[Peter has made a start on Kap’n Klam: The Memoirs of Porky White, Nonpareil American Restaurateur, Entrepreneur, and Raconteur, As Told to Peter Leroy. So far he has only two episodes. The first is about the architecture of the Kap’n Klam huts. This is the second.]
The second episode was an attempt to get some of Porky’s wit and wisdom into the book.
If there’s one thing I pride myself on, it’s my ability to turn adversity to advantage. I’ve had to do this again and again. You take the very nature of the commodity I’m selling — clams. A lot of people don’t like clams. One of the things they don’t like is the fact that when you eat a clam you’re eating pretty much everything. You know what I mean — guts, digestive tract, the contents of the digestive tract, reproductive organs — pretty much everything. With a chicken, most people just eat the muscle tissue, some skin, maybe a little liver, but even the liver makes some of them feel a little funny. So you see, from the very start I was wrestling with this problem of how to get people to overcome their squeamishness about eating the little guys whole. Well, I had one of my famous brainstorms. That’s what I call them. They start with kind of a period of dark mental turbulence, when I seem to sense a change coming on, a shift in my intellectual wind, if you know what I mean. Call it confusion, if you like, but, as I said, I prefer to call it a period of dark mental turbulence. Then some small stimulus — maybe just a passing remark from my young friend Peter Leroy, who has a singular knack for saying the right thing at the right time — will cause a little spark in my brain, and out of that dark mental turbulence, whammo! A bolt of lightning! Not a bolt out of the blue, as some people say — people who probably haven’t ever really experienced this particular kind of inspired idea — but a bolt out of the mind, out of this roiling kind of cloudy thinking that’s been going on in my mind for some time. And that’s just how it happened that I came up with the idea for the famous “guts” campaign. You’ve seen the ads, I’m sure. “Have you got the guts to eat a clam?” That was the first. Personally, I think the best was “If you’ve got the guts, we’ve got the guts,” kind of a clever twist on an ad for beer that was running at that time, but the lawsuit on that one cost us plenty.
[to be continued]
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