THE BIRTH OF THE CATCHES
After WW II ended I came home on July of 1946, having spent a year in the army of Occupation. I went to work for a rather large Ad agency called Benton & Bowles as a junior copywriter. I had a cubicle, a typewriter and a ream of paper. Life was good. Copywriters don't write a lot. They get an idea and write a headline. Then they study it and after a while they do another version. And another. And another. Sometime this can go on for days with the typewriter going only for a few minutes at a time sporadically during the day. But in the cubicle next to me the typewriter went all day every day. It was going when I came into work and still going when I left in the evening. Everyone marveled it this non-stop output. And as one writer joked, " what is that guy writing a novel or some thing?' One slow morning when his typewriter stopped for a moment I poked my head into that adjoining cubicle and introduced myself to the man working there. "Hi I'm your next door neighbor. Name's Arthur Kramer". He looked up and said" Glad to meet you Art. I was going to say hello but I'm glad you did since I have been really deep into something here. Hey, we must do lunch sometime. Oh, and by the way, the name is Joe. Joseph Heller."
One-day Joe's typewriter fell silent. Joe had gone. But about two years later Catch 22 burst upon the literary scene changing the literature of war forever. And y'know I felt strangely connected to that work having listened to it being written for so long. And sadly, we never did do lunch.
Copyright © 2002 Art Kramer and Coastal Computers, Inc.