Mornin Bitches
A cursing, foul mouth old ladies take on the present world!!! Filled with her opinions, views on current events, and special guest appearances!
Mornin Bitches
Journey Through Time: Unraveling Advertising Icons and Personal Nostalgia in L.A
Step into the captivating world of pitchmen in Los Angeles as we journey through time in this episode. From the post-WWII era to the present day, we explore the tactics and personalities that have made advertising legends in LA La Land. Join us as we uncover the fascinating techniques like boraxing and odometer rolling, and meet notable figures such as Cal Worthington and Earl Scheib. Discover how the law has adapted to keep up with changing times and how modern pitchmen like Larry the Mattress Guy continue to leave their mark. And don't forget the importance of having a memorable personality in creating a successful pitch. This episode is filled with invaluable insights and unforgettable stories that will leave you wanting more.
In the second half of our show, we embark on a journey down memory lane as we reminisce about moving to Los Angeles in 1976. Get a glimpse into our deep affection for this vibrant city and hear about our time spent in Cleveland. We share personal anecdotes, from our morning routine with a cherished coffee cup to our own podcast advertising strategies. Plus, we reveal our dream guest - Opie from Opie and Anthony. But that's not all! We wrap up with a heartfelt message for anyone who hasn't been told they are loved today. Get ready for a dose of nostalgia, laughter, and profound reflections that will leave you feeling uplifted.
MORNIN BITCHES PODCAST
You are welcome to Tuesday. As Rosie O'Donnell's grandma would say Nana, it's Tuesday all day. Hopefully. Here's my coffee cup, here's me. Okay, here we go. So I wanted to read this from the illustrators and I got big bug bites on me again. Pat Morrison who is that's P-A-T-T. If you don't know who she was or is, look her up. But she wrote a great article in the LA Times yesterday and it reminded me so of my first time here in La La Land. They made their pitches some way hits.
Speaker 1:Will LA ever again see lovable hucksters like Cal Worthington and his dog spot? Do any of you ever remember Cal Worthington? If you want a brand new car, go see Cal. Okay, let me read this here. I am coughing. Of course this weather's given me a cough again. Cough and cough and cough and tick-tock Bobby. All right, whatever. Okay, there is no patron saint of Los Angeles pitchmen and really this should be, after all, ad Astra. Per huckster to the stars through sales pitchery. Right, the job is open. Are there any nominations? Tick-tock Bobby, I'm nominating me.
Speaker 1:An early favorite and a standout set, or even an LA strenuous real estate game, is Harry Culver. He was the 20th century whiz bang who pawl ate. A $2,000 option on 93 acres of bally fields and sales gimmicks and stunts into land deals that beget the city. He, modesty be damned, name for himself called the city. Obviously, this mantle of commercial sainthood is reserved for those characters who invented their identity and personality, faked or authentic, in their shtick, disembodied voiceover.
Speaker 1:Announcers are not in the running. Let us not speak of them in the same category as true pitchmen. A longevity trophy may have to go to an orange county dealerships jingle that you won't get a lemon from a. You won't get a lemon from Toyota of Orange, even though it man mangles the two critical syllables of orange into a single ugly one Orange. It's been on the airwaves for about 50 years, almost as long as California had its pioneering lemon law protecting us from getting stuck with junkers and there were. There was a trophy for the ad getting the most and fastest hits on the mute button. The car for kids jingle would likely own it right Now for the real candidates for the choices place in our pitchman pantheon Almost all of them are caused salesmen for manifold reasons.
Speaker 1:The first after World War II, the biggest car market in this world's saving nation was the Southern California. In Southern California, the second thrive or die. Market market demanded that you make a name for yourself or you get out of the game. In the 1950s the game was delivering some self-inflicted wounds. Dirty dealing practices like boraxing advertising cause that didn't exist. And rolling back odometer seemed like SOP, standard operating something. Every speedometer was flipped back. It's how a Beverly Hills Studebaker salesman named William L Plunkett described that common practice from the 1950s.
