Issue
#90 – Tuesday, April 14, 2020
http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2020/04/90-eric-sloane-marketing-cartoon-art.html
Posted by Denny Hatch
Posted by Denny Hatch
How Young Artist Eric Sloane Marketed
A Fun and Funky Work of Cartoon Art
Details from Eric Sloane's Extraordinary Metal Lithograph
Imagine Starting a Small Business in Your Garage.
How Do You Reach Your Prospects and Customers?
Imagine Starting a Small Business in Your Garage.
How Do You Reach Your Prospects and Customers?
Eric Sloane (1905-1985)—born
in New York City to a well-to-do family—decided to become an artist at a very young
age. Over his long career, Sloane created more than 15,000 paintings and 38
books.
Sloane’s Signature Opus
If you’ve ever been to the Smithsonian Air
& Space Museum in Washington, D.C., Eric Sloane’s massive mural is one of
the first things you see.
Sloane’s Formative Years
Obviously a young start-up artist does not
land a major commission from one of the great museums of the world.
Sloane
got there the hard way—by creating art and figuring out how to sell it.
Eric Sloane’s first mentor was his
neighbor, Fredrick Gaudy (1865-1947), legendary designer of Gaudy Type. Gaudy
taught boy Eric how to hand paint letters and numbers and how to create signs.
Operating in the Epicenter of Earliest Aviation
Pioneers, Pilots, Parts Makers and Manufacturers
In the 1930s, Sloane had built an amazing
client base with a niche business—painting the giant numbers, letters, signs and
logos that served as identifying markings on the wings, fuselages and tails on the
hundreds of private and commercial planes bought and built by aviation pioneers
whose base of operations was Roosevelt Field and nine other airfields on Eastern Long
Island, in New York City and Northern New Jersey.
Sloane Became a Celebrity Hound
One of his early clients was world-famous aviation
pioneer Wiley Post, the first pilot to fly solo around the world in 1933.
As a “thank you” for a painting of his single-engine
Lockheed Vega “Winnie Mae,” Post taught the young sign painter to fly.
(BTW, Post crashed and was instantly killed
together with Ziegfeld Follies comic star and rope-trick wizard, Will
Rogers, on my birthday—August 15, 1935.)
In short order Sloane was hooked on the
romance and adventure of flying and fell in love with aircraft, the sky and clouds
which became his favorite subjects throughout his life.
In
the course of his work, he built a vast personal database of Long Island’s
pioneer men and women pilots, aircraft mechanics, plane builders, corporate manufacturers,
parts makers and sellers, hangers-on and playboys. He sold his first cloud
painting to Amelia Earhart.
Sloane’s Unique Metal Lithograph
Every Person You Ever Met May Be Your Prospect
Sloane marketed this
very early work of art by using the same commonsense wizardry the propelled
Bill Clinton into the presidency.
Quite simply—like Clinton—he had kept the
name, address and phone number of everyone he ever met, constantly updating it
and adding to it. When Clinton ran for president, he contacted everyone on his
list going back to his boyhood.
Ditto for Eric Sloane when it came to marketing
his tin map. In 1936-7, he most likely went on a personal sales campaign to alert
hundreds of his aviation customers and acquaintances throughout Eastern Long
Island, New York City and New Jersey. His spectacular offer: a lithograph “socked
into metal” with your name included and surrounded by all the greats—Charles
Lindbergh, James Doolittle, Wiley Post, Amelia Earhart, Jacqueline Cochran,
Howard Hughes, Howard Hawks and dozens more!
The Kicker
Here is Sloan’s
signature panel with the dedication to our great family friend, Miles Vernon, wealthy
Wall Street Broker, and owner of a 1933 WACO fighter-bomber biplane kept at the
Aviation Country Club in Hicksville, Long Island.
