Red Jacket Assassins

High Lifers. Breakfast suit. Tom & Jerry chaser.

Dec 27, 2023

“I’ll give you $300 right now for that jacket,” the man said as he unfurled a heaping wad of cash from his pocket. He was referring to my red Miller High Life sport coat. It was almost Christmas and I was hanging in the fabulously festooned bar at Miller’s Pub in downtown Chicago with long time friends, Matt, Chris, John, Joe and Dana. We were all wearing these peculiar red sport coats, and they were causing quite a ruckus.

Some people thought we were an off duty a cappella group. Others thought we were attending a convention for Avis customer service agents. Some tourists wanted to get their pictures taken with us. Random strangers bought us beers. The frenzied man with the cash meant business.

“That jacket is more rare than a Masters’ Jacket!” He said. “How many Masters’ champions have there been? Fifty? And it looks like there are only five of what you’re wearing!”

He had a point. But even for $300, I wasn’t going to part with my red High Life jacket. It really only makes one appearance a year, but in my mind it is irreplaceable.

The Breakfast Suit

The reason that a bunch of grown men were parading around the Loop in cherry red sport coats dates back to an early part of my advertising career when for a few glorious years my client was the Champagne of Beers, Miller High Life.

This was a great account to work on. Iconic brand. Legendary history. Classic bottle. Classic logo. Classic all round vibe. What’s more, the people that surrounded me during my time on this account were some of the best people I’ve ever had a chance to work with. My boss was great. My team was great. My client was great. Everyone enjoyed each other’s company. We won awards. We drank lots of beer. We had lots of fun. And we’re still friends over a decade later.

Anyways, the main color of the High Life “soft cross,” as the logo is called, is red. At the peak of those agency years, I believe it was Dana who had the idea of getting a bunch of us to don red sport coats emblazoned with the High Life logo to the company holiday party. It was a festive show of force for our mighty little team. I’m always game for a funky getup. Count me in.

Keep in mind, this holiday party was not your average holiday party. This was the “Burnett Breakfast” which was the biggest all hands on deck gathering of the calendar year for this revered advertising behemoth. It didn’t get to Wolf of Wall Street-levels of debauchery, but it was pretty close. It started at sunrise, and ended well after midnight. A typical itinerary started with beers at Billy Goat Tavern around 7:30am, then there were drinks served on multiple floors at Burnett’s offices along the Chicago River—even the elevator had its own bar—which stretched until about 11am. Then individual teams broke off for lunch which meant more drinks at some downtown restaurant, and then there was some sort of fantastically choreographed thousand person plus “team meeting” that would take place somewhere like the Chicago Theater or Navy Pier’s ballroom or the entirety of Soldier Field. After a few of the global execs shared their updates that no one paid much attention to, some celebrity would show up to serenade us for half and hour. That was followed by agency sponsored food and drinks for a couple hours and then some sort of clubbish event wrapped up the festivities around 6pm, but it felt like 2am. Hardy souls kept going on their own bar hopping around town to well past midnight.

It was all a wondrous spectacle, really. And it was also the kind of event were a bunch of 30 year old dudes wearing red jackets would cause hardly a ripple. Except one year, when our whole lot went to rally around a coworker who was being hassled by another coworker, and just when things were about to boil over, the offender stood down by saying something to the effect of, “Looks like we’re done here, thanks to your Red Jacket Assassins.”

High Lifers

These red jackets became our go to uniform every time the Breakfast came around. And most of us continued to wear them at holiday parties even after we shifted to other accounts or other agencies. When I moved on, I wanted to find a way to reunite with my High Life kin, and to this day, each year I extend invitations to all the members of the High Life coat-owning crew to join me at Miller’s Pub in Chicago’s Loop. This has been going on for almost a decade, and the group has grown to include Joe who captained many of our efforts from the client side, and Chris who championed our work, and Molly who wrote almost every one of the good lines that manged to pass through legal, and Julie who still works on the High Life account to this very day and became our newest/oldest jacket wearer last week.

Ironically, we don’t meet at Miller’s Pub because the bar and the beer share the same name. Rather, there is something warm and welcoming and wonderful about this bar, especially this time of year. There’s a grand scale to the place with its two story room and extra long bar that is decked out with the same holiday decorations from the 70s. Though the clientele isn’t as starlit as it was in its heyday when it hosted Marilynn Monroe and Harry Caray, today the bar’s proximity to hotels and theaters means that there’s always a good mix of locals and out-of-towners that keep it buzzing. Of course, they serve High Life, which not all bars do. And during the holidays, the veteran bartenders serve the rarefied holy grail of holiday cocktails, the Tom and Jerry.

A distant relative of egg nog, a Tom and Jerry is a hot, creamy, Christmastime cocktail that is made with brandy, rum, and an otherworldly batter that resides somewhere between whipped cream and cookie dough in its consistency. You can make one by whipping and combining egg whites and yolks, or you can buy the pre-mixed batter and go from there. There’s also a whole culture around serving one of these hot messes because if you are going to go through the trouble of making the batter, you might as well make a few. Thus, Tom and Jerrys are traditionally served from their own punch bowl, and you can still find sets online which were made decades ago. One such bowl proudly sits behind the bar at Miller’s where the bartenders ladle the batter into warm mugs all season long. And there’s no better chaser than High Life.

So, if you happen to bump into a bunch of old guys in red coats drinking High Lifes at Miller’s, be sure to say hi and we’ll happily buy you a beer. As for the jackets, they’re not for sale.

Epilogue: Joe Biden Happy Hour

My red sports coat is actually a hand-me-down gift from my great uncle, Charlie Darby, who lived in New Castle, Delaware. Charlie was a dapper man who had a sport coat for every occasion—Kelly green for St. Patrick’s Day, Pink, blue and yellow plaid for Easter, and of course he had this red sport coat which worked for Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Fourth of July, etc. Charlie actually ran for governor of Delaware at some point in the late 80s where he was friendly with then Senator of Delaware, Joe Biden. So surely my red coat must have rubbed shoulders with pre-President Joe at a Rehoboth happy hour at some point.

As a teenager, I was a bit of a clotheshorse, and one year while visiting my Aunt Mary Ann in Delaware I commented to Charlie that I admired his style. This remark must have stuck with him because fast forward to about five years later when I received a big box in the mail that had all these sport coats that Charlie was parting with. I’ve lost track of most of them, but I have worn the red one to at least one Christmas party every year since.