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people.
    â€œGood morning, children,” the Professor said quietly. “This is a commercial for cereal. Listen to me carefully, please. I know a lot about cereals, because I’m the Sharp Cereal Professor. Sharp Cereals—Twinkles, Cocoa Bears, Bran-16, and Sharp All-Grain Blend—are the best-tasting cereals in America. And they’re good for you.” A beat of silence, and then the Sharp Cereal Professor grinned . . . and when he grinned, you knew there was the soul of a real pal in there. “Believe me, because I know. Your mom knows; I just thought you’d like to know too.”
    A young man came into the ad at that point, and he handed the Sharp Cereal Professor a bowl of Twinkles or Cocoa Bears or whatever. The Sharp Cereal Professor dug in, then looked straight into every living room in the country and said: “Nope, nothing wrong here.”
    Old man Sharp hadn’t cared for that last line, or the idea that anything could be wrong with one of his cereals. Eventually Vic and Roger had worn him down, but not with rational arguments. Making ads was not a rational business. You often did what felt right, but that didn’t mean you could understand why it felt right. Both Vic and Roger felt that the Professor’s final line had a power which was both simple and enormous. Coming from the Cereal Professor, it was the final, total comfort, a complete security blanket. I’ll never hurtyou, it implied. In a world where parents get divorced, where older kids sometimes beat the shit out of you for no rational reason, where the rival Little League team sometimes racks the crap out of your pitching, where the good guys don’t always win like they do on TV, where you don’t always get invited to the good birthday party, in a world where so much goes wrong, there will always be Twinkles and Cocoa Bears and All-Grain Blend, and they’ll always taste good. “Nope, nothing wrong here.”
    With a little help from Sharp’s son (later on, Roger said, you would have believed the kid thought the ad up and wrote it himself), the Cereal Professor concept was approved and saturated Saturday-morning TV, plus such weekly syndicated programs as Star Blazers, U.S. of Archie, Hogan’s Heroes, and Gilligan’s Island. Sharp Cereals surged even more powerfully than the rest of the Sharp line, and the Cereal Professor became an American institution. His tag line, “Nope, nothing wrong here,” became one of those national catch phrases, meaning roughly the same thing as “Stay cool” and “No sweat.”
    When Vic and Roger decided to go their own way, they had observed strict protocol and had not gone to any of their previous clients until their connections with the Ellison Agency were formally—and amicably—severed. Their first six months in Portland had been a scary, pressure-cooker time for all of them. Vic and Donna’s boy, Tad, was only a year old. Donna, who missed New York badly, was by turns sullen, petulant, and just plain scared. Roger had an old ulcer—a battle scar from his years in the Big Apple advertising wars—and when he and Althea lost the baby the ulcer had flared up again, turning him into a closet Gelusil chugger. Althea bounced back as well as possible under the circumstances, Vic thought; it was Donna who pointed out to him that placid Althea’s single weak drink before dinner had turned into two before and three after. The two couples had vacationed in Maine, separately and together, but neither Vic nor Roger had realized how many doors are initially closed to folks who have moved in, as Mainers say, from “outta state.”
    They would indeed have gone under, as Roger pointed out, if Sharp hadn’t decided to stay with them. And at the company’s Cleveland headquarters, positions had done an ironicflip-flop. Now it was the old man who wanted to stick with Vic and Roger and it was the kid