I somehow missed the news that Gary Dahl, inventor of the Pet Rock, died a couple of days ago. The Spokesman-Review’s Doug Clark is on the case—because it turns out that Dahl was a Rogers High School graduate. Who knew?
In 1975, at the height of the craze, my best friend owned a Pet Rock. My feelings about it at the time can best be described as ambivalent: even as an eight-year-old, I understood how unbelievably dumb it was, yet I couldn’t deny that I really, really wanted one. Probably my first lesson in marketing.
Dahl, a “down-at-the-heels advertising copywriter” when he came up with the Pet Rock idea, was no one-trick pony. He published Advertising for Dummies in 2001. And a year earlier he was the grand prize winner in the 18th annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a competition that “challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels.” Here’s his winning entry:
“The heather-encrusted Headlands, veiled in fog as thick as smoke in a crowded pub, hunched precariously over the moors, their rocky elbows slipping off land’s end, their bulbous, craggy noses thrust into the thick foam of the North Sea like bearded old men falling asleep in their pints.”
RIP, Mr. Dahl. You done your hometown proud.
