Roy Podorson’s New Memoir Traces a Childhood Shaped by His Artist Father in Post-War New York

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During his advertising career spanning over four decades, Roy Podorson worked at prominent agencies such as Doyle Dane Bernbach, Scali McCabe Sloves, and McCann Erickson, has published a memoir of his childhood titled "The Artist in the Kitchen’s Son: A Real-Life Journey from Beekman New York, in 1943 to Brighton Beach Brooklyn, in 1951 and Beyond." The book is published through Page Publishing.

The memoir opens in 1943 on a farm in Beekman, New York, where, according to the book’s description, air raid sirens signaled families to pull their shades at night during the war years. Podorson, five years old at the time, walked more than a mile to a one-room schoolhouse and followed his older sister Alice through a childhood built around his father’s weekend returns from New York City, groceries in tow.

When the family relocated to Brighton Beach in 1949, the author began regularly commuting by subway to Union Square to meet his father on weekends The book describes his father as a dedicated home cook who held court in the kitchen for guests eating three meals a day, and who introduced his son to the Museum of Modern Art at age nine. There, Podorson encountered Alexander Calder’s mobiles, Edvard Munch’s "The Scream," and a Frank Lloyd Wright exhibit on a proposed mile-high skyscraper. Other scenes described in the book include a freight train passing by his bedroom window and a circus clown stacking fifteen chairs before toppling them during a show in Poughkeepsie.

Podorson is a graduate of Pratt Institute and later taught at the Delaware College of Art and Design. His advertising career included work on accounts for Volkswagen, Volvo, and American Airlines. In the announcement, he said writing the memoir let him "honor my father’s legacy and revisit the magical moments that defined my childhood," adding that he hopes readers connect with "the universal themes of family, creativity, and the transformative power of exposure to art and culture."

The book is available at bookstores and through Apple iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble.

Studio CarryOnHarry sees this as part of a familiar but durable genre: the professional creative looking back to find where the eye was trained. Podorson spent decades making images for a living; the more interesting story here may be a career’s worth of advertising work traced to a kitchen table and a museum visit at age nine.

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