Piscine.

When I was a boy in the ad business I was fortunate enough to work on a heavy-duty print account at a decent agency. And I was fortunate enough to work for a creative director who was good, caring and generous. His name was Ed Butler. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, he was considered, by people who knew the business, to be one of the best writers in the business.

Ed hired me based on a spec ad I had in my book. 

The ad was for the New York City Police Department who at the time were suffering from a suicide problem. It ain't easy being a cop. And, since they always have a gun at the ready, a lot of them were killing themselves.

I wrote an ad that said, 

Last year in New York, 

ten cops were killed.

Seven did it themselves.

That was enough to get me a job and a $5,000 salary bump and a windowed office in a good agency and the sense that I was making progress.

My job was on a retail bank account. The bank ran a different ad in The New York Times every week. Ed and Mike, his art partner, would do half of those ads. Lisa, my art partner and I would do the other half.

That was pretty good. It meant we were always concepting, selling ads and producing ads. All these years later, I still get a thrill when I have an ad in the paper. I never got tired of that feeling.

When I first had to show body copy to Ed I was more than a little nervous. I might have procrastinated for half a day. But finally I walked the city block from my office to his and handed him my copy. He had a school-bus yellow Ticonderoga pencil and read my copy using the pencil as a pointer. Once in a while he would underscore something. 

I watched him read my copy like an osprey watches for fish.

Finally he looked up and spoke.

"You're a what's more guy," he said.

It took me a moment, but I quickly understood what he meant. 

Ed clarified anyway.

"I learned when I worked on VW at Doyle," he began, "that a lot of writing copy is learning how to write a list so it doesn't sound like a list. Some people go right to 'and.' Some are 'also' people. You use 'what's more.'  I like 'what's more,'" he finished. 

Ed had a couple more things to say about my copy. Then he said, "You can write. You don't have to show me copy anymore if you don't want to." And that was that.

I've learned four things about copywriting in the forty-four years I've been earning my keep from bleeding on my keyboard. 

1. Always start with your second sentence. Cross out the first one you write and jump in in medias res--in the middle of things.

2. If you write a clear headline rewrite it upside down and/or backward to make it better. 'Nothing is impossible,' is bland. 'Impossible is nothing,' is memorable.

3. Learn how to write lists so you can put in all the stuff the client needs in the ads without sucking up the ad.

4. Remember George Orwell's six rules of writing:

Some years ago my wife and I went down to the South Street Seaport during The New Yorker Festival. Nora Mitchell, Joseph Mitchell's daughter, was speaking about her father and his stories about New York's ancient waterfront.

Nora was a lovely, soft-spoken woman who remembered her father with more fondness than I think most fathers get. Especially fathers who are writers. The condition of being a good writer often doesn't go hand-in-glove with being a good father. But Nora's recollections of Joseph were fairly rose-colored. As if she didn't want to tear down a man who was a hero to so many in the small audience. 

This was 20 years after I worked for Ed. I remember Nora said, "My father was a great list maker."

Somehow in thinking about what to write this week I thought about Ed, as I do often, and I thought about Joseph Mitchell, as I do even more often.

As a tribute to each, I found this list from a book of Mitchell's "New Yorker" pieces from between 1944 and 1960. "The Bottom of the Harbor," is one of the best books I've ever read. And not just because Mitchell uses this as the book's epigram, a verse I remember from the harbor-bottom of my murky childhood.

Here's a list from Mitchell. Ed might have written it, as well.

I am still learning from them.

This post is sort of a thank you. Belated, of course, like 97.2-percent of all thank-yous, if they come at all.

A list. Kissed.

“In the spring, summer, and fall, during the great coastwise and inshore and offshore migrations of fishes along the Middle Atlantic Coast, at least three dozen species enter the harbor. Only a few members of some species show up. Every spring, a few long, jaggy-backed sea sturgeon show up. Every summer, in the Lower Bay, dragger nets bring up a few small, weird, brightly colored strays from Southern waters, such as porcupine fish, scorpion fish, triggerfish, lookdowns, halfbeaks, hairtails, and goggle-eyed scad. Every fall, a few tuna show up. Other species show up in the hundreds of thousands or in the millions. Among these are shad, cod, whiting, porgy, blackback flounder, summer herring, alewife, sea bass, ling, mackerel, butterfish, and blackfish. Some years, one species, the mossbunker, shows up in the hundreds of millions. The mossbunker is a kind of herring that weighs around a pound when full-grown. It migrates in enormous schools and is caught in greater quantity than any other fish on the Atlantic Coast, but it is unfamiliar to the general public because it isn’t a good table fish; it is too oily and bony. It is a factory fish; it is converted into an oil that is used in making soaps, paints, and printing inks (which is why some newspapers have a fishy smell on damp days), and into a meal that is fed to pigs and poultry. In the summer and fall, scores of schools of mossbunkers are hemmed in and caught in the Lower Bay, Sandy Hook Bay, and Raritan Bay by fleets of purse seiners with Negro crews that work out of little fishing ports in North Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, and Long Island and rove up and down the coast, following the schools.”

A mossbunker. Today we call them Menhaden.