In the Art World: A Remarque
Three decades ago Peggy
and I went to Kenya. At one of the lodges we met a gifted young wildlife artist,
Peter Blackwell, who was the resident guide and naturalist. He invited us to
his cabin to look over his work and we settled on a pair limited edition renderings
of guineafowl for not very much money. I offered to pay him a bonus if he would
do remarques—little sketches in the margin. As I recall, he said nobody ever
asked him to do this. But for what might have been an extra $25, he was
delighted.
Sloane’s Amazing Personalization
Miles Vernon’s name appears
twice in the map—in the signature bloc above (which is the equivalent of a
remarque) and in the Aviation Country Club map (See Illustration #1 above between
“HICKSVILLE” and “WHITNEY.”)
How many actual names of people and
businesses did Sloane etch into his tin lithograph. Dunno. Never tried to count
them. But certainly hundreds.
It
is a kind of Where’s Waldo? of early American aviation.
What’s more, Sloane must have sold a ton
of these maps.
Concerned what would happen to this splendid memorial to these pioneers after Peggy and I assumed room temperature, I started contacting relevant institutions that might be willing to take it as a gift for their collection. All said thanks but no thanks. “We already have one,” was the reply.
Concerned what would happen to this splendid memorial to these pioneers after Peggy and I assumed room temperature, I started contacting relevant institutions that might be willing to take it as a gift for their collection. All said thanks but no thanks. “We already have one,” was the reply.
Mercifully we found a taker: The American
Philosophical Society here in Philly just across Independence park from our
building. Founded in 1743 by Benjamin Franklin, APS has one of the world’s
greatest collections of old maps, rare books and incunabula (books printed before
1501). It also has fat endowment, so our little Eric Sloane map has a safe permanent
home.
Eric Sloane Working at the Air & Space
Museum
Takeaways to Consider
• Like Bill Clinton, put
together your private database of everybody you meet. You never know when you’ll
need someone from your past or present.
• For example, if you ever decide to write a memoir or a book, your personal address collection is your private "house list"—your most obvious customers. And if they like what you've written, they well tell their friends, family and business colleagues.
• For example, if you ever decide to write a memoir or a book, your personal address collection is your private "house list"—your most obvious customers. And if they like what you've written, they well tell their friends, family and business colleagues.
• One of America’s
greatest newspaper publishers was Warren G. Harding (sic!). Yes, that
Harding—the second most corrupt crook ever to occupy the White House. He is
remembered for the notorious Teapot Dome scandal. As a young man, Harding bought
out of bankruptcy the Marion, Ohio Star newspaper and turned into the
leading paper in the area (which it is today) using an amazingly simple 11-word
business model:
“Mention the name of everybody in town twice a
year.”
• The 7 key copy drivers
in marketing—the emotional hot buttons that make people act—are: Fear –
Greed – Guilt – Anger - Exclusivity – Salvation – Flattery
• About this list,
Seattle marketing guru wrote: “If your copy is not dripping with one or more of
these emotional hot buttons, tear it up and start over.”
• In marketing his tin
lithograph, Eric Sloane pandered to Exclusivity, Flattery and
possibly Greed. (Hey, thing might be worth something someday…”)
• Get to know your customers—as many as possible—personally.
• If you know some of
your customers—intimately—you’ll know where to find the mother lodes of logical
prospects and how to turn them into customers.
• Direct marketing entrepreneur
Axel Andersson once analyzed 872 American direct mail letters in different business categories
and discovered 43 percent were based on flattery.
###
End of Marketing Lesson.
Here's a BONUS.
What follows is a reminiscence of growing
up on Long Island, the epicenter of early American aviation.
You might find it fun; or maybe a crashing
bore. But here ‘tis.
The Lure
of Flight
pilot seat
of a Glenn Curtiss Golden Flyer, c. 1911.
The
Plague That Hit the Hatch Family
In the very early years of the 20th century, my grandparents
rented a house on Long Island with a resident cow. “Fresh milk for the boys!” they
boasted. Alas, this was before the widespread use of Pasteurization. My father
was fed raw milk and he developed tuberculosis of the bone. The result: two dozen
operations, a shriveled left leg and crutches for his entire life.
