At the tender age of 2, Barbara Feigin embarked on a harrowing escape from Nazi Germany with her father, mother and 79 other refugees that involved a terrifying 17-day train trip from Berlin through Lithuania, Russia, China, Korea and Japan before they then traveled across the Pacific Ocean to Seattle.
The family eventually settled in the small town of Chehalis, Washington, where Feigin yearned to become an “authentic” American.
“I wanted to be just like everybody else. We were such oddities in that town,” Feigin said. “There was absolutely nobody like us. We were these German-speaking refugees who wore weird-looking clothes. The town was very kind to us and took us in, but we were clearly outliers. All I wanted was to be an All-American girl, having All-American fun.”
It’s time to pick your Milwaukee favorites for the year!
The genesis of new memoir by Feigin, My American Dream: A Journey from Fascism to Freedom, which is set for release this month, came a few years ago when she learned that her father had kept a journal in the runup to the family fleeing Germany in July 1940.
“I had known that we had escaped but I really knew none of the details at all. My parents never spoke about it and I didn’t ask any questions,” Feigin said. “I was so young, so I remember nothing.”
The existence of the journal long remained undiscovered.
“Then, all these decades later, my sister found the journal in my late father’s papers. She sent it to me, and I read it,” she said. “It was an astonishing and highly emotional experience to read about this terrifying, harrowing experience.”
The journal spelled out the family’s trials and tribulations in detail.
“I learned so much about my parents and this trip. My parents really came here with nothing. Ten dollars and 50 cents for the entire family,” Feigin said. “No connections and no idea what would become of them. They had the clothes on their backs and what they could carry and me and a tent. I learned about how courageous they were, how determined they were and what perseverance they had. They had enormous optimism despite all the difficulties, and great resilience. The knowledge from this journal filled in a hugely important puzzle piece of my life.”
All that the journal revealed spurred a desire within Feigin to write a book.
“I never want my own kids to be as ignorant of what came before them as I had been about what came before me,” she said. “I wanted my kids, my grandchildren and the generations to come to really know who they are, where they came from.”
My American Dream begins with the entire text of her father’s journal.
“It’s his own words, with all of the misspellings and cross-outs. I thought that was really the important starting point,” Feigin said.
Feigin, whose son, Peter, has served as president of the Milwaukee Bucks and Fiserv Forum since 2014, will speak about her memoir at 7 p.m. Jan. 23 at the Harry and Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center (6255 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Whitefish Bay).
Feigin remained in rural Washington throughout her childhood before heading off to Whitman College, a small liberal arts college in Walla Walla, on the other side of the state. With graduation on the horizon, Feigin was determined to buck a trend at that time that saw many women become teachers, nurses or get married and not join the workforce at all. After graduating from Whitman, Feigin was accepted into a business administration program run by Harvard Business School and Radcliffe Graduate School.
She’d later become a trailblazing executive in the male-dominated, “Mad Men” era in the advertising industry, rising through the ranks and ultimately securing a seat in the boardroom at Grey Advertising, now Grey Global Group, a New York City powerhouse agency.
Oftentimes, she was the only woman in the room when key decisions were made.
The book intertwines various narratives from Feigin’s life, including her remarkable career.
“I grew up in the advertising business during a time when career-building opportunities for women were virtually nonexistent,” Feigin said. “I shattered some ceilings, and I was able to pioneer a career in a major advertising agency. I found great success and had a very long career there, 30 years. I was able to really forge a career in what was basically a man’s world.”
Feigin began her career at the Vick Chemical Co., now part of Procter & Gamble, which manufactures products such as Vicks Vapo Rub and Vicks Formula 44.
“I wanted to go into marketing, and it was impossible for women to go into product management jobs with profit and loss responsibility. Women weren’t allowed to go into those kinds of jobs,” she said. “I went into marketing via the back door as market researcher. I worked at the Vick Chemical Co. for a year, and I had gotten good feedback about my performance, so I decided it was time for me to go and talk to my boss about career path planning and compensation and so on. He sort of stared at me and then put his head back and literally started laughing and said there is no career path. He said women get married, have babies and they leave. I said I planned on getting married and having babies, but I went to business school, and I also plan to have a career. He said I’m really sorry but if that’s what you want, you’re going to have to leave because we can’t give you that.”
Feigin did leave and then entered the advertising industry and a job for which she had considerable passion and in which she performed remarkably well.
“I was married at this point, and I got pregnant, so I wanted to talk to my boss about my plan, which was to work until the baby was born and then take a few weeks off and then come back,” she said.
After being informed that she’d be unable to take any type of maternity leave, Feigin pushed back and requested that her boss go higher up the chain of command to get approval for time off and a subsequent return to work.
“Finally, he called me in and said I’ve got great news. You’ve got maternity leave. But then he said they couldn’t pay me while I was off or guarantee that I’d have the same job when I returned. But it was a very important thing. I kind of pioneered maternity leave in this very prominent advertising agency and paved the way for all the women who came after me. Today, my grandchildren can’t even imagine such a thing. It was such a different time. Women weren’t part of the game plan.”
