"Glide is not a town, it's a verb. Right?" Wrong.
My name is Gary DeLoss Cox. "Gary" because it was a popular name when I was born, "DeLoss" because it belonged to my dear, departed uncle who died as a young man from the disease of riding in the rumble seat of an overturning old Ford. "Cox" because somebody in my family's dim, distant past was from County West meath, Ireland, wherein dwelt the so-named originals.
(Or perhaps because a great-great-great grandfather who was a coxswain jumped ship in Louisiana and kept the name but shortened it to Cox, married a Southwest Indian lady and moved to Texas.) I'm the director of a small communications company, CoxCrow. Before that, I was creative director at several ad agencies. And even before that, I was "in radio and television."
I started working in radio at the tender age of 13
in a small town in Oregon. A town small enough to allow such atrocities as a 13-year old DJ. Roseburg claimed about 7000 people in those days, and it was possible, in a town that size, to wander into the local radio station and television, make friends and eventually, make commercials, play Rock 'n Roll, and otherwise grow up in media. (During this period, I spent summers above Glide, Oregon, on the North Umpqua River.)
The moment I graduated from high school, I was on a plane to a real job, as a real announcer in Anchorage, Alaska. KHAR - "The Heartbeat of Alaska." The job lasted until I was drafted in the late summer. (Actually, my dad "found out" I was to be drafted, and in a fit of fatherly love, he signed me up in the Marine Corps. Dad: "I've got some bad news and some good news. Bad news - you've been drafted; but I pulled some strings and signed you up in the Marines. That's the good news")
After the stint in the Marines, where ol' pop and I served together briefly in Vietnam, I worked as a DJ during the Underground Radio days,("Are you going to San Francisco. There will be a love-in there.) eventually gaining so much experience writing commercials that I gave up show biz for a job as an advertising agency copywriter.
(Airchecks: 1959, 1978, 1999, Traffic Check, Weather Check)
I worked at Cole & Weber; John Brown & Partners; and Wells, Rich, Green; in Seattle. Chiat-Day, Ogilvy & Mather and Keye,Donna, Pearlstein in Los Angeles. Hal Riney and Partners and J. Walter Thompson in the Bay Area.
Because of my mechanical bent, and because of the sheer complexity of the work, I started making ads for hi-tech companies and fooling around with "online" agencies. After a bad injury in San Francisco, I moved back to Oregon.
On this site, I've collected stuff I've stumbled over, things I enjoy, and stories I've written, and am disseminating them here in an expression of selfish joy.
The homeland.
The North Umpqua River valley in the mountains of South Central Oregon is a very special place. Here is the seat of my soul, and the source of much of my writing.
The Real Ultimate Driving Machine.
Genius is rarely lost. This scan, resurrected from a picture that hung in my room when I was a kid, originally came from Road & Track. It was the key to the highway in my head. Lotus, Juan Manuel Fangio, Phil Hill, Wolfgang Von Tripps, Pininfarina... and the shark nose Ferrari. These were magical names in a world of elegant design, unfathomable power and ultimate capability; they seeped into my young personage, imbuing me with a weird, mystical sense of mechanical grace and maniacal, probably suicidal, freedom. In my devoted submission to these unknown masters, I worshiped at a mechanical altar.
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