Big-Time Belittling

Fred Beck's column of homespun advertising in the Los Angeles Times has as many readers as Westbrook Pegler's column. This intense reader following has made a $5 million enterprise of the Los Angeles Farmers Market, which less than ten years ago was a vacant lot and an idea.

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 day.

The idea for the Farmers Market came one day in 1934 to Roger Dahlhjelm (rhymes with column) a dogged, rawboned Swede who was once Stanley Steamer's best auto salesman west of New York.

He was a $4 a 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-c- 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 intended for housewives. Within three months, 3,000 cars were parked out front each day. Now there are 18,000 on Saturdays, 12,000 weekdays. At first the only profit for Dahlhjelm and Beck was $9 a day, split between them, from the 50-c- daily rental paid by each tenant.

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 of Shoe Reconstruction, we have a contraption priced at $7.50 that cannot be worth a shiny steel penny. It is useless, badly designed, overpriced . . . what it is supposed to be is a shoe shining set. . . . It's a silly gadget. We promise you you don't want one."

In his spare time Fred Beck helped write the last five Burns & Allen radio programs, but rejected a 39 weeks' contract with them. He also has turned down book publishers, and the Associated Press, which wanted him to write a column. Last week Beck went to work for 20th Century-Fox, earning "crazy movie dough" on a 51-year contract. He plans to take a couple of hours off at lunch each day to continue writing his market column. Fred Beck's assignment at 20th Century-Fox will be to lure people to Fox pictures. Angelenos were willing to bet that no Beck-described picture would be supercolossal.

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