Mr. Gribbin is best remembered for some notable campaigns
in 1930s -1950s, such as Arrow Shirts (1930s and 1940s), Borden's Milk
(1940s and 1950s), and Travelers Insurance (1940s and 1950s).
Mr. Gribbin's favorite copy was an ad without headline for Travelers Insurance:
When I was 28, I thought I'd probably never get married. I'd always been over-tall, and my hands and feet were always getting in my way, and my clothes never looked nice on me the way clothes looked on other girls.
It seemed pretty certain that no knight would ever come along on his big white charger and carry me away. But a man did come along.
Everett wasn't the masterful kind you dream about when you.re sixteen, but a shy and awkward sort of fellow who didn't exactly know what to do with his hands and his feet, either. He saw something in me that I didn't know I had myself. I actually began to feel like somebody. In fact, both of us did.
Pretty soon, we got so used to each other that we felt lose when we weren't together, so we figured it probably was the sort of love you read about in the story books, and we got married.
It was a day in April, and the apple trees were in blossom, and the whole earth smelt sweet. That was nearly 30 years ago and it's been that way almost every day since. I can't believe so many years have gone by. They just carried Ev and me along so peacefully, like a canoe on a quite river, that you didn't realize that you were moving.
We never went to Europe. We never even went to California. I guess we didn't need to, for home was big enough for us. I wish we'd had children. But we couldn't. I was like Sarah in the Bible, only the Good Lord didn't work a miracle for me. Perhaps He thought that Everett was enough.
Well, Ev died two years ago last April. Quietly and smilingly, just as he had lived. The apple trees were in blossom and the earth again smelt sweet. I felt too numb to cry. When my brother came in to help me straighten out Ev's affairs, I found he'd been thoughtful, as I suppose men built like him always are. There wasn't a great deal in the bank, but there was an insurance policy that will take care of all my needs as long as I live.
I'm as content as a woman can be when a man she really loved has gone.
Moral: Insure in The Travelers. The Travelers Insurance Company. The Travelers Indemnity Company. The Travelers Fire Insurance Company. Hartford, Connecticut.
Some other Gribbin's noteworthy copy for Arrow Shirts included the following:
A man smartly dressed sitting with a beautiful woman kneeling at his feet says, "I expect other girls to propose to me, too." He goes on to recount that the way he became so popular was due to his mother. One night while playing cards she said, "Chauncey, the trouble with you is your shirts-they look funny. If you had a shirt like the fellow I saw in the Arrow ad, you may get a girl. And you are old enough to have one." Chauncey explains that he went out and bought an Arrow shirt. Now all the girls want to marry him, and he expects more proposals followed by happily married life (Schofield 1954, p.38 ). · A homely man declared, ÒEven I look good in an Arrow shirt!Ó (Madden, Cooper & Cole 1994, p.175).
A man is pictured talking to a horse hitched to a milk wagon. The unusual headline reads, "My friend, Joe Holmes, is now a horse."Joe, who had died, had always wanted to be a horse. Now he has returned as the animal of his choice. "I am now wearing a comfortable collar for the first time in my life," said the horse (alias Joe). ÒMy shirt collars always use to shrink and murder me."Gee, his friends think, I should have told him about Arrow Shirts, which never shrink." (Watkins 1959, pp.132-33).
