She wrote an autobiographical self-help book called  “Jane Trahey on Women & Power: Who's Got It. How to Get It.”

And she won more than 200 awards for advertising, writing and public service. 

Born in Chicago in 1923,  Trahey graduated from Mundelein College, a Catholic women’s school, in 1943. Her first job was at The Chicago Tribune in the records library, known as the morgue. “My mother never got over it,”  she once said. “Every time she would call and someone would answer ‘the morgue,’ she'd cross herself and hang up.”

Her real career began writing advertising copy for men’s underwear. One of her first ad jobs was at Neiman-Marcus in Dallas. She came to New York in 1956 and soon founded Jane Trahey  Associates, which operated for many years under several names..

“It was a very informal company, like a playground,” Rocky Piliero, Trahey’s production manager, told The New York Times. “Ms. Trahey didn’t like accounts. She liked projects. She liked to do something new. She’d be gung-ho for six months, then get bored.”

She had her country home on New Road from the 1950s until the early 1970s, when she moved to Kent. She shared her place here with fabric artist Tammis Keefe, who died in 1960, and with her companion for more than 40 years, pioneering TV producer Jacqueline Babbin. 

Ms. Trahey died in April 2000 in Kent at the age of 76.

Milton Biow: 

Modern Advertising Leader

What do the Mimosa subdivision, Philip Morris cigarettes, Lucille Ball, and box-top premiums have in common? Milton Biow.

A leader in modern-day advertising techniques, Mr. Biow rose from humble beginnings to operate one of the largest ad agencies, write now-classic ad copy, create radio and TV shows, and come up with the name of what is now a North Street neighborhood.

Milton Harry Biow (pronounced “be-o”) was born in 1892 in New York City. Although he barely graduated from grade school, he had set up his own advertising agency by the age of 25. The Biow Company grew to become one of the nation’s largest agencies, grossing at times hundreds of millions in today’s dollars.

He created such advertising slogans as “It’s Bulova Watch Time,” “Pepsi Cola Hits the Spot,” and “Call for Philip Morris.”  He is also said to have originated the idea of sending in cereal and other product box tops for premiums.

The New York Times once said that among the products “he made household names” were Anacin, Eversharp, Ruppert beer, Schenley whiskey, and Lady Esther cosmetics. 

“We moved them by the ton,” he’d often say. “We are a tonnage agency.”

Although he promoted the sale of  many tobacco and alcohol products, Mr. Biow never smoked or drank himself.

Also involved in radio and TV, Mr. Biow created the “Take It Or Leave It” radio show which became the $64,000 Question on TV. He  also brought to television ”The Lucy-Desi Show,” starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.

He was credited with being an originator of the modern school of advertising and the first to use radio and TV “spot” commercials to saturate the national market, especially for watches.

“All watches offer time,” he once explained. “Bulova watches not only give the time, but provide beauty, a source of pride, an added measure of value to the user. It’s advertising which sells the plus difference.”

Although he shied away from publicity most of his life, Mr. Biow published an autobiography in 1964, called “Butting In: An Adman Speaks Out.” Promotional notes for the book said, “He never really cared much about money — and he made millions. He was not in politics — yet he ‘ghosted’ some of the smartest lines ever spoken by a president of the United States….He still doesn’t know an adverb from a preposition — but he has just written the gayest, wisest, frankest, most hell-raising book on advertising ever published.”

The president was Franklin D. Roosevelt who, according to one author, used “the catchy slogans that Milton Biow passed along for his speeches.”

Mr. Biow came to Ridgefield in 1952, buying as a weekend and summer retreat a 37-acre estate on North Street that had been called “Wood Acres.” He changed the name to “Mimosa” after planting trees of that species around the house. (Accustomed to warmer climates, the trees had died off by the 1960s.)

In 1964 he sold the estate to Ernestine Tuccio whose husband, Jerry, subdivided the property into Mimosa Estates.  (Mr. Tuccio at first wanted to call the main road into the development “Airline Circle” because so many airline pilots were buying his houses in the early 1960s.

The Planning Commission felt the name wasn’t an appropriate and Mimosa Circle was used instead.) 

The estate house, painted “Mimosa yellow,” was retained and still stands.

In 1956, Mr. Biow closed his agency to devote himself to other interests, including his autobiography and work with the National Conference of Christians and Jews, of which he was a founder. He was also active in the United Jewish Appeal, the United Hospital Fund and the Muscular Dystrophy Association. 

He died in 1976 in Manhattan at the age of 83.