#192 First 10 Words

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#192 Blogpost – Tuesday, 25 July 2023

 

Posted by Denny Hatch

 

 

“Your First Ten Words Are More

Important Than the Next 10,000.”

      —Elmer “Sizzle” Wheeler

 

 

Dear Friend,

 

     A lady should never get this dirty, she said.

 

     She stood there with a quiet, proud dignity. She was incomparably dirty — her face and hands smeared, her clothes torn and soiled. The lady was 11.

 

Of the literally thousands of direct marketing letters I have studied over the 30 years of publishing, writing and sending out the monthly WHO’S MAILING WHAT! newsletter, the above lede was my favorite of all time. A stopper. You absolutely have to keep reading. Over its 27-year lifespan it was responsible for tens of millions of dollars in revenue.

 

A Brief History

The writer was Fr. Bruce Ritter, a Catholic priest who had never written anything his life beyond Sunday sermons. The proprietor of a small Parish in Manhattan’s grungy, dirt-poor lower east side, he saw his biggest challenge as saving the hundreds of abused, homeless and endangered teen-age kids roaming the streets in his down-at-heels neighborhood. Every day of the week at all hours they rang his bell seeking something to eat and a place to spend the night.

 

Ritter’s idea was to create a rescue center/safe house for these disadvantaged kids. His name for the refuge: Covenant House. In 1972 some unremembered hero put Ritter in touch with Epsilon Data’s gregarious and funny John Groman, a visionary who put a deal together. He encouraged Ritter to write the letter. Fifty years later in 34 cities across five countries, “More than 2,000 young people sleep in a Covenant House bed each night. No one is ever turned away without support of some kind. And all services and programs are available at no cost.” In 2022, Covenant House revenues were $3.5 million. And it all started with Fr. Ritter’s “Dirty Lady” letter that had brought in millions of dollars over the 27 years it was mailed.

         While Groman started out with this act of pure charity, it paid off big time. Over the years Covenant House has morphed into a cash cow for Epsilon in terms of lists rentals.

 

What Triggered This Blog Post:

The Tedium of The New Yorker

 

In late July, Peggy and I took our first vacation in four years (Covid had kept us home)—a splendid Viking cruise though the five Great Lakes from Toronto to Duluth. On the way home a backup of little twin-engine United jet airliners stranded us for four unplanned hours in the modest Duluth Airport.

 

At some point I wandered over to the newsstand looking for something to read. Amidst the five shelves of pop culture magazines — front and center — was the July double-sized Fiction Issue of The New Yorker.

 

Over the years I have been an on-and-off subscriber to this legendary publication. As kid I loved the cartoons — particularly the ghoulish thigh slappers by Chas. Addams and the bawdy, brilliant hilarious world of Peter Arno. My very favorite:

 

Never in my life have I renewed my subscription to The New Yorker. I always found it wordy and filled with what David Ogilvy called “gray walls of type.” The contents were dense, and the stories (to me) seemed interminably long. I came to believe the writers were paid by the number of words and padded their copy to garner larger paychecks. Every 10 years I would try it again — resubscribe and then not renew.

 

Direct Marketing Copy: The Grab-‘em by the Throat—

Polar Opposite of the Ever-so-literary New Yorker

Heaving a sigh, I mumbled “What the hell, I’ll give it one more shot. There, in the Duluth Airport I ponied up the cover price of $9.99 for the 80-page issue.

Whereupon Peggy rushed up to tell me the plane was boarding, so I tucked the magazine into my carry-on and started reading it when I got to my seat. I found the start of every article/story instantly bored me to stupefaction.

 

Remembering the Bruce Ritter’s powerhouse “Dirty Lady” 9-word lede, I decided I would compare ledes to see if anything grabbed me by the throat.

 

Here is the start of seven of the first eight stories:

 

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

 

COMMENT

AFTER AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

Any proper obituary for affirmative action (1961) in higher education would be obliged to note that it had been in decline for years before it met its ultimate demise last week. The policy had weathered successive legal challenges dating back to the nineteen-seventies. It was often difficult to tell whether the effect of these suits was to inspire more nuanced and legally sustainable approaches for insuring diversity or…

—Jelani Cobb

 

HERE TO THERE DEPT.

BIG-ASS CANOE

The speed limit on the Shinnecock Canal, in Hampton Bays, is five miles per hour, which a group of hardy paddlers in a thirty-one-foot canoe were improperly exceeding the other day, when “the shit went down,” as one of them, Ryan Ranco, recalled…

—Ben McGrath

 

BARNYARD DEPT.

RENT-A-FOWL

“I could talk about chickens all day long,” Ida DeFrancesco, a farmer and an affiliate of Rent the Chicken, an all-inclusive chicken-rental service, said not long ago…

—Parker Henry

 

DEPT OF FUSION

MUDANG CHILE

Where in New York does one find shoes for a shaman? At Meermin, in SoHo, Hong OK, a singer in the Korean the folk-pop band ADg7 confessed recently that she and her bandmates usually shop at Zara or H&M…

—Julian Lucas

 

LIFE AND LETTERS

Killing Dickens

Why I wrote a historical Novel

BY ZADIE SMITH

For the first thirty years of my life, I lived within a one-mile radius of Willesden Green Tube Station. It’s true I went to college—I even moved to East London for a bit—but such interludes were brief. I soon returned to my little corner of Northwest London…

 

FICTION

THE KITCHEN GOD

BY HIROMI KAWAKAMI

I tried peeling the kitchen wall with my fingernails, but that didn’t work, so I pressed hard with my fingers and a flake of the “stucco,” which is what I call it, fell off. I don’t know if it’s really “stucco" or not, or even what stucco is, precisely, but I like the snappy sound of the word, and that's good enough for me...

 

COMING TOGETHER MARY GAITSKILL

Night of the Happy Bodies

I like parties where you sit around and talk to people. But I love parties where you dance and make noise with people…

 

Takeaways to Consider

• If you ever find yourself waiting in the Duluth airport for four hours, cheer up. Although there’s no restaurant or food counter, just behind the newsstand is a small, well-stocked bar.

 

• “Avoid gray walls of type.” —David Ogilvy

 

• “The first ten words are more important than the next ten thousand.” — Elmer “Sizzle” Wheeler 

 

• If direct marketing letters are written to generate instant interest, why shouldn't writers of fiction non-fiction use the same technique? And maybe corporate annual reports and academia?

 

• I remember a chum of many years ago at Columbia College, R. Bruce Moody, told me his favorite lede for a long forgotten short story was: "'Take your hand off my knee!' cried the duchess."

 

• For the complete text of Fr. Ritter’s legendary “Dirty Lady” letter, check out my pitch for Method Marketing that follows this blog post. Also included: you’ll savor the text of Tom Gaffney’s “Paint Can” letter for Covenant House which brought in tens of millions more dollars over the next 20 years; Mel Martin’s multi-million-dollar letter for Boardroom; and Bill Bonner’s masterpiece for a newsletter that did not exist—Retirement Living. Bonner's newsletter idea was profitable from day one and spawned Agora Publishing, today a billion-dollar corporation. Also, the astounding Carol Farkas once-in-a-lifetime chain letter for Memorial Sloan-Kettering and magazine editor Bob Shnayerson’s upbeat launch letter that brought in 600,000 paid subscribers to Quest/77, a magazine the existed only in his head. Plus, a bunch more delicious Direct Marketing success stories, including the strange saga of the Western Monetary War College and what happened when the entire faculty flunked basic mail order math and the founder was sentenced to 16 years before parole in federal prison for securities fraud.

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 Word Count: 1337