Speaker 1:The low ed came in 57 when an LA County grand jury heard testimony about fudged contracts and trade in scans and indicted a dealer and more than a dozen of his associates. The dealer was HJ Caruso, the father oh, no that. Oh, don't tell me this, my heart's breaking the father, future LA businessman, philanthropist and former mayoral candidate, rick Caruso the elder. Caruso pleaded guilty what he thought was a deal for a misdemeanor. But there was no such deal and Caruso and his lawyer couldn't get the plea changed. Caruso went to jail for a year and was on probation until 1970 when his plea was changed and not guilty and the case was dismissed.
Speaker 1:Good. So the gimmicks got sticky and more frantic and more desperate to claim the honor of honest, sincere, authentic and entertaining. But first the non-car dealer contenders Earl Schaib I don't know if any of you you're probably from the East you don't remember, you can pinpoint when you came to live in LA that the price. You first remember Schaib introducing advertising to paint your car from $29.95 in the 60s to $190.95 by the time he died in 1992. He was the face and voice of its business. I'm Earl Schaib. I'll paint any car for, only fill in the price, no ups, no extras. He developed a singular painting technique that extended his empire to many states and Europe. Who knew Henry Ford once said that a customer could order a Model T in any color as long as it was black. Shibes special offer was good only for a few basic colors and that special price wasn't special, just the everyday charge. In the law it's in civil form like the Federal Trade Commission had a few words about what Shibes could and could not do in his ad. Shibes pitch Line earned him a spot on the chair in pitchman, the hot Valhalla next to Johnny Carson and his big desk on national TV. He created his own TV spots and Told the TV stations running his ads and the precise moment he wanted them to interrupt the late movie at a suspenseful moment and dropped them in.
Speaker 1:How a man born in San Francisco and spent his life in LA, spoke with a kind of modified hand-handled Lining, is as much a mystery as the generation of commercial airline pilots who delivered their cockpit pad, cockpit padded. Sharky Agus, west Virginia games. All right. Now he is my favorite because he's still around Larry the mattress guy, and Erwin, his beleaguered accountant, because guess what? He's still doing his sit and sleep advertisements. And his son is with him now.
Speaker 1:Mattress shopping is almost as bewildering and unpleasant as car shopping. Selling a personality gimmick surely catches the fire, zia, better than someone ad comparing models and prices, although Larry's Accelerando war warble pledge Okay, let's read this From the 90s sound kind of sound like will be anyone's advertised price. Oh, your mattress is. Is this spousal style? You're killing me, larry, bickering over discount prices. It has drilled this bit into your brain. The Larry and Erwin characters of the mattress company owner and LA native, larry Miller, and his childhood friend and real accountant, erwin, signant as the fits the family owned company, erwin and Larry's dynamic became the honeymooners of radio ads and, as I said, his son is now doing the ads with them. All of our Larry, all of our.
Speaker 1:Now here's one of my favorites, ron Pope.
Speaker 1:He'll just past. I love him. If you ever stayed up late with the sick baby I woke up too early with a bad hangover Ron Pope, he'll probably kept your company, kept you in comp, you kept your company, I, I, I in his groundbreaking infomercials. He was a master of the art of selling solutions in search of problems, who knew you absolutely Couldn't live without his pocket fisherman or Vegumatic or, my favorite, mr Microphone. Until Pope Hill told yourself People needed cause. But Pope Hill had to create a need for his aspirational Gadgetry, and for decades he did so brilliantly that his place in a pop culture made last longer than his admin innovations. Saturday night life sent him up when Dan or acroy dropped a fish into a bath, somatic flanger. If you were able to write a letter to the editor to let me know I forgot Ron Pope Hill.
Speaker 1:But wait, there's more lying, don't? That's come on with the creation of the author Schiff, the father of the ginsu or ginsu knife and myriad other direct marketing gizmos, and the developer of the most identifiably information line, which of course made its way into his obituary. Oh, I loved Ron Popeal. He was fabulous, right, mm Miss Cleo, not many women got into the pitchman game, but your darling Del Harris.