Because of his delicate
heath, he was home schooled. One of his favorite outings was hanging out at the
workshop and grass landing field of the great aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss in
Hempstead, Long Island. The engineers and mechanics loved him!
My father remembered
hearing about the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903 and lived to see men
walk on the moon. All his life he loved everything about aeroplanes, aerospace
and flying.
Many years later my
father wrote a fine biography
of Glenn Curtiss.
Somerleas
I grew up in Somerleas,
my grandparents’ house in Cedarhurst, Long Island. Built in the 1920s, it was two
miles from what became main touchdown point of JFK Airport (née Idlewild). When
jets came in for landings and were 1500’ overhead, the noise was so loud as to
be painful. Eighty times an hour conversations came to a sudden halt until the
damn plane flew over.
My first novel was a
light-hearted story about a guy who couldn’t stand the noise around Kennedy
Airport, so he sent a World War II barrage balloon into the main landing
pattern.
It was optioned by Hollywood
six times; I have three screenplays including one by Academy Award winner, Ring
Lardner, Jr. (M*A*S*H and Woman of the Year) who was paid $75,000.
It was slated to the be next directorial project for John G. Avildsen following
his Academy Award for directing the mega-hit Rocky
Alas, Lardner (1915-2000),
a communist and one of the blacklisted “Hollywood 10” turned my marshmallow fluff
novel into an angry protest screed ending with Army paratroopers threatening to
bayonet little girls in their bare breasts. The shooting script was so gawdawful
Paramount scrapped the project.
My father adored Somerleas.
“I can leave “my house and be any place in Washington, D.C. in two hours!” he
would say with glee.
From
my earliest boyhood I remember he would periodically proclaim “Someday man will
hold the sun it its stride at the equator!” I have searched the world for that
quote and can’t find it. But the prediction came true.
One of my regrets in life was not having
the loot to buy my father and stepmother a trip to London or Paris on the
Concorde SST. They would have loved it!
One
of my father’s great regrets in life was not driving over to Roosevelt Field on
May 20, 1927 to see Charles Lindbergh take off for Paris. He knew about the flight
and was awake early that morning. But it was raining and overcast. He figured Lindbergh’s
team would postpone the flight, so he rolled over and went back to sleep.
Miles Vernon
Miles Vernon was one of my father’s oldest
friends—a reclusive bachelor-type guy who lived in New York on Park Avenue. Miles
adored fast and noisy personal transportation. He would roar up for lunch at the
house, incongruously accompanied by his two little ancient aunts—who always dressed
in black. His transportation was a beloved hotrod—a wildly souped-up 1940 maroon Mercury
with a top speed of 120 mph. Finally it became too much for the old aunts and
in 1950 Miles sold it to my step-father and bought a roomy sedan.
Miles was a lovely guy, rail thin and a heavy
smoker. Since my father was on crutches and incapable of typical father-son
stuff—and since Miles had no children of his own—he would occasionally contact
me and take on a father role.
For example, Somerleas bordered the second
fairway of the America’s oldest golf club, the Rockaway Hunt. One day when I was
in my early teens, Miles proclaimed that since I lived next to a golf course, I
should try golf. He took me over to the pro shop where an abandoned canvas bag
of wooden clubs was found. A caddy was engaged and off we went.
At
the second hole I realized my eyesight was so terrible (20/400) I would hit a
ball and had no idea where the thing went. Every ball was a lost ball. For me, golf
was preposterous. I manfully went along for nine of the 18 holes, whereupon we
went back to the clubhouse and had lunch. I never again set foot on a golf
course.
