Better Late

Don Mokrynski did not exactly radiate gratitude when he accepted the DMA List Leaders Award in 2004.

“It's about bloody time,” he said. Then he added: “Ben Franklin had to be dead two centuries before he got any recognition from the DMA.”

Don was joking, but there was a grain of truth to what he said. The timing of these things tends to be slightly off, especially when it comes to the DMA Hall of Fame.

Take the case of Andi Emerson, the founder of the John Caples Awards. She'll be inducted in October.

She deserves it, and I'm thrilled to hear it, but there's one problem: She died in February.

It should have happened last year, when the woman was here to appreciate it. For that matter, she should have been elected in 1995.

The same thing occurred with fulfillment expert Stanley Fenvessy. He was nominated one or two times, then made it the year after he died.

It'll probably happen with Richard Viguerie years from now. He'll be up there somewhere trading war stories with the Gipper before he gets in.

But the worst case I've heard is that of Bill Jayme. (Did I hear it from Denny Hatch?) Bill was nominated, so the story goes, and asked to fill out a form about himself. When they asked what he did in his spare time, he wrote, “I masturbate.”

That showed Bill's contempt for the whole thing, and it apparently killed the nomination. But he, too, made it after he died.

This could be an apocryphal tale, but what if it isn't? Why was Jayme, one of the greatest copywriters who ever lived, acceptable only in death?

Leave it to Richard Levey to come up with an explanation: “He stopped masturbating.”

Well, better late than never.