An Honest Day's Work - True Tales of a Life in PR

Chapter One

Canoes and Commas

In 1980, my friend Eric King was working as the assistant sales manager for Grumman Boats. They were part of the same Grumman that built many of the fighter planes used in WWII and whose lunar module put Neil Armstrong on the moon. This division made boats and canoes. The canoes, in particular, were especially popular with summer camp owners because they were virtually indestructible. Millions of campers had fond memories of paddling around in one.

That’s why Grumman kept making them long after it was profitable to maintain such a tiny division: Roy Grumman always believed that the memories of summer fun at camp warmed the hearts of the congressmen and Pentagon staffers to whom the company was so beholden. (I have been told that it’s the same reason Johnson & Johnson still makes baby products, even though they bring in a tiny percentage of J&J’s profits. The emotional connection for most people is transcendent.)

Grumman Boats had for years retained a one-man PR shop in Manhattan—Rockwell & Newell. Dwight Rockwell started the business in 1975 with book publicist Ellie Newell. By the time I got there, he was in his mid-50s. Newell had moved on a long time before, but Dwight liked the symmetry of Rockwell & Newell. Plus, he’d once ordered 144 ballpoint pens embossed with the name from an in-flight magazine, and nothing was going to change until the supply of pens dried up.

Dwight was a great guy but a bit of a one-trick pony. His specialty was getting the senior editor of Outdoor Life magazine to run quarterly special features on camping and fishing expeditions, which always prominently featured a Grumman canoe. He usually undertook these adventures by meeting the editor in one of the backwoods watering holes that punctuated the side streets east and west of Madison Avenue. They served Bombay martinis deep enough to sink in up to your elbow when fishing out the lemon twist, which Dwight liked to nibble on. At this, Dwight was a master.

But Dwight had one weakness: although he was suave and self-assured, he could not have written a grammatically correct gravestone. And he was overly fond of exclamation points. If he had ever written a grave marker, it would probably have read:

Here Lies Joe Blow!
Born 1905, Died 1977!!!

He also had a tendency to use such literary pearls as, “Also and in addition...” The Grumman folks were constantly grousing about the atrociously written press release drafts they received from Dwight and they finally issued an ultimatum. “Either hire someone who can write or we’re taking our business elsewhere.”

Eric King suggested that Dwight meet with me, because I was a good writer, unemployed and cheap. This was all music to Dwight’s ears. I went down to Manhattan to meet with him, and after about 90 minutes of conversation, he offered me a job as a writer for $200 a week. I did the arithmetic and decided I could make that work, although it would not have been feasible if he hadn’t paid me in cash. Paying taxes would have ruined the economics. (A couple of years later, the IRS sent me a letter that ruined my day—I hadn’t realized that Dwight was deducting my salary on his taxes as a business expense.)

It was $25 more than I was making as a substitute teacher. Despite the fact that I had an education degree, I really had no interest in teaching. I had wanted to become a journalist, in fact.

I started my college education at George Washington University (GW) in the fall of 1973 because their J-School was (and still is) highly regarded. Washington, D.C., like the rest of the country, had just become captivated by the Watergate scandal, and my classmates and I dreamed of being Carl Bernstein or Bob Woodward. But instead of studying the secrets of digging up the big scoop, I found myself wallowing morosely in the History of Journalism 101. The typical impatience of a freshman with an unrequited passion took hold of me and in just one semester I concluded that I had made a big mistake.

I spent a few semesters trying other majors, landed on psychology for a bit, and then took stock of my growing debt and stultifying coursework and decided to take a break. I took a job in D.C. as a driver for the now defunct Emery Air Freight, which was ironic given the many years I spent leading the FedEx account team at PR firm Ketchum years later. Eventually I had to admit to myself that my “10-4-Good-Buddy” CB radio life did not comport with my self-image and headed back to school at State University of New York College at Cortland. I cross-referenced my GW transcript with the Cortland degree requirements to see which major, after transferring my GW credits, would allow me to graduate in the shortest amount of time: Voila! Education. After school, I moved up to Lake Placid with a friend, got a job bussing tables and applied for a job with the Olympic Committee (the winter games in 1980 were held in Lake Placid).

