Chapter One