Jerry Della Femina
American advertising executive
Jerry Della Femina (born 1936) is an American advertising executive and restaurateur. Starting from a poor Italian background in Brooklyn, he eventually became chairman of Della Femina Travisano & Partners, an agency which he founded with Ron Travisano in the 1960s. Over the next two decades they grew the company into a major advertising house that was billing $250 million per year and had 300 employees and offices in both New York and Los Angeles. Della Femina is known for his larger-than-life personality and colorful language, and was referred to as a "'Madman' of Madison Avenue". In 1970, he wrote a book about the advertising industry, humorously titled, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front-Line Dispatches from the Advertising War. The book became a best-seller, described by The Guardian as "one of the defining books about advertising", and eventually inspired the television series Mad Men.
Early life and career
Della Femina was born into a working-class family in Coney Island, Brooklyn. His father, Michael, was a composing room employee for The New York Times. Della Femina graduated from Lafayette High School and attended one year of night school at Brooklyn College. In 1952, at age 16, he worked as a delivery boy for the Ruthruff and Ryan advertising agency.
“Jerry Della Femina” enters the record as american advertising executive. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jerry, Della and Femina can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6183474. VIAF identifies the subject as 22668184. The Library of Congress control number is n00084918. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1936, 1970 and 1952.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jerry Della Femina” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.