The story below is from our September/October 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Photo above: Patrick Harrington / ©Dan Smith.
The one-time “Ad Man” has been surrounded by history of one kind or another most of his life. Now, he’s having fun with it.
For the past few months, former high-end advertising creative director Patrick Harrington has been having fun. He recently retired, so he can use his time as he wishes. And what he wishes is to create laughter and understanding in one fell swoop.
Always a quick study and a blindingly fast-moving hand with an artist’s eye, he has been busily pumping out daily cartoons (sometimes several a day) lampooning politicians and putting together bright and instructive books. His “Cartoon History of Roanoke” has created a minor sensation. He draws remarkably accurate caricatures of friends, old and new — which he did beginning as a teenager, earning an excess of pocket money. “It was three or four years before I made more money in advertising than in caricatures,” he says.
Harrington, 62, drew the illustrations for former Roanoker April Marcel’s second children’s book, “Don’t Say I Can’t.” The book is turning heads, especially among those of parents with autistic children. He’s working on a story that is an homage to his granny, an irrepressible woman who fought the odds and won, ultimately putting four kids through Harvard (including Harrington’s dad, a top lawyer in Boston).
Coming soon — perhaps this year — is “The Field Guide to American Idiots,” a book with a wealth of possibility and topicality.
All of his work takes advantage of his Providence College concentrations on English and art. “I walked in cartoon-ready with a plan” and wound up doing the weekly cartoon for the college newspaper all four years. He was also a disc jockey at the college radio station.
His rounded liberal arts education made him especially attractive to ad agencies and eventually led to significant awards, and huge accounts during his career (Coca-Cola, Amtrak, Anheuser-Busch, TWA/American Airlines, Kraft Mac and Cheese, Progresso, Van de Kamp Fish Sticks, Old El Paso and many others).
The Boston native, who moved to Roanoke four years ago, did most of his high-profile work in Chicago and St. Louis. But it was in Arlington where he may have had his most significant impact. He created advertising campaigns for COVID-19 vaccinations for the Biden Administration (“We Can Do This!”). His two campaigns became the two largest in American advertising history, he relates.
His family has been immersed in and surrounded by history throughout his life. He won’t talk publicly about all of it because of privacy concerns. Suffice it to say that some of that history has been especially juicy. His mother was a prominent reporter for a large Boston daily newspaper and members of the family either were high profile or had access to bigwigs.
Harrington became interested in writing the Roanoke history shortly after he moved into the Roanoke home of former Governor J. Lindsay Almond. (He had made it known that he would move to Roanoke if he could find a house near the Grandin Theatre, which he and his long-time wife, Francine, did.) Research centered on Almond led him to dig even deeper and settle on a history that is far different from what you’ve read elsewhere. It is true, funny, irreverent, insightful and a heck of a lot of fun to read, or simply investigate.
The upcoming “Idiots” book will be limited to 50 figures, which, he says will be the biggest challenge in writing it. He has many of the drawings and narratives already and estimates the book will take another six to eight months to complete. There are so many candidates that he has a couple of times simply named a career rather than a person.
It appears that topical characters won’t be running short for his always moving pen (often a stylus and laptop) anytime soon.
The story above is from our September/October 2025 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
