Village Voice Praise for a Times Column

August 18, 1960, Vol. V, No. 43

By John Wilcock

One of the brightest spots in one of the dullest of newspapers, the New York Times, is the daily column buried away in the business and classified-ad pages and devoted to news of advertising.

Some recent columns, for example, have dealt with how companies got the rights to put advertising words to popular songs; why the formerly static Miss Rheingold is this year suddenly jumping and running around; the attempts of the cigar-makers to shed the "tough guy" image; the day when Life and Modern Romances hit the stands with identical covers; why Brigitte Bardot sued a mineral-water company, and what happens when you deliberately make a mistake in an Arthur Murray telephone quiz.

All these and many other bright items have been dug up by Robert Aiden, an under-40-ish reporter who took over the column six months ago after 19 years on the Times during which he worked his way up from messenger boy.

In his column one day, Bob carried the news that in one way or another the average American is exposed to 1581 different advertising messages every day of his life. Which is one of the reasons, one supposes, why (as he reported on another occasion) there's a bunch of hard-headed businessmen already at work with plans for turning Mother's Day into a three-week festival.

[Each weekday morning, we post an excerpt from another issue of the Voice, going in order from our oldest archives. Visit our Clip Job archive page to see excerpts back to 1956.]