Feigin experienced considerable success in the advertising industry through her work at Grey Advertising.
“I was involved in strategic planning and consumer attitude research, which was kind of a brand-new thing in those days and Grey was known as the pioneer in figuring out the tools to determine consumer attitudes,” she said. “Today, everybody does it. Advertising back then got made by men who sometimes consulted their wives or their secretaries but there was very little consumer attitude research that went on.”
Feigin worked on many of Grey’s famous campaigns, including those for Kool-Aid and CoverGirl cosmetics, but one major project still stands out for her.
“I was involved across the board working with most of Grey’s clients over the years but one of the campaigns that I was very proud to be involved with was for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration,” Feigin recalled. “They had really become very frustrated because they had been unable to get the fatalities caused by drunk teenage drivers to decrease and they had run advertising that had fundamentally dealt with fear and terror of death and maiming, but it just was not effective.”
The administration turned to Grey to develop a more effective campaign.
“We did a very major piece of consumer attitude research with teens, and we got deeply into the emotional and psychological aspects that were associated with it,” she said. “All that lead us to a strategy that dealt with friendship and empathy rather than fear and terror. That led to the very famous campaign of ‘Friends Don’t Let Friends Drive Drunk.’ We told people what to do. We said take the keys, have a designated driver, call a cab, have your friends sleep over. We gave them a call to action. As soon as this campaign started running, teenage drunk driving deaths began to decrease. I always felt very proud to be involved in something that had such societal importance.”
Feigin’s book also details her devotion to her family, which included caring for a husband who suffered multiple strokes, and the joy of raising three successful sons.
“I’m a mom with three sons. Fabulous, all of them,” she said. “We had a very strong family life. My husband, Jim, and I believed very strongly in building strong family bonds. We really worked at it. We were good partners. I’m very grateful and believe we were very successful.”
Feigin said she feels great pride about her son Peter’s role with the Bucks and the thrill of watching the team win its first NBA title in 50 years – and only the second in the history of the franchise – in 2021.
“I’m so proud of him and so thrilled to see what he’s accomplished,” Feigin said. “He is [a] very, very hard worker. The great thing about his whole experience in Milwaukee and with the Bucks is that he worked with an ownership group and together they had a vision of what they wanted to accomplish. They worked tirelessly to make it happen.”
She attended Game 6 of the NBA Finals at Fiserv Forum, when the Bucks secured the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy with a win over the Phoenix Suns in front of raucous home crowd.
“It was so exciting. Everybody just went crazy, including me,” Feigin said. “We slid around the floor with the confetti and spilled champagne. It was so exciting for the Bucks, and it was so exciting to see the effect on Milwaukee. I just loved it. It’s been a great reward to me to follow along with Peter and see his wonderful success. He has endless energy and enthusiasm and he’s a great team player.”
She also took part in the championship parade a few days later when hundreds of thousands of fans jammed Downtown streets to celebrate.
“It was just a thrill to see all those people cheering and screaming and all wearing Bucks gear and thrilled beyond comprehension,” Feigin said. “Peter was sitting on the right-hand side of the bus near the front and was waving to everybody. By this point, Peter had become fairly well known in Milwaukee and we could hear all these people shouting and screaming ‘Thank you, Peter.’ What I don’t think people knew is that Peter is an identical twin and so on the other side of the bus was Daniel, his brother, waving to the crowd and they too were all shouting ‘Thank you, Peter.’ My only sadness was that my husband wasn’t here to enjoy it all.”
Peter Feigin described his mother as intelligent, thorough, hard-working and extremely rational.
“I assume I have some of her rational tendencies in me, but I don’t know where they are,” he said. “I’m a little more delusional, and kind of fun and impulsive. She’s extremely constructive and hard-working. She’s also fact-based by nature. She was a market researcher. She really loves and understands the genesis of the who, what and why. Probably her best trait is that she’s got a real genuine curiosity.”
Feigin credited her for motivating him in his career through her own success in the workplace, despite facing a myriad of obstacles.
“In a very direct way, she had an incredible influence on my career,” Peter Feigin said. “It was fun to have a parent who was directly connected with some real super brands. You just learned a lot by being at the table during dinner conversations. She’s been intimately involved in my career. Forget about chapters, there’s never been a page that I haven’t shared about my career with her and sought help and guidance. She’s been there at every turn.”
Feigin labeled his mother a “super-hero.”
“She has zero ego, zero airs, zero drama,” he said. “She’s my mom. She’s the best. Her academic and intellectual intelligence is at a far different level.”
Barbara Feigin hopes the book will serve as an educational tool for readers.
“This is such a crazy and fraught time we are living in right now,” she said. “Many young people and people who are not so young don’t know about the Holocaust or what it was all about and entailed. Education of that time is important. The other thing is that my mother always impressed upon me her great principle for living, which is to dream big, work hard and never quit. If I can inspire even one person to take that into account and live by it, I’ll feel like I made a difference.”