Speaker 1:Born and brought up right here in Los Angeles. It came in talking with an Irish accent. Jamaica, as her native land and accent, became a TV meme from the 90s as the midnight psychic Miss Cleo call me now. She brought in big money for the company that have put her on the air until those businesses were sued by the Federal Trade Commission for defrauding people and had to hand back a half a billion dollars to customers and stop peddling psychic. Psychic services by telephone, the hallmark of a true TV pitch meme, parody and a documentary. And now now for the cost salesman. A sampling for FYI, not an encyclopedia entry. Okay, this, this cost salesman, was the best one. Cal, then Coolidge Worthington, as chatty as President Coolidge was Mano Silovic.
Speaker 1:Cal Worthington spent as much as 2.5 million a year on advertised. That in the platinum years put him his go see Cal Jingle on television a thousand times a week, mostly from dusk till dawn. His original joke making fun of his dog hugging competitors became his signature line my dog spot, who was never a dog, a hippopotamus, a Cody, a penguin, a gorilla, a change door car bumper and a goose who once crapped on Worthington's lap, right there on Johnny Carson's show. Once Worthington rode Shamu in the Sea World orca like a bronco. He never really liked cars, he told me once. I got trapped in the car business but it made him rich. And for an old sage County Oklahoma boy who made his Scarlett O'Hara vow that he'd never be hungry again, that was a compromise he gladly made.
Speaker 1:Worthington came here in 1949 and at the time he had a deal of ships from Anchorage to Phoenix and piloted his own plane. Hmm, to most of them it was planes that he loved and he flew more than two dozen combat missions in World War II, earning the distinguished flying crew. He told the Times in 1979 that electric cars were the future clean, quiet and up to 200 miles on one charge. But in 2002 he went to Sacramento to lobby against a bill to rein in CO2 emissions from cars. When TV airtime was cheap he drifted off three or four minutes telling corn pong jokes, extolling the virtues of his forwards shivis and toyotas and promising to eat a bug if he couldn't make a deal by getting squeezed into a 30 second spot was not to his liking and he probably wasn't worth whatever he had to pay to rent the hippo. In 1978, state and federal regulators went after his dealerships, accusing them of deceptive appetizing, such as bait and switch tactics, altering smog devices to improve performance, selling as beautiful, clean and sharp cars that they were in generally poor conditions with exceptionally high mileage. Worthington settled four years later without admitting doing anything wrong. He was married and divorced four times. His eldest child was old enough to be grandfathered to his youngest. He liked pretty women, he said, and French champagne and babies. And yes, dorks. Rest in peace, cal Worthington, you were the best.
Speaker 1:Next is Earl Manman Munce. Earl Munce was the brilliant Bonham of Pitchman, a man made and lost several fortunes, only one of them selling cars. He came to LA in the 1930s selling from used car row on Figaroa. He bought 176 radio spots a day on 13 station but the free promotions he got dwarfed back. Radio joke writers worked him into scripts for Groucho Mox, jack Banny, red Skelton and Avanick Estella, bob Hope mentioned in 32 times in 39 shows. That was even. Let's see what things say about him. Wow, months, months joke in Catherine Hepburn's September Tracy movie State of the Union. What was mad about the mad man? He and his cartoon avatar dressed in red, long johnson, a pole in at Crazy Lucky Fox and 47. Guess what year? That was the year TikTok Fubby was born. He grew 72 million in car sales. We buy him retail and sell them wholesale.
Speaker 1:More fun, that was when one of what was one of his slogans then in the 1950s, a manufacturer television set with the largest green that most and broke the floor by selling it for under a hundred dollars. Woo, I want to give him away but Mrs Munce won't let me. She's crazy as that's verbal. He mailed TV knobs by the hundreds to Angelina's with an outtelling him to call and he bring over the rest of the set. That was brilliant. In one year he sold 55 million in TV sets. He named his daughter TV, although his wife the final tally was seven changed it later to Tina color TV did in the month TV.