The Aviation Country Club
Miles
was also a member of the Aviation Country
Club, founded in 1929 in Hicksville, Long Island. Described as the
swankiest
private airfield in the country, the Aviation Country Club had 175 rich
members
that included Charles Lindbergh, who taught his bride, Anne Morrow
Lindbergh,
to fly off the great grass landing lawn surrounded by endless fields of
potatoes. There was no control tower, no concrete runway. Just grass.
All flying was under VFR (Visual Flight Rules).
The facilities
included a swimming pool, a tennis court, a club house with four bedrooms a couple
of large hangers with two mechanics on duty seven days a week. It was routine
for them to overhaul the engines of the members’ planes after every 75 hours of
flying. It was all very civilized.
Incidentally,
Miles Vernon was a world-class pilot who knew one helluva lot about aircraft.
During WWII, as a major in Army Air Corps, he was in charge of maintenance at the
massive Wright-Patterson air base in Dayton Ohio.
The Ercoupe Ride
In 1947 I broke my leg in a wrestling match and
was in a cast for weeks. Miles came by for lunch and, surprisingly, was moved
by my condition. “I’m going to take Denny flying!” he said to my mother and
father.
Vernon
flew an outrageous 1933 Waco biplane with an open cockpit and a huge, deafening
radial engine. The fuselage was black and the wings were bright yellow.
My
mother was scared of planes and flat-out refused to let Miles take me up in his
Waco. So he chartered a neat little Ercoupe and took me for my first flight.
The Ercoupe—with side-by-side seating—had no
foot pedals. All maneuvers were entirely controlled by the two little steering
wheels. So when we reached cruising altitude, Miles invited me to take over the
controls. Since it had no foot pedals I could fly it while wearing a full cast
on my right leg.
It
was thrilling!
My
mother was hoping I would hate flying, but as we were landing I waved at my
parents. My mother was not happy.
The Love of Miles Vernon’s
Life
Vernon took me up in his Waco just once in 1948.
Wearing a parachute, I sat in the rear seat. We were covered by a sliding
Plexiglas canopy. Headphones muted the roar of the engine and made talking to
one another possible.
Compared to the flight deck of a WWII bomber or a modern jetliner the
controls and instrumentation were primitive. Below is the front cockpit of the
Waco.
We flew over Levittown, the great postwar WWII
housing development that enabled returning GIs to buy a fully-equipped home for
$10,000 with just $100 down.
Below
me were hundreds of houses in all stages of construction—from cleared fields
and holes in the ground to finished and landscaped homes. It was my first
awareness of the magnificence of American business innovation. Levittown gobbled
up vast amounts of land including the Aviation Country Club, which disappeared
in the early 50s, swallowed up by Levittown.
About the WACO S3HD
To fill in the blanks of this post, I Googled “WACO”
and up popped the 2014 issue of the magazine above and Budd Davisson’s long story devoted to this
airplane. I started reading:
If Waco Aircraft Company
is remembered for nothing else, it should be for its unbelievable perseverance.
Beginning just before the crash of ’29 put the country on its knees, this
little company just kept on keepin’ on. The world of the Waco during that
period was one in which imagination, creativity, and dogged determination saw
it develop, certify, and produce new models as if they were cookies. It figured
that inventive, new products would always catch at least a few customers that
wanted (and could afford) the newest and the greatest, so it were continually
developing new models that it thought would satisfy yet another marketing
niche. And that’s where the S3HD came from: the niche was the military, and
that’s what guided the appearance of the S3HD. The aircraft was envisioned as a
multiuse military flying machine that would be both a trainer and an armed
ground support bird. So, it was equipped to drop small bombs and carry one or two
wing-mounted Browning .30-caliber machine guns. It also had provisions for a
machine gunner in the back seat. The rear part of the canopy would slide
forward out of the way. The only customers for the design turned out to be
South and Central American air forces, including Brazil, Nicaragua, Guatemala,
and Cuba—all of which were in the process of creating air forces.
