Over the years I’ve
accumulated a lot of disposables, you might even call it litter
— newspaper clips, photographs, travel souvenirs — but
not many what you might call collectibles. Dody and I are not
really collectors. I have three small Olmec head replicas and
an Olmeca tequila bottle (empty), gathered while I was doing research
on a novel, but I don’t think of them as a collection. And we
have a raft of books but we bought them to read, not because they
were first editions or beautifully bound. Many of the books are
signed by their authors but that’s because they are people we
know.
But there is one thing
I have been collecting over the years. None of them cost me a
dime and they take up zero shelf space. Advertising slogans.
The gem of my collection
is "With a name like Smuckers it has to be good." Followed
by Hallmark’s "When you care enough to send the very best."
Many years ago, as
a newspaper TV editor, I was privileged to interview Joyce Hall
(with a name like Joyce and you’re a man you have to be good),
founder of Hallmark, but I wasn’t smart enough to ask him where
that slogan came from — him or some ad agency. And there’s
a slogan that with me will forever be held in infamy. "Lucky
Strike green has gone to war."
Back about 1941 Lucky
Strike decided to drop the familiar green packaging for their
cigarettes and go to white. And shortly thereafter the green dye
used in the old packaging apparently had a use in the war effort
and was taken off the market. So someone took advantage of that
to trumpet that Lucky Strike had given up their traditional green
package to the war effort and spouted the phrase on the radio
and in news releases at every opportunity. A lot of folks didn’t
like it. It wasn’t the first time Lucky Strike had done something
irritating (apart, possibly, from chain-smokers’ throats). They
had a campaign advising people to "Reach for a Lucky instead
of a sweet." It didn’t go too well with the makers of sweets
and the slogan was dropped.
I believe another slogan
drove a cigar manufacturer out of business. The maker of Cremo
cigars. They called the product "Certified Cremos," with the slogan,
"Spit is a horrid word but it is worse on the end of your cigar,"
and said that other cigar makers, including Cuban hand-rollers,
would spit on the end of the wrapper leaf to make it stick. Cigar
smokers must have associated Cremos with the horrid word because
they quit buying Cremos in droves.
And still on the subject
of tobacco, what happened to "I’d Walk a mile for a Camel?"
Is it still being used? Camels has been running a double-truck
ad in the Air Force Times (there are not too many places
where cigarette advertisements can be run these days) which proclaims
"Pleasure to burn." I’m not sure if that’s supposed to
appeal to cigarette smokers or to sadists.
The oldest slogan in
my collection, going back more than 60 years, is Dr. Pepper’s
"Drink a Bite To Eat At 10, 2 and 4," which apparently
was recommending Dr. Pepper as a snack food, which makes sense.
There were only 150 calories in a 12-ounce serving and no cholesterol.
If you didn’t have it with fries.
Then there’s Campbell
Soups’ venerable "M’m! M’m! Good!" which is still going
strong.
And another gem in
my collection: "Ipana for the smile of beauty, Sal Hepatica
for the smile of health." Then there’s the perplexing, "You’ll
wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent"
Could it have gone
off to war with Lucky Strike green?
David Westheimer,
SeniorWomenWeb's resident male, lives with his wife of 57 years,
Dody, in the same Los Angeles apartment they moved into from Houston,
Texas 41 years ago. Their son, Fred, is a Senior Vice-President
at the William Morris Agency and his younger brother, Eric, is
a veterinarian. Succeeding generations include five grandchildren
and two great-grandchildren. As a journalist, David worked for
Oveta Culp Hobby.
At 85, David Westheimer
continues to write, and not just for Senior Women. The Great
Wounded Bird, his recollections of World War II, is winner
of the Texas Review 1999 poetry prize, published by Texas Review
Press and may be ordered from Amazon Books, where it has surged
to 821,374th on their sales list. It is also listed with Barnes
& Noble and Borders Books. David's latest novel, Delay En Route,
is hovering at 1,485,676th on Amazon's list.
Poet and novelist,
David is a retired Air Force Officer. He can be reached for a
repertoire of feigned curmudgeonly remarks at: DWestheime@aol.com.
