Before Musical Chairs
James Mitchell was born in New York City and grew up listening to music more than playing it. His family had a collection of 78rpm classical albums and an early Capehart automatic record player which he recollects would shatter the brittle records almost as often as it would change them.
He graduated from NYU in 1965 with the notion of becoming an actor. Youthful impatience prompted him to leave the theatre because he hadn’t made it to Broadway (except by bus) after three years of auditioning.
He was a decent athlete and played college and semi-pro baseball. He also liked to ski and that led to a seasonal job in a ski shop, which in turn led to working full time for the Head Ski Company.
For some inexplicable reason, especially being a city boy, he also always liked horses and remembers reining an eight year-old school chum around the playground with a length of string in her mouth.
His mother once said, “He always wanted to be a cowboy and just never outgrew it.”
This, after he started a wilderness outfitting business called American Wilderness Experience (AWE) and moved to Colorado. After he married and had children, he converted an old beer draft wagon into a covered wagon and took the family on trips along the Oregon Trail.
He still had a day job and was recruited to be the Advertising Manager for the toy division of the Samsonite Corporation, which at the time had the license for Legos in the USA.
Still with the hubris of youth in his veins, he decided he could do better work than Samsonite’s advertising agency, J. Walter Thompson, the largest ad agency in the world, and started his own, Mitchell Advertising. Working primarily in the sports and recreation field he spent almost twenty-five years working with the likes of Arthur Ashe, Bjorn Borg, Andre Agassi, John Newcome, Jean-Claude Killy, Picabo Street, Terry Bradshaw, Tom Seaver, and others. Over those years, he created and wrote more than three thousand ads and TV commercials.
In 1997 he sold the agency and retired.
A failure at retirement, he and a veteran UNESCO friend co-founded Afghan-Ed, an NGO dedicated to educating women and girls in Afghanistan.
Shortly thereafter, the school his children were attending saw a precipitous decline in enrollment and he signed on for two years as Director of Admissions to turn things around. He did so but stayed on an additional seven years before retiring for the second time.
Throughout the years, he has served on various music related Boards including the Columbine Chamber Players, Colorado Music Festival, the Longmont Symphony Orchestra, and the Boulder Chamber Orchestra.
He is currently at work on two other books, “Let you know when I get there,” a collection of travel writing, and “Moving On and other stories.”
Mr. Mitchell lives in the country near Longmont, Colorado with his wife, some zebra finches, a cat, and a few equines. He has two grown offspring of whom he is immensely proud and fond, and one very young grandson.