Jim Surmanek was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1941, an otherwise good year, save the attack on Pearl Harbor. In his senior year of an undistinguished passage through Flushing High School, he accepted the prestigious position of part-time mailroom clerk at Parade magazine. Being skillful at sorting mail, the research director at Parade offered him his second prestigious position, research assistant, a job requiring that he endlessly crunch statistics. A significant turning point in his till then non-illustrious career happened when the Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency, apparently desperate for help, hired him as Media Research Supervisor. He climbed the corporate ladder with only an occasional misstep, at O&M, then J. Walter Thompson, and later at mMcCann-Erickson.