He Used His Noodle - And His Typewriter

ON THE day I was born – 78 years ago yesterday – a young man in Detroit, Michigan, turned his life around. He did it with a battered old Underwood typewriter and 40 cartons of noodle soup. Of course this all happened 8733 miles from where I entered the world, but who knows how far positive vibes can reach? And how long it takes for them to find their target?

Joseph Purdum Waitz, then a 26-year-old unemployed ex-army air forces officer, living with his wife Carolyn at 5903 Maryland Street, just off the Edsel Ford Freeway (1-94), was down to his last four cents on April Fool’s Day 1948.  But he had invested $11.56 to buy 40 cartons of Lipton’s “old-fashioned chickeny noodle soup”.

That enabled him to enter the Lipton’s limerick competition 40 times – and one of those entries came up trumps.

Joseph’s “investment” paid off “about 1000 to one”, according to the picture story on page five of the April 6, 1948, issue of the Detroit Free Press. One of Joseph’s entries won the competition and earned him $11,000 in prizemoney (just under $150,000 in today’s money).

Carolyn (née Zynda) told the Free Press, “Just before the contest closed on February 29, he [Joe] bought a whole case of soup for $11.56. We had less than $100 to our name and needed other things worse than soup. But I’ve learned 67 ways to serve it.”

Mrs Waitz had also decided where the prizemoney was going. “We want a log-built house out in the country some place near Detroit where everything is green,” she told the Free Press.

Joe Waitz, who had grown up dreaming of becoming a successful writer, went on from his limerick success to get a job with General Electric Carboloy as a technical copy writer. Mrs Waitz said, “Some people thought when we were married [18 months previously] that Joe was just a writer who didn’t have a job. But I believed in him. He hasn’t sold any stories yet, but he’s had some awfully nice rejection slips.”

Lipton’s got plenty of free publicity out of Joe’s win, with a United Press story appearing in newspapers across the US. Yet Joe’s winning limerick was never used. The UP piece had described Joe as an “unsuccessful free lance writer who was down to his last nickel.”

Joe had, however, won a washing machine in a similar contest in 1947, and he and Carolyn had 30 pounds of coffee left in their kitchen after an unsuccessful bid in another limerick competition. Carolyn told UP the couple would “use up” the noodle soup cartons “just like we did with the coffee”.

In the 60s Joe went on to become vice-president and creative director of Maxon Inc and then creative director in the Detroit office of Geyer-Oswold. The couple settled in Aurora, Illinois, and Carolyn died there, aged 82, in July 2008.

Olivetti Typewriter Ad “As She Recalled It”

So pleased to see that Margaret Talbot, a 22-year veteran staff writer for The New Yorker, has taken the trouble to check the facts laid out in my ozTypewriter blog posts of September 2020. Talbot devoted a lengthy "A Critic at Large" article to Shere Hite in the March 9 issue of The New Yorker. Fittingly, Talbot's piece appeared under the headline "Doing It Right", for that is exactly what Talbot did. She checked and she worded things correctly.

Following Hite’s death in London in September 2020, I corrected the story about the Olivetti typewriter advertisement which allegedly propelled Hite toward the women’s movement. In obituaries for Hite that were published around the world, a false claim was repeated ad nauseam, unchecked and unsubstantiated. A few minutes’ research would have confirmed the truth. Surprisingly, the supposed fact-checking New York Times was among the many guilty parties.

Hite appeared in "Olivetti Girls" ads in 1971 to help her pay college fees while at Columbia University. Her recollection of the wording of the ads, some 10 years after they appeared, was faulty. Talbot doesn’t fall for the same trap as Hite’s obituary writers did – not quite, anyway. She wrote that the words contained in an “advertising campaign for Olivetti electric typewriters, in which she was cast as a fetching secretary” were those “as she recalled it” and "something like". These six words are critical, for the issue I had raised back in 2020 was about accuracy in reporting. What Hite said in 1982 was not what the ad said. A few people said it didn’t matter. They were wrong. It did matter. Accuracy is everything. Accuracy is the truth.

Most if not all of the ads were sexist in the extreme. But that wasn’t the point. The point was what they actually said, not what anyone thought they said

Richard Polt commented on my 2020 posts: “This topic has stirred up a bit of friendly controversy in the typosphere. It's always good for us to keep thinking both about the documented facts of history, and about the more elusive question of the meaning of those facts … In any case, this is fascinating material for cultural interpretation, and it's a very successful advertising campaign inasmuch as we are still paying close attention to it, decades later.”