Word: becks
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Fred Beck's trick is to belittle his merchandise. This is a sure-fire way to attract attention in Los Angeles. Typical Beck comment: "Our tomatoes are tasteless. We'll let you know when they are good again." Readers, who like his frankness, jam the 84-stall market from 9 to 6 every...
...week bookkeeper in a bakery when he thought up a scheme for a farmer-operated market to sell fresh produce. He took the idea to Fred Beck, a chunky, practical advertising copywriter...
With no capital, the two promoters found 18 tenants: an avocado grower, a man who sold sherry from a barrel, a florist, a rabbit raiser, more than a dozen farmers. Beck & Dahlhjelm got lumber and awnings on credit, built their own stalls, to rent for 50? each a day. They persuaded a millionaire oil producer, Earl Gilmore, to let them use a vacant plot he owned in the Wilshire residential district. Beck wrote radio ads, got them broadcast over KNX on credit. They were directed at farmers ("don't bother to bring us anything but the best"), but shrewdly...
Today Dahlhjelm makes $25,000 a year as manager. The Gilmore Co. rents seven and one-half acres to the market, gets a percentage of the gross. And Fred Beck gets $10,000 a year for writing his daily ad column. The Los Angeles Times obligingly permits his column to be set in the same typographical style as Hedda Hopper and Walter Lippmann, requires no "advertisement" identification at the head...
...Beck does not talk prices. Instead he writes a chatter column, fictionalizing the personalities of the shopkeepers. ("The Grist Mill ... the darnedest bust you ever heard of ... is operated by a sad-eyed, spanielesque woman named Cora.") Sample treatment : "The trouble is that whenever we advertise something-demmit, people come in and buy it. And then we're out of that too. So today we have scoured the Farmers Market in search of something that nobody could ever have any use for ... and B-ruther-r-r we have found it. Eureka! . . . down at Manny Vezie's Gallery...