Urban Flick, Frank Tallman, and the Tallmantz Brochure

Webmaster Note: The Tallmantz Brochure featured in the Tallmantz Photo Gallery elicited this response from Mr. Urban Flick, who ran an advertising agency in Orange County. He did the design and promotional work for the brochure. This is Mr. Flick’s recollection of his dealings with Frank Tallman, edited with his permission, and it provides a nice insight into the workings of Tallmantz Aviation in the early 1970s.

I had just opened my advertising agency, Urban Associates Advertising, in 1971 when I received a call from Mr. Frank Tallman. I was in a meeting with another advertising client when my secretary/partner (wife) came into the meeting room and said, “There is someone on the phone who wants to talk to you now! He said his name is Frank Tallman and he is calling from the airport and that J. Walter Thompson Advertising is on the way to pick him up and if you want a chance on his job, you will go right over,” which I did.

When I arrived at his office, I wondered what this was all about. The office was not much more than the Quonset huts that were nearby. I opened the door to meet someone who I thought at first was his secretary and she led me through an office door just to the right of her desk. And when I entered that office, I knew that something great was about to happen. The office had very nice wood paneling, and as I waited in the room alone, I noticed that there were several artifacts from places all around the world. Then I noticed that the photographs on the walls were not your ordinary office photos, but photos of movie stars like Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, Amelia Earhart, and the current day astronauts, and also what appeared to be foreign dignitaries and a president or two, and many with antique aircraft. All the photos had one thing in common; they had this guy that could have passed for Clark Gable himself add just then, that guy entered the room wearing a leather flight jacket with a scarf and smoking a pipe. He said, “Urban, I’m Frank, glad to see you decided to come.” He then sat down at his desk and started repacking his pipe all the while looking through the window directly across from his desk. Outside the window was a Curtiss P-40 in full battle paint, teeth and all. I could see that there was a connection between that plane and Frank.

After a few minutes of some silence while we sized each other up, Frank hit the intercom and said “Dear, bring it in now.” A moment later the secretary, Mrs. Tallman, appeared with a large check book, and laid it down on the desk in front of Frank. Frank looked up and said, “How much?” I was thinking to myself $200 or $250 would make me current at the bank. And before I could answer, he said, “What about $2,500?” “For what?” I said, and he replied, “For you to get out of here and go to the library and find out who Frank Tallman is, and then come back here next week and we can start talking about what we need done here. J. Walter Thompson is flying in here soon, and I have seen some of your work, and I think I would rather have you help me plan what type of promotion I should use here.” I then said “Frank, do you know how big J. Walter is?” He replied, “Yes, I worked for him myself years ago.”

The next week when I returned to visit Frank he was already seated behind his desk, this time with a leather flight jacket, a scarf, and leather aviator helmet with goggles resting just above his forehead. Before we could start our meeting, he had to take a phone call from Disney about some work that they were planning. I was trying to listen and I was very impressed with how he negotiated a $15,000 a day fee. (About a year later, I was similarly impressed when one meeting was interrupted to take a call from President Nixon.)

Back to this first meeting, Frank Tallman told me that as a young boy he remembers rolling a World War I aircraft from a barn, and the lifelong excitement he felt about flying as he watched the dew from the grass roll back up from the wheels, and wrapping his flight scarf around his neck to protect himself from the cold in the open cockpit. Frank stated that he would probably die in a plane crash. I said, “Frank, why? You crash planes for a living!” Frank said, “Hell, that’s the easy part, but the unplanned and uncertainty of what can happen to your aircraft is what concerns a lifelong pilot.”

Yes, the centerfold of the brochure had Tallmantz Aviation displayed on the hangar; that was added by me. I did this by floating the typesetting on a piece of acetate on the finished art that we sent to the printer. How this came about was that, one day, Frank and I stood across the street from the hangar in the picture and he told me he was in some conflict with associates about putting up an actual sign on the hangar reading Tallmantz Aviation with the logo. Frank was very distressed about the situation, so we agreed that I would overlay the sign and logo on the art and answer for it myself if his associates questioned the appearance of the sign on the building photo. Frank said that this sign would one day go up anyways, and that “Paul Mantz gave everything he had to the company, even his life.”

As for the collage in the brochure, I did not take any of those pictures; those were provided by Frank. I showed Frank some illustrations to use, but he said “No, use the pictures, it’s all about the aircraft and hardware. We want to show that we have the airplanes. That’s a big part of our capability. We can spot the locations, make a landing strip, provide the pilots, the ground to air, and air to air communications, and the cameras to film the planes. We can also provide the studios with consulting about which aircraft actually fits the story line and dates in history.” Frank continued to tell me about the camera platform they developed and used to film some big stuff for Disney. I believe it’s called Circlevision. He said the cameras were hung beneath the plane on this platform and they could make 360 degree pictures as they flew thru canyons, etc. Frank had these photos for the collage and I had copies made. We then met and Frank chose the photos he wanted to use. I returned to my office, cut and directed our paste-up person on how to lay them out.

For the entire brochure, you can notice that we used color only on the logo, and blue duotone for the center fold. Everything else was half-tone black and white. It was done this way to keep the cost down.

Sometimes I would talk with Frank every day for months over a couple year period. Sadly, I don’t have any pictures of Frank and myself. At one time out back of the office he did have someone take our pictures standing alongside one of his planes. I asked Frank why we were we doing this. He said, “Come-on you never know.” Now I know. It could be somewhere in his files. It’s been almost 40 years.