Every so often, the death of a famous person touches one in an unexpected way. That happened to me a little more than a week ago. A true cultural icon, someone who in his small way redefined our lives, had died unexpectedly. He was only 50. His passing left a void that will not soon be filled.
I was surprised at how the death bothered me, and even more surprised to learn that my friends were similarly affected.
I’m speaking, of course, of Billy Mays.
If you have watched television much in the last decade or so, you know Billy Mays. Big, bearded, and burly, with a non-threatening, overly enthusiastic voice, he would in two minutes prove to us why we would be complete fools not to buy whatever modern labor-saving product he was hawking.
He was the modern manifestation, the crystallization, of a trade as old as commerce itself. It has gone by many names: tub-thumper, drummer, ballyhooer, spieler, hawker, grafter (not grifter!), snake-oil-peddler, and, in its modern and honorable manifestation, pitchman.
It is a real trade, with its pecking order, its terms of art, its tricks and methods, its well-known characters and its stars, and among the latter none was brighter than Billy Mays.
He came up in the time-honored fashion, peddling his wares at county fairs, then state fairs, then rising to the boardwalk at Atlantic City, before that place was a glitzy town of broken dreams.
He learned to “bally the tip” (the pitchman term for drawing a crowd), “nod them in” (creating excitement and an atmosphere that might cause people to part with their money), and “chill them” (getting them to actually part with that money). He paid his dues, and in the community of pitchmen, he was respected and well loved. He mastered what the British grafter Mark Lewis has called “a very hard way to make an easy living.”
Then he moved to television. His first big national success was, I believe, the incredible OxiClean, though it may have been incredible Orange Glo.
Thumping the tub on television is an art as old as the medium. My family fell for the seminal product, the incredible Chop-O-Matic, hawked by the then-unknown Ron Popeil.
There have been numerous others, the best being adept at selling their wares in 60 seconds. “Infomercials” are a relatively new thing, because at first there wasn’t a lot of money to buy blocks of expensive advertising time. Often, you would find the television hawker at your state fair; first it was of necessity, but later, as with Billy Mays, there was honor in still being able to draw a crowd, “keep it through the turn,” and “chill” it.
The phrase “as seen on TV” got its start.
The industry has grown. Some of the pitchmen have become semi-celebrities. There is “Mick,” the British seller of the incredible Magic Bullet, who looks a little like the result of a terrible gene-splicing experiment involving a human and a guinea pig. There is Vince Shlomi, who had a little problem in March with a woman he had hired to come to his hotel room in Miami to entertain him. She gave as good as she got and by the time the police arrived Vince’s face was a mess that not even the incredible ShamWow could mop up.
There is Anthony Sullivan, hawker of incredible floor care products primarily, and recently Billy Mays’s partner on the “Pitchmen” television series.
The products themselves have become a part of our lives, our culture, our humor. Who can forget the incredible Popeil’s Pocket Fisherman? Who does not remember the incredible Ginsu knife, for the select few who need to slice through both beer cans and tomatoes?
It is a testament to the effectiveness of the television pitchmen that many upscale, expensive products have adopted their approach and methods.
It harks back to a time, too, in which “salesmanship” was considered a virtue. I still think it is, but I’m not sure the sentiment is universal anymore.
Whenever I think of a pitchman, I’m drawn to the memorable scene from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, in which a sheriff is trying to round up a posse. He is getting little response from the crowd. Finally, he pleads, “What do you say?”
A voice comes boldly from the crowd. “I say, boys and girls, friends and enemies, meet the future! The future mode of transportation for the weary western world.” It is a “drummer.” The sheriff challenges him but he has an answer: “You got the crowd together — that’s half my work — and I just figured I’d sell a little … you’ll see — this item sells itself.” We learn that “this item” is a bicycle; later we learn that Butch fell for the spiel and bought one.
And, as he might have said, that’s the power of Billy Mays.
Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.