Featured Testimonial About Creighton University
What's on your PowerBook?
By Micah Mertes
Did you know that 30 years ago, a Creighton Jesuit — one who is still on campus — was the face of an Apple ad campaign alongside a popular music pioneer later inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Here’s how it happened.
In 1993, the Rev. Don Doll, SJ, got a call from a former student named Christian Wolfe, BA’90.
“He asked if I had a black clerical suit and if I would consider being in an Apple ad campaign,” Father Doll said.
After receiving permission from his Jesuit superiors in Milwaukee, Fr. Doll agreed. Apple flew him to San Francisco, from which he went across the bay to Tiburon, where a church, a photographer and a rock star were waiting for him.
The photographer — Michael O’Brien — Fr. Doll knew.
The rock star — Todd Rundgren — he did not.
At the time, Wolfe was with BBDO Advertising in Los Angeles and working on the Apple Computer, Inc. contract. Specifically, he was working on an ad for Apple’s PowerBook (the precursor to the MacBook Pro). The ad’s idea was a study in contrast: The PowerBook is useful and fun for everyone, whether you’re an iconic musician or a Jesuit priest at a Midwestern university.
For the photoshoot, Fr. Doll wore his priest blacks. Rundgren wore a baggy, yellow suit. They posed in front of a small, white country church, each man holding a solemn expression and a Macintosh PowerBook.
The shoot took a few hours and 76 rolls of film. Fr. Doll said Rundgren — whom he’d never heard of before that day — was quiet, modest and highly intelligent. For his time, Fr. Doll received his own PowerBook.
The following ad debuted in the Nov. 25, 1993, issue of Rolling Stone and in subsequent issues of this and other magazines, including Spin, in 1994.
And here’s a closer look at what Fr. Doll had on his PowerBook, which included wedding homilies, reflections on scripture, the photo layout for a book he was writing about the Sioux Indians, faxes to Jesuit missionaries around the world and his mechanic’s phone number …
The “What’s on your PowerBook?” ad campaign ran through the early ’90s and also featured writers, photographers, professional athletes, sales managers, bike messengers and innovators, all listing the many ways they used their PowerBook. Huffington Post named the ad campaign one of the best in Apple’s history.
Fr. Doll might have been the co-star of an ad campaign for what is now the world’s most valuable company, but he’s spent most of his life behind the lens.
Fr. Doll — who turned 86 this year and has been at Creighton since 1969 — is a renowned photographer whose work has won national and international acclaim.
His photos — many of which have been featured in National Geographic magazine — have long focused on honoring native cultures. He’s photographed the Lakota people, the Yupik and the Athabascan people of Alaska, as well as native cultures in South America, Central America, Australia, South Korea, India, Nepal, Thailand, the Philippines and many African nations.
At Creighton, Fr. Doll served as the Charles and Mary Heider Endowed Jesuit Faculty Chair and professor of journalism. (Fittingly enough, an image of Fr. Doll's Apple ad sits on a shelf in the student-run iJay Apple store in the Heider College of Business in the Harper Center.) Today, Fr. Doll is a professor emeritus.
Earlier this year, Fr. Doll and the Society of Jesus donated his collection of photos — numbering in the tens of thousands — to Creighton University.
When he recently received the Sword of Ignatius award from Creighton Prep, Fr. Doll recounted the summer many years ago when he took a photojournalism class at Marquette University. Later, Fr. Doll was at the St. Francis Mission on the Rosebud Indian Reservation, where he’d been assigned to teach.
“As I walked the prairie one night, I was so discouraged with photography,” he said.
“I had been working at it for two years, and I still had not taken what I thought was a good photograph. I was going to give it up.”
But as he walked, he wondered: “What am I going to do as a Jesuit?"
“Then a voice deep within me said, 'Stay with photography. It’s the first thing you have loved doing.'”
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Fr. Doll’s most recent book, A Call to Vision, A Jesuit's Perspective on the World, details the story of his 'vocation within a vocation' as a Jesuit photographer.
The book — which received positive reviews from both America: The Jesuit Review and the New York Times — can be purchased here. Revenue from sales will go to Creighton’s Vision Quest Fund for scholarships to Native American students.