A retired army master sergeant was in charge of transportation, and the Emery Air Freight experience caught his eye, especially the fact that I had filled in as a dispatcher from time to time. He offered me the job of senior dispatcher for the Official Transportation department. Four bucks an hour, plus overtime and a free pass to all Olympic events. Of course, I worked 18-hour days for the entire two weeks and only managed to see the last half of the closing ceremonies.

With no job prospects in sight, I spent the spring substitute teaching. When I met Dwight I was tutoring a couple of ninth graders who could not be bothered to walk an extra five feet off school property to smoke a joint during a school dance. They were suspended for the rest of the term, but state law required that they be taught anyway. It was the only teaching experience I ever had, and it was like teaching remedial earth science to Cheech and Chong.

So you could say I was looking for something to do with my life. Of course, when I showed up for my first PR job on June 16, 1980, I didn’t really know what PR was.

# # #

I worked for Dwight Rockwell for two years. It was mostly fun, and I was writing copy every day and talking to reporters, honing my fledgling PR skills. Every now and then, Dwight would take me along on one of his media placement benders, and afterwards we would go back to the office and sit, semi-paralyzed, for the rest of the afternoon. A person walking through the door would have thought he had encountered two stroke victims for all the coherence we could muster. Eventually, we would part for the evening, to Beekman Place for him, Brooklyn for me. I would have my customary dinner—a bag of corn chips and a Heineken for a buck and a half at the corner bodega.

Oddly enough, like an art critic who has never painted anything other than his living room, Dwight had some rather strong opinions about writing, which he dispensed liberally and with a bit of misplaced exasperation. “How many times do I have to tell you, verbs are the bullets in the writer’s gun.” He had a point. Why “attract” media attention when we can “seize” it? Exciting verbs demonstrate passion and enthusiasm for a new initiative, and give a piece of copy a sense of urgency and action.

More wisdom from Dwight: “Six words are better than seven—way better than ten.” Trust me, less really is more. I can remember Dwight not only counting words but also the number of letters in certain words in order to say the most with the least. Okay, he did have many of the telltale signs of clinical depression. Nonetheless it was a lesson that stayed with me over the years. Daniel Webster said that the better he got at writing, the more “scratch outs” he did. This is much easier to do today than it was when I first started, since way back then a significant copy change meant ripping the sheet from the typewriter and starting all over again.

I had my first and only brush with advertising in that job. Dwight was out of town and I got a call from Grumman saying that they were exhibiting in a boat show and were buying an ad in the show magazine. They needed something fast, so I set to work. I decided to find just the right graphic and then come up with a catchy headline. We had files and files of photography. Dwight was always sending out freelance photographers to capture images of Grumman products in situ and in no time I found the shot I wanted.

It was an action shot of a young man driving a Grumman speedboat. The guy was wearing only swimming trunks, and when I say that he was the archetype for the 98-pound weakling, I am being too kind. But his passenger, on the other hand, was a dead ringer for Pamela Sue Anderson, resplendent in a bikini. How they got these two in the same boat is a mystery, but there it was. At the speed they were going, he should have been focused on the water ahead, but not surprisingly, his eyes were glued on her. His tongue wasn’t quite hanging out, but it was close.

My headline: “Parts of your life have no room for compromise. Your boat is one of them.” A little cheesy, but at least it might shore up the client’s 98-pound weakling sales deficit. The client loved the ad, and sent it off to the Grumman corporate legal department. The lawyer who reviewed the ad was skeptical and called his boss, who was on a business trip. The lawyer described the ad over the phone as semi-pornographic (it certainly was not!) and not in keeping with Grumman’s military-style culture (possibly true). Without ever seeing it, the boss demanded that the girl in the picture be...