When was donald draper born

With the real Draper's body burned beyond recognition, Whitman switched their dog tags, assumed Draper's identity, and claimed the dead man's Purple Heart. He accompanied the body of the supposed Dick Whitman on a train back home but never got off. He let his family think he was dead, and no one believed teenage Adam when he claimed he saw his brother through the train car window, still alive.

Adam committed suicide in after tracking his brother down, only to have the former Dick spurn him and try to buy his silence. The new Don Draper was working as a used car salesman when the real Draper's widow, Anna, tracked him down. Miraculously, the two became friends, with Dick vowing to support Anna for the rest of her life. In return, she kept his secret and became the only person with whom he ever felt completely at home. Her death from cancer in would be one of the most devastating losses of his life.

But he remained close to her niece, Stephanie, who would ultimately bring Don to that fateful hilltop retreat and abandon him there. Draper moved to New York, where he found work as a salesman and copywriter for the Heller fur company while attending City College at night. It was there that he met two people who would change his life.

They were wed in and had three children: Sally born , Robert , and Eugene The other fateful meeting was with Roger Sterling, a senior partner at the Sterling Cooper advertising agency, who came into the store to purchase a gift it turned out to be for his new mistress, Sterling Cooper office manager Joan Holloway. Draper slipped his portfolio in the box with the fur, a move Sterling found presumptuous, but after another encounter with Draper, one that involved many martinis, Draper persuaded Sterling to hire him.

Within a few years, Draper was Sterling Cooper's creative director. Draper seemed to have it all -- a good salary, a house in the suburbs Ossining, N. He created the famous "It's Toasted" campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes, named Kodak's rotating slide projector tray the Carousel, and won a Clio for his cinematic, kiddie-Western-style commercial for Glo-Coat floor polish.

Draper even managed to save his agency from ruin more than once -- though he also nearly brought it to ruin several times as well. When McCann-Erickson threatened to absorb Sterling Cooper in , Draper led the defection that resulted in the creation of new firm Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, in which he was a senior partner.

His TV commercials showed people picking up their new Oldsmobiles and immediately treating them with nonchalance; tossing half-empty cups of coffee on the floor, never washing them, parking where they were easily dinged.

The can garnered much attention for the brand, almost none of it positive. Oldsmobile sales dipped even more precariously and Draper was quickly fired. Personally, I still think it was a great campaign, just ahead of its time. Thus was born the Pontiac Aztek. He was married and divorced five times. His first wife, Betty Francis, died of lung cancer.

The future would be all direct selling and personally crafted messages. In later years, a young email copywriter tried to explain the nuances of email copywriting to Don.

One of his biggest was suddenly and inexplicably legally changing his name to Dick Whitman five years ago. The episode takes place in November , exactly 10 years and eight months after the pilot, which would pin Don's real age at 44 at the end of the series.

When his story began, Don had just left the straight-laced s, a decade in which he fought more wars than one, abandoned his former life and his former self, and started over. When Mad Men ends, he has entered a new decade with a newfound freedom from the shadows that used to follow him. Meditating in the sun in lotus position and offering a rare half-smile, Don Draper lets go of his past and finds peace in the present.

Molly MacGilbert is a freelance culture and entertainment writer from Leicester, England and currently based in Portland, Oregon. Beyond writing about entertainment for Screen Rant, she is a music journalist for Portland's alt-weekly newspaper Willamette Week.