Speaker 1:But he moved right along to cause stereos. He bought his own for track tape. He bought a Columbia records catalog 75,000 he spent to put music in those tape debt. In 60, 70 sold 30 million costs stereos and tapes. He made money and went broke and made money again. Wow, his dumbest business moves. Saying no to the change to the us distributor for a funny little thing called the Volkswagen. I drove the car and didn't like it. I still don't like it, but I was damn full to turn it down.
Speaker 1:Broker flush Munce had swagger with all the right in the thick of the red scare. He asked and I'd advise the whether she should announce that he was a communist just for the headlines. He'd get and laugh him. He dated famous women and befriended famous men. He was relentlessly charming, always questing for the new and novel and living large and lively. He drank high balls, some of luckies, and drove a custom Lincoln with a TV and a vcr in the dashboard. In the documentary madman months, american maverick actress angie dickens said his funeral was one of the funniest funerals she'd ever been to. Okay, so could we have a worth engine or months type today? That kind of use of our universal grip on the public's mental scenery? It probably can't happen anymore. The audience is too fragmented, spread too thin across the fractured media landscape the car out there, if you can hear it too thin across the fractured media landscape for any catch phrase, any peddle, how ever inventive, to reach the scale of wrecking recognition. Months and Worthington were big.
Speaker 1:It's the, it's the air time that got small, the only possible new contenders I've ever heard recently, and maybe others in the alternative universe of tv and radio that I don't see or hear, which proves the point that I just made. The only possible contender I've heard lately is on terrestrial radio. His name is Aaron ad adoram, an emigrate from latvia with an mfa from nyu and a pitchman for his own california window installation business. Never heard of him. His signature slogan is a bit ronk wordy, but delivered with vervin's sincerity, which makes sense because he wrote it. Our installation technique is so precise. We do not break your stucco, never hide of him. And here comes the earthworm. Your house could be covered with potato chips and we wouldn't break one. It's good, but can it bear the test of time and fickle audience? Will he too have to eat a bug or make a deal and stay in our brains, or maybe just eat that stuck? Oh well, larry's still around from sitting sleep. So, larry, I'm honoring you today. Larry and his son, okay, I'm honoring you with my podcast today, larry from sitting sleep and all the other pitchmen. Thank you, pat Morrison, for this article.
Speaker 1:It was such a joy for me when I moved here in 1976 and saw Cal Worthington on the TV at night. Oh, if you want a better car, go see Cal. I don't remember the rest of it, but you know TikTok Bubbie loves this city because I moved here when I was 28 years old. How many years ago is that? Wow, is that 46? It's going to be 46 soon, oh my God. Yeah, that's right. And I never went back, although I lived in Cleveland for three years. So the people of Cleveland remember SJ Mendelson God, that was so amazing living in Cleveland from 77 to 80. Then I came back here to work and do whatever and my life completely changed. So I love all of you so very, very much.
Speaker 1:You know that if you're a new follower on TikTok Bubbie, on TikTok, you'll get my morning bitches cup. I don't know if this is on the air or not or whatever. And if nobody told you they love you today, I love you because you're you. And just to let you know, besides coughing this morning coughing of all the phlegm I advertise on my own podcast because it seems that nobody wants to advertise with me. At one time the matchmaking channel tender advertised with me and I have to thank them for that, but as far as anybody else, no. But I'd love to have Opie from Opie and Anthony on my podcast because he is amazing, so hopefully I'll go on his, hopefully he'll go on mine, and that will be amazing because I'd love to do a show.
Speaker 1:Opie and Bubbie, opie and TikTok, bubbie, opie. If you hear this, I love you. Okay, and, as I said earlier, if no one told you they love you today, then I love you because you're you, be yourself. Who else are you going to be? But you, okay, and I don't think anybody could be anyone other than themselves. So I love you. I'm going to go, let's see what happens. I'll eat Bye. See you on Saturday. Usually, saturdays is when I have my people come in and interview with me.