Lots of Variety

The world being full of a number of things, Joseph M. Russakoff '27, president and owner of the Vanguard Advertising Agency in New York, tries to get into as many of them as possible and succeeds to a surprising degree.

He made a head start by graduating from Dartmouth at the age of 19 and receiving the M.A. degree from Harvard when he was 20. Advertising - his present occupation —he learned from attending night classes.

Launched into the business world during the depression, Joe Russakoff had a series of jobs in New York and Boston. After leaving the last one on Advertising Age, where he was an associate editor, he found he was tired of job-hunting, and although in 1937 the times were not propitious and he had no accounts he could say were "in the bag," he decided to start his own agency. He made it a small one and held to his original non-Huckster conceptions: that an agency should stick to advertising and produce good copy, without getting too involved with a client's actual business. He believes this pays, as most of his accounts have been with him ten years or more. In addition to minding his own business, he enjoys doing such extra jobs as public relations for the Advertising Federation of America and the Direct Mail Advertising Association, and teaching advertising courses at Manhattan and Hunter Colleges. He has also taught at City and Pace Colleges, and estimates he has taught some thousand students. Many of them have learned enough to open up their own agencies and are now his competitors. Joe Russakoff likes to play the piano, which he first studied at the age of six, and enjoys tennis. He is married and the father of three sons, who take up any slack there might be in his program.