The
Paragraph That Stopped Me Cold
A dozen aircraft were
built and delivered, but the first one was built for a private customer,
sportsman pilot Miles H. Vernon, who took delivery in 1934. His address was
listed as 1 Wall St., New York, but little is known about him or his flight
time in that airplane. It is indicative of his position that he had the
financial capability to approach the factory for a “special” airplane, the S3HD
being the result. This was the heart of the Depression and the aircraft had to
have been expensive, so apparently he was well above the financial chaos that
was gripping the rest of the country. The “D” spent its infancy and postwar
years at the Long Island Aviation Country Club in Hicksville, Long Island, New
York.OMG! The plane on the cover of the magazine was Miles Vernon’s Waco of my childhood!
From Bud Davisson’s cover story in Vintage Airplane:
There is something magnetic about a biplane fighter, or any
biplane that has a military vibe. Anyone with a feeling for vintage aircraft
simply can’t walk by them on the flight- line without visually studying their
lines on the way past. Take the Waco ZPF-6 type. The only difference between
them and the other Waco open biplanes is the sliding bird-cage canopy. These
airplanes were never intended for the military, but their canopy gives them “that”
look. So when John Ricciotti, who had become an antique aircraft owner only
days earlier, pulled into the front row in the antique area at Oshkosh ’13 in
the rarest of the rare, a Waco S3HD, a lot of heads snapped around. Not only
did Waco originally envision this sliding-canopy bird as being a gun-toting,
honest-to-goodness military airplane, it’s the sole survivor of the breed.
Over the years, Miles Vernon's Waco S3HD has been worked over with love by a succession of owners to the point where John Ricciotti now has restored it to absolute perfection.
Over the years, Miles Vernon's Waco S3HD has been worked over with love by a succession of owners to the point where John Ricciotti now has restored it to absolute perfection.
Mr. & Mrs. John
Ricciotti, current
Owners of Miles Vernon’s
Waco S3HD
Memories
of the Aviation Country Club
Is Miles Vernon's Waco SDH3
I remember attending an air show with sumptuous buffet lunch there in 1949. Adirondack chairs and tables with checkered cloths were set out in front of the clubhouse and hanger where ladies and gentlemen could view the action. According to John Fleischman in the February 1999 issue of Smithsonian’s Air & Space:
And in nearly 20 years of flight operations,
the club never had a serious accident resulting in injury—not even at the annual
air show. Instead of death-defying stunts and hell-for-leather pylon races,
manufacturers used the show to put on dignified exhibitions of their latest products.
The Flying Committee’s 1939 invitation to manufacturers made the tone of the
event clear. ‘Each demonstrator will be asked to demonstrate his ship in the
air for approximately five or six minutes. The Committee will permit no
stunting, excessive pull-offs and climbs or unorthodox maneuvering, the
demonstration being purely to show off the ship’s best qualities.... It is important
that each demonstrator realize that he is not in competition and also that no
sales approaches be made.’
Yeah, They Had an Accident
I witnessed one of the rare accidents. An
elegant gentleman, Rear Admiral Luis de Florez, USN (Ret), who had done
pioneering work in aviation fuels and lubricants as well as flight simulators, was
intrigued with a little, single-seat hottie with bright red fuselage and
retractable tricycle landing gear.
Captain Luis de Florez, USN
The
manufacturer, anxious for a testimonial from the world-renowned de Florez,
invited him to take it aloft for a spin. It was an uneventful flight that ended
with a perfect three-point landing in front of the large gallery of spectators
that represented a Who’s Who of private aviation.
However
there was one slight glitch: de Florez forgot to lower the landing gear. The
landing was so perfect that the only damage to the plane was a broken
propeller. De Florez walked away with a damaged ego and a very red face.
In
1962, de Florez was found dead in the cockpit of his plane while waiting to take
off at a Conn. airport. He was in his early 80s. Not a bad way go.
Bill Odom
“There
are two kinds of pilots,” Miles Vernon used to say. “Good pilots and dead
pilots.”
###
Word count: 3743
No comments:
Post a Comment