by Garth Meyer
Matt Sterling worked at LINTAS advertising in New York City, its offices inside the One Dag Hammarskjold Plaza building, near the United Nations; named for its second secretary general.
Sterling was a young assistant media planner, trying to make it in the city, one of 200 people in his department.
On the phone, he spelled out the building’s address, repeating it for salespeople who wanted to send magazines or other mail to the office.
“I recited this hodgepodge of consonants multiple times a day for the first year or so, until I learned you could write ‘DHP’ and it would still get there,” Sterling writes in his new memoir, “Mighty: Finding the Strength to Survive.”
It was the early ‘90s. While pushing it in the city, he was also pushing a wheelchair, in the snow, navigating buses and taxis, access and no access, gloves or no gloves to keep the muck from the sidewalks from transferring to his palms, then to his clothes.
Gloves left black marks, so Sterling went back to no gloves and “washed (his) hands constantly” (in the pre-instant hand sanitizer era).
“Mighty” is a New York story – in a vein that recalls how Tom Wolfe came to write “The Bonfire of the Vanities.” Wolfe always wanted to write a grand book about contemporary New York but figured someone was already doing it. He’d wait another five or ten years, and think the same thing. But still nobody had, so one year he got started.
“Mighty” is kind of like that, but it’s just a regular guy’s story – set in the New York of a few years later, illuminating the peak of print advertising and print magazines, then seeing it start to fade, then change drastically as the digital world seeped in.
In the midst of this, Sterling switched jobs, from LINTAS to Time, Inc. – going from buying ads for clients to selling ads for his client – working on Time’s IBM account. Eventually, he was so immersed in the world of digital/new media/.com, he moved to San Francisco in 1999 to launch a new magazine from Time, Inc. called “eCompanyNOW.”
Born in 1969, Sterling was a “breach” baby, for whom doctors had to break both of his legs to bring him out of the womb. Unable to walk on his own, his legs in braces, Sterling’s story began in a time when his first school – outside Sylvania, Ohio – was run by “Toledo Society for the Handicapped.”
The youngest of three children, Sterling soon began to use a wheelchair and was “mainstreamed” before the term came to be, often the only disabled kid amidst throngs of “AB” – able-bodied – people at school, the same for when he went to college and entered the business world.
Now living in Rancho Palos Verdes with his wife and son, Sterling decided to write his story to fill a gap in the books he knew as a kid.
“It was either a Vietnam veteran or a paralympian, never just a regular disabled person who got a job and had a family,” he said.
His wife, Carrie, is an American Studies professor at Cal-State Fullerton.
So Sterling began to write it all down.
He moved to New York just out of the University of Florida, after getting the LINTAS job from a spring break interview trip to the city.
“Being able to afford fancy clothes, an apartment and the other expenses of living in the city on a meager entry-level media salary gave birth to the phrase: ‘Media, a great career if your parents can afford it,’” Sterling writes.
The book tells of getting acclimated to New York in a wheelchair; finding an apartment, taking buses – the subway had few accessible stops then – fitting into tiny “bodegas” to get groceries.
“Thankfully, New Yorkers for the most part seemed accepting, or more accurately, they didn’t give a s––,” Sterling wrote. “This overall feeling of apathy made me feel like part of the crowd.”
The self-published “Mighty” also tells of Sterling’s expanding work at Time, Inc., for which he began to fly internationally for the first time, once sitting entirely alone in the non-smoking level of an Air France flight from Paris to Tokyo.
“Mighty” also attests to Sterling’s unique reality as he looked to advance.
When a veteran Time executive who handled the IBM account was retiring, Sterling thought he had a shot at the promotion.
He went to his boss, Time Publisher Jack Haire, to lay out the situation:
“My concern is, I would never want my disability or someone’s problem with a disabled person getting in the way of a sale. Almost before I finished voicing my concern, Jack smiled and said, “Mattyboy, some people’s personalities are a disability.”
“Mighty” later gives an inside-the-building view of the infamous 2000 AOL-Time Warner merger and what happened next, one episode in particular about blue, pager-like devices with a little keyboard, “AOL Communicators,” given to staff.
“Conversations were usually co-workers taking jabs at the person speaking in the meeting as they droned on about synergy,” Sterling wrote. “At least that is what mine was used for.”
He gave further observations of his career along the way.
“I began to understand (that) jobs are like the life of a popsicle. Exciting, cool and delicious to start. Then after a period of time and diligent work, the fun is gone and you are left with a tasteless stick.”
Later, moving back to New York, Sterling was there for the August 2003 electrical blackout, which started one weekday afternoon, knocking out power throughout the city of elevators, none of which worked.
How was Sterling to get up 20 stories to his apartment?
Later, after he had moved to L.A., met his wife and became a father, a much bigger problem faced him as he contracted an MRSA (staph bacteria) infection and was on life support for four months.
He details this in a harrowing final section of the book.
“Mighty” is available at Amazon.com or for more information go to www.mightymattsterling.com. ER
