Issue #15 - Wednesday, July 18, 2018
Posted by Denny Hatch
The Greatest Copywriter in the World
Plaza de Santa Domingo, Mexico City
The Greatest Copywriter in the World
By Bob Dolman
Whenever I get burned out, I go to visit and watch the greatest copywriter in the world at work, under the portales in the Plaza de Santo Domingo in Mexico City.
Oliverio, with his Olympia typewriter made in Brazil, is clearly a king among evangelists, the scribes who sit at card tables behind the old platen presses where you can have your wedding invitations printed while you wait.
Good plain people who can’t write letters for themselves come to Oliverio, and he is much closer to life than I’ll ever get. He writes most eloquently about love waiting at home for sons and daughters to return and claim it.
Under his fingernails I see a permanent black edge from changing his ribbons. Back home, when I confront my antiseptic computer, I look first at my fingernails and if they are all clean I know my letter would be antiseptic, too.
I wish I could take Oliverio’s place at his card table for just one hour, but that would turn into a bitter circus—-his clients would believe I was mocking them, and I think they would be right about that.
Mocking them or him is something I would never want to do, so I melt into the background and watch and listen while my friend works.
For my own work, the best thing I can do is try to keep Oliverio’s human touch in mind every time I write.
Lord knows I try.
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NOTE: When writing my first marketing book, MILLION DOLLAR MAILING$, I asked readers of my newsletter, WHO'S MAILING WHAT! for ideas and contributions. Copywriter Bob Dolman sent in this splendid piece and I ran it as the book's epigraph. —DH
In recent years Bob Dolman's vocation as a writer and film director has been disrupted by a passion to paint. His television and film credits include SCTV Network starring John Candy and Joe Flaherty, Willow starring Val Kilmer, Far and Away starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, and The Banger Sisters starring Susan Sarandon, Goldie Hawn and Geoffrey Rush. His paintings and drawings have been exhibited in Los Angeles and Stockholm. In 2017 a solo exhibition of his paintings was held at Galleri Cupido, at Stockholm's Gamla Stan.
Bob lives in California, having wandered there many years ago from Canada. He is represented by Renée Nordståhl of Beckholmens Publishing in Stockholm, Sweden.
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