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A Few Kind Words
Thinking Aloud
WAR STORIES
My Left Ear
Telling Facts
Message In A Bottle
B-TO-B
ABOUT
DAVE
JUST
FOR FUN
HOMEPAGE
Eight years ago, I was about as low on the food chain as you can get in advertising ... writing owners' manuals for washers and dryers in a Michigan beach town.
Then seven words changed my life forever.
Fed up with my job one day, I dug around my grandma's basement and found a 1962 Pan Am Airlines wine bottle. Then I emptied and washed it, gluing on a label: Found On The Shores Of Lake Michigan.
Inside went a crumpled parchment scrap with a shakily written message in eyebrow pencil. A lost copywriter yearned to work for a certain well-regarded ad agency back East, and promised follow-up samples ... as soon as he could find another bottle.
Off it went to the agency chairman.
I left Michigan, heading 660 miles east to New York City with a car and no home address. Too insecure to ask the agency for relocation help, I slept in my Dodge Aries at the Vince Lombardi Park & Lock on the New Jersey Turnpike. But I gutted it out, and eventually found a place to live.
Three years later, that agency planned its first European office in Amsterdam. They asked me to leave home again--3600 miles east this time--and help get it off the ground. Suddenly I'd be living in a canal house, not a Dodge.
That's the power of words, friend.