Lee Cirillo

CIRILLO, LeeJanuary 6, 1930-February 16, 2012. One of the luckiest guys east of the Mississippi River died Thursday. Lady Luck entered Lee Cirillo's life early in the form of three remarkable, distinctive, original women-Margaret "Peggy" Doyle, Anna Grace Smith and Joan Marie Morgan. Peggy was Lee's mother-a strong but vulnerable woman who had the youthful vision, with her brilliant young engineer husband, Lee, to guide her 3-year-old "polio" kid into becoming an independent adult. Peggy and Lee insisted on placing young Lee in regular school classes-instead of a special school "for crippled children"-long before the phrase "main-streaming" entered our language and our attitudes. Anna Grace Smith was a tiny but dynamic high school teacher who spotted a cheerful facility with words in an inchoate, unshaped, 15-year-old pre-engineering student...and changed his life forever. And Joan Morgan was a drop-dead gorgeous babe, who for inexplicable reasons, started to mess around with a way-too-serious 26 year-old in the Mid-Fifties, the dependably solid years of Republican President, Dwight David Eisenhower. Joan helped a cautious, middle-of-the-road guy figure out who he really was. Lee's fledgling career would take the yeoman advertising man and his young family-Joan, Chip and Diane-from Cleveland, Ohio to the Philadelphia area as a copywriter with the venerable N.W. Ayer, one of the oldest and largest advertising agencies in the United States. Then he was off to Marsteller, Inc., in New York, New York, as baby Leslie completed the Cirillo quintet, and two years later back with Ayer to its Chicago office, as group creative director on the Illinois Bell and Caterpillar accounts. Good luck and generous kudos would follow. Bill Tyler of Advertising Age listed Illinois Bell's public service advertising in his Top Ten Campaigns, two years running, suggesting in his column that the Bell System would have been wise to run the campaign nationally. Tyler also admired Caterpillar's eye-catching two-page market development ads in the then fat U.S. newsweeklies. Chicagoans hummed to the tune of the "Touchtone Follies" in a Clio-winning animated commercial, "Tap Your Way to Happiness" created by Cirillo's team, playing a discreet second place in Chicago that year to Leo Burnett's iconic "You've come a long way, baby" campaign for Virginia Slims. In 1978 the adman nomad ventured to Nashville as creative director of the Bill Hudson Agency, and two years later opened Cirillo's Words & Pictures, producing creative projects for a number of Nashville clients, including the Mitre, Easy Street and Laredo Boot brands for Genesco, Jack Daniel and Bols Liquers for Brown-Forman, Alcoa-Fujikura, Arnet, Bridgestone EAP, Hickory Specialties, the United Paperworkers and the Paper Industry Union-Management Pension Fund. Over the years Lee wrote ads on everything from $1.98 pens to half-million dollar Cat tractors and trucks, from 35 mm cameras to Girl Scout cookies, fast food to financial services, computer gear to insurance. Son Chip became a journalism student at the University of Illinois during those years, Diane a double major-English and French-at Indiana University, Leslie a student at Franklin Junior High and wife Joan, a happy and fulfilled member of the team at Cheekwood, first as docent, then receptionist, then secretary-assistant to the director and finally, perfectly suited, on the public relations desk. Leslie, the youngest, would move on to the University of Wisconsin and the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. In the Words & Pictures years, Lee partnered with photographer-computer maestro Dennis Carney in the production of more than 20 fund-raising audio visual programs--for independent schools and social resources, from Chicago to Florida. He partnered with administrator Kent McNish and art director Bobbi Phillips in the development of a wide and colorful array of "Sharing God's Gifts" promotion-of-giving resources for the United Methodist Church. And late in life, at 80, he partnered with art director Nick Long to develop an illustrated e-book on the two journeys to America of his immigrant grandfather, a cobbler from a time-worn town in southern Italy, who came to America at the turn of the 20th century. Laced together with an album of delicious old family photos, La Famiglia, Cirillo was a labor of love...and a celebration of Lee's deep and abiding faith in the promise of the American Dream. Even as he enjoyed the good life with his kids and the radiant Joan, Lee Cirillo produced a steady stream of acerbic Letters to the Editor. His favorite targets were stupid wars, greedy plutocrats, careless deregulation, reckless, irresponsible, filibuster-loving, one message Republicans Tax cuts! Tax cuts! Tax cuts! and feckless, cowardly Democrats--with no coherent message at all. He loved life. He loved words. He loved music and the movies, and well-crafted books-both novels and non-fiction, especially, especially history. He loved to putter in his little garden, too. He adored his family. And he delighted in the wonderful trips he and Joan had taken over the years-the beach bum runs to Cape Cod, the Jersey Shore, south Florida, Pawley's Island and the Outer Banks. The grown-up, sophisticated vacations in San Francisco, New Orleans and New York. The spectacular tour of France with Diane after she finished her year at Strasbourg University. Seventeen or eighteen years of New Plays Festivals in Louisville with Jim and Margie. Then more visiting Leslie, Ian and the boys in England---with a couple of runs to France thrown in for good measure. He loved all of it. And, as he said in one of his Christmas cards, he and Joan had "one hellova 52-year ride together, with amazing adventures, large and small, three great and loving kids, and splendid friendships along the way. "I am one lucky guy," he'd add with a quick grin. "I strolled the Champs-Elysees, watched the copters buzz the top of the North Tower when the terrorists truck-bombed it in 1993, loafed in the sun on the beaches of Cape Cod, California, Florida and France, walked down a thousand years of British history on the stone floors of Westminster Abbey...and one of these days I'm gonna walk down the street my father was born on in Molfetta, Italy." His smiling spirit is probably walking along the huge dunes on the great beach at Wellfleet, Cape Cod, trying to catch up with Joan, as you read this final paragraph. Lee Cirillo was one lucky guy. Arrangements are pending. WEST HARPETH FUNERAL HOME