When I was in New York City my 20’s, my junior copywriter salary was so meager ($15,000/yr) when I was starting my career in advertising, I had to do freelance work just to pay the bills.

I used to rip out newspaper ads and send letters to the company saying if they were tired of wasting their money, I’d create an advertising campaign for them that works.

I got all kinds of clients from the world’s largest fur auction house to a piano lesson school to a plastic surgery practice on Park Avenue.

Once I started working for the plastic surgeons, I didn’t need to work for anyone else because we doubled their business and they gave me a raise. My partner Mike Schell and I created a blockbuster campaign with print ads that said, “Look like a million for a couple of thousand.” and “Plastic surgery that doesn’t leave you looking plastic.”

Instead of offering free consultations, we offered a free information booklet which I wrote called, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Plastic Surgery.” Every time our ads ran the phones would light up and soon, we were sending out thousands of booklets. Revenues soared from $2 million a year to $5 million.

My surgeons’ offices were on Park Avenue on the Upper East Side, one of New York’s wealthiest neighborhoods. To get there, I’d take the 4 or 5 train — the same lines that go to Harlem and the Bronx. Sometimes school would let out when I was taking the subway and it would be filled with school kids going home.

Since I had learned a lot about plastic surgery, I took notice whenever I saw a problem plastic surgery might be able to fix. Without fail, whenever my subway car filled with students, I would see students with missing ears, extra fingers, giant port wine stains, keloid scars, etc.

I always thought it was unfair that rich New Yorkers who didn’t really need surgery had unlimited access to it while poor, inner city school kids who needed couldn’t afford it.

I told my surgeons what a mess some of these students were and asked if these problems could be fixed. Of course, they could, they responded, we’re plastic surgeons, we can fix anything. That’s good news I told them, because I’m going to start a program that provides free plastic surgery for inner city kids who need it but can’t afford it.

And I need you to help me and provide surgery for these kids for free.

Much to my surprise, they said yes. Who says cosmetic surgeons are shallow?! Now all I had to do was figure out how to find these kids and get them onto an O.R. table.

The obvious answer was to partner with the New York City schools. If they could identify the kids who needed help and referred them to us, we could take it from there. So, I wrote a letter to the Chancellor of New York City public schools telling him about my idea and asking if he would help. Almost immediately I received a call saying Chancellor Fernandez loved the idea and yes, the Board of Ed would be happy to partner with us.

I enlisted the help of my friend and business partner, Mike Schell and we co-founded a charity called Operation Smile.

Our program was pretty simple. Participating schools would assign someone, usually a guidance counselor or school nurse, the job of identifying children who might benefit from surgery. They would tell the student and their parents about our program and if they were interested, they could send us an application and with a couple photos. We would review the applications with our surgeons and choose the kids who were good candidates.

I went to my old college roommate Ken Mills at Polaroid and he and his boss Jim Hawkins donated a couple hundred Polaroid cameras to give to participating schools.

In just a few months, we were ready to test our idea with a small pilot program. But we spent more than a year trying to get permission from an extremely bureaucratic and dysfunctional New York City Board of Education.

Mike and I attended endless meetings with Board of Ed lawyers, bureaucrats, administrators, social workers, teachers, etc. who kept asking us insulting questions like, “Why are you really doing this?” “How are you making money out of this?” and “Why should we give you access to our schools?”

Mike and I bit our lips and politely endured meeting after meeting at the Board of Ed in Brooklyn for more than a year. When we were just about to quit, I received a call from a Board of Ed lawyer who told me they’d approve our program if I would personally indemnify the City of New York from any potential lawsuits or damages.

I got a good laugh out of that request!

New York City pays out $1+ billion a year in all kinds of settlements, lawsuits, claims, etc. I calmly thanked this lawyer for her kind offer but explained to her that I was really not in any position to personally indemnify the City of New York.

Instead, what I would do was call The New York Post newspaper and invite them into our Schell/Mullaney offices to photograph the hundreds of donated Polaroid cameras that had been gathering dust for more than a year while we begged the Board of Ed for approval for our free surgery program that would greatly benefit the poorest students in New York City. And I hung up.

She called me back in half an hour to tell us our program had been approved.

We started out in 89 public schools and got a good response. We rolled out to 500 schools and it went even better. Eventually, our Operation Smile program was adopted in all 1,200 of so New York City public schools.

We received hundreds of and hundreds of applications which completely overwhelmed our two plastic surgeons on Park Avenue. So, I wrote to every Chief of Plastic Surgery at every major New York City Hospital and they all agreed to help. We would review the applications and then assign the students to the hospital nearest them.

Dozens of applications with photos would arrive at Schell/Mullaney every week and opening them was always an eye-opening experience. From little scars to big problems like cancerous tumors, we were always shocked at the fact that no one else was helping these kids.

One day, I opened an envelope and saw a photo that I will never forget. It was an eight-year-old girl named Julie Raymondi who had been born with a giant black mole across her entire face.

The medical term is “a giant hairy nevus”

Her guidance counselor had included a note with the application: “Julie is a somewhat shy little girl from Queens who is quite brave and needs your help.”

The mole was extremely disfiguring, but that wasn’t the most upsetting thing about the photo. It was the look in her eyes that devastated me. Her eyes were filled with shame.

I tried to imagine this little girl’s life, looking in the mirror each morning, going to school, other kids staring at her and doubtless calling her names. The courage it must have taken just to leave the house every day. I can still remember kids at my school teasing other kids for wearing glasses or having buck teeth. I could only imagine what they must have said to Julie.

She had other problems too. She lived in a public housing project in Queens; her family had recently emigrated from Peru. Her father had just passed away, and her mother worked as a housecleaner and didn’t speak much English. It was easy to see why no one in the family had the resources or the know-how to get Julie the help she needed.

We expedited Julie’s application and rushed it to the top surgeon at Columbia-Presbyterian. He responded right away and told us Julie needed surgery as soon as possible. There was a very high chance that her mole would turn cancerous.

Within a few weeks Julie underwent her first procedure which implanted tissue expanders to grow skin. This new skin would be used to fill in when the giant hairy nevus was excised. Her major surgery took place a few months later.

A few months after Julie’s treatment was completed, we invited her, her mother, and her guidance counselor, to meet with us at the offices of our ad agency on Madison Avenue.

I can still remember watching Julie, with her head held high, as she proudly walked into our office holding her mom’s hand.

She was unrecognizable as the girl in the Polaroid that had landed on my desk a few months back. She had a pretty bow in her hair, and she was wearing her Sunday-best dress.

Most importantly, she was smiling—the same eyes that had been filled with shame were sparkling—and her mom and counselor were beaming.

It was an incredible moment, seeing what the surgery had meant for Julie and her family.

I certainly meant a lot to me.

Julie Raymondi was the first kid I ever helped get surgery.

Almost 30 years and a million miles ago, I can still remember how good it felt.