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 drector of Maxon Inc and then creative director in the Detroit office of Geyer-Oswold. The couple settled in Aurora, Illinois, and Carolyn died, aged 82, in July 2008.