First, let me tell you about George Batten. Many of his contemporaries believed he had not only one bat in his name, but a lot more of them flying in and out of his belfry.

He confirmed their views by opening an advertising agency in New York March 15, 1891. He had one employee, Miss Hopkins, and no clients. His principal asset appears to have been a vast mental storehouse of indignation.

The son of a minister, he was imbued with Christian principles and a clear mandate from the Lord to put them into practice. His humorless eyes peered through steel-rimmed glasses at a world that he generally found ignorant, incompetent, lazy, unpatriotic and dishonest.

Nevertheless, he got business. First was the Macbeth Lamp Chimney Co. His first ad took pains to point out that if you dropped the glass chimney, it would break-a fact that must have been known to ever child over 4 years old.

But if your advertising was handled by George Batten, you were not going to fool the public. Nevertheless, he got the Zenith Horse Collar account and three other pieces of business the first year, which justified adding another minister's son to the firm.

William H. Johns must have been quite impressive even then. He weighed 255 pounds in his prime. Johns threw all his weight into getting new business, and by 1912, the George Batten Co. was a success. That was the year the agency was appointed by the Hammermill Paper Co. Hammermill never left and today, 68 years later, their enthusiasm for their agency choice does not seem to have waned.

Success brought its rewards Batten amused himself with a 400-acre cattle ranch in New Jersey, and Johns, commodore of the Bayside Yacht Club, entertained aboard his 72-foot steam yacht, from which no cocktail flag was ever flown.

George Batten died in 1918... But Mr. Johns and all the rest of the characters who played leading roles in BBDO history were alive and well when I came aboard. By 1919, the George Batten Co. had become one of the country's top agencies, with offices in Boston and Chicago and an impressive client list.

The scene, also dated 1919, now shifts to an oyster bar beneath Manhattan's Grand Central terminal. Slurping their clam chowder were two young men with hardly any physical resemblance. Bruce Barton, a strikingly handsome man well over 6 feet, was a minister's son. Although only 33, he was already known as one of the brightest magazine editors and writers of the day. Seated next to him was Alex Osborn a small, short man with a head that looked like a well-barbered cannonball.

Osborn's fame - if any - was limited to being manager of a small advertising agency in Buffalo. Barton, planning to return to editing, complained that the literary world had made him famous but that fame had not been putting money in his bank account.

Osborn suggested that Barton should get into the advertising business, where writers were paid on a more regular basis. He, Osborn, offered to put Barton in touch with an advertising man named Roy Durstine, who already had a small New York agency.

Roy Durstine was an intense and powerful salesman. Barton, professing he knew nothing of running a business and didn't want to, agreed to work half-time writing ads for an agency to be called Barton, Durstine. Within a year Osborn joined them.

By 1928, Barton, Durstine & Osborn was billing about $23 million, while the venerable George Batten Co. was still in a holding pattern of about $8 million. The two firms were acutely conscious of each other. In 1924, both by coincidence moved into the same building, 383 Madison Ave.

The legend, probably phony, is that Papa Johns, riding up in the elevator with Roy Durstine, said, "Did it ever occur to you that we have no competing accounts? Think it over."

In any event, they merged, taking as a temporary name Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn. Barton, a great believer in short, memorable trade names, hoped to shorten it as soon as nervous clients quieted down.

Alas, they reckoned without the American funny bone. A wag, some say Alexander Woollcott, produced the following gag: "Have you heard about the new advertising agency that sounds like a trunk falling downstairs? Batten, Barton, Durstine .... and Osborn."

During the years of Alex Osborn's association with the BBDO, it became one of the leading advertising agencies in the United States, with a total of fifty-two offices throughout the World. Its annual billings increased from $1 million in 1919 to $20 million in 1939, when Osborn became executive vice-president, and to $207 million in 1957.

Sometimes Alex Osborn went so far as to plead with his employees to use BBDO-advertised brands exclusively, even at home, on the grounds that "BBDOers" and their families accounted for nearly ten thousand people, a large enough market to have an influence.

He took an active role in the agency, supervising all its departments. He was also the man who hired Bernard Duffy as an office boy in the early years of the firm. Duffy rose to become president of the concern, leading it through its most expansive period before he retired in 1957.

• 1891 George Batten, 37, opens his one-room advertising agency, the Batten Co., at 38 Park Row, New York, with no clients and one employee.
  
  
• 1894 Batten's is the first agency to install in-house printing. He advocates the use of plain, simple type, which he says, "stands out like a Quaker on Broadway."
  
  
• 1906 The agency, now with 50 employees, moves to the Metropolitan Annex building on East 24th Street, occupying the entire 11th floor - 5,000 square feet.
  
  
• 1912 Hammermill Paper Co. awards its account to Batten. Today the company is BBDO's oldest client.
  
  
• 1917 Armstrong Cork Co. awards its account to Batten. It is now BBDO's second-oldest client.
  
  
• 1918 George Batten dies at 64, and William H. Johns becomes president of the Batten Co.
  
  
• 1919 The Barton & Durstine Co. agency opens January 1 at 25 W 45th St., with Bruce Barton as president and Roy Durstine as secretary- treasurer. In August, Alex Osborn joins the agency, renamed Barton, Durstine & Osborn.
  
  
• 1920 General Electric becomes BDO client.
  
  
• 1924 BDO ranks as the fourth-largest U.S. agency.
  
  
• 1925 BDO airs its first radio program an hour show for Atwater Kent radios for which the agency had obtained the exclusive right to broadcast Metropolitan Opera stars. Two years later, BDO becomes the first agency to establish a radio department.
  
  
• 1927 John Caples, who later will become the world's authority on copy testing, joins BDO.
  
  
• 1928 In September, the Batten Co. and BDO merge to form Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn.
  
  
• 1929 BBDO gets the Du Pont account on the basis of the campaign theme "Better things for better living through chemistry." The campaign will run for 55 years, modified in the 1969s when "through chemistry" is dropped.
  
  
• 1934 Kate Smith begins her first commercially sponsored radio show for BBDO client La Palina cigars.
  
  
• 1935 BBDO launches the first "Hit Parade" radio show. "Soon" was the No. 1 song.
  
  
• 1937 Bruce Barton is appointed to an unexpired term in the U.S. House of Representatives and is elected a year later.
  
  
• 1939 Roy Durstine resigns, and the agency is reorganized under the leadership of Alex Osborn.
  
  
• 1939 Lever Bros. becomes a BBDO client.
  

John Osborn joined BBDO in 1980. He's been ever since, in the media department, where he is a VP-associate media director. His father was Alex Osborn's only son.

John Osborn, who was 13 when his grandfather died in 1966, remembers very little talk about advertising around the house. He does remember, vividly, his grandfather holding forth on any number of other topics. "I have images of him sitting at the head of the table when we'd have these big family gatherings, maybe 15 people around the table. I could smell Scotch Whisky, and he - well, pontificated isn't the right word - but he loved telling stories. I think he had distilled everything he had accumulated in business and turned them into life lessons."

The two business-related matters that stand out in Mr. Osborn's mind about his grandfather are his work on brainstorming and creativity and the amazing commute he undertook for seven years in the 1940s, when he had to lead the agency out of serious financial difficulties.

"He would get on a Sunday night train in Buffalo. Monday morning he'd arrive in Grand Centra, walk underground through the Roosevelt Hotel to BBDO and start his workweek. Monday night he would check in at the Roosevelt. Friday morning he'd check out, work a half-day, get on the train and be in Buffalo by 9 or 10 at night."

His grandfather "really believed that creativity was something you integrated into every area of your life." John Osborn says, "I knew this because when Bruce Barton was coming to visit on his birthday, my grandfather would have a family brainstorming party: "How are we gonna celebrate Uncle Bruce's birthday?"

"Now when you're 13, that's pretty stupid," John Osborn continues, "and produces a small snapshot that shows Mr. Barton in a wheelchair, being feted - Alex hovering over him making sure everything is going just right and young John standing there looking as if, well, the whole thing is very stupid."

But these days, John Osborn relishes the heritage and in fact gives informal talks on the agency's history to new employees and other groups:

" There's kind of a nice sense of implied continuity," he says. There is also a specific tie to the past with the media department, where executive VP-media director reinstituted brainstorming sessions, called "Media Idea Groups," in 1984.

By mid-October, it seemed a lost cause. On October 24, the Goodrich president phoned Alex Osborn. "One of our boys just told me you have lost the General Baking Company account." He sounded hurt, as if he meant to say: "You let me down. I was for you. But my associates were not. I might have swung them over. But they have now proved to me that your outfit must be slipping or otherwise you would not have been let out by General Baking."

The next morning Osborn went to see George Morrison, the new president of General Baking. He had been hired by a major stockholder who had given but one command: to get rid of BBDO.

That Friday morning, sitting at Morrison's desk, Osborn told him about the phone call from the Goodrich president. Before he had finished, Morrison reached for his phone and called the head of Goodrich (a man he had never met). "I understand you are thinking of taking on BBDO. It might help you to know that in the last six months I have looked into 32 agencies and, if I had my own way, there is only one agency I would select for my company, and that agency is BBDO."

Osborn signed the Goodrich account. For him, it meant a lot more than mere money. In the family newsletter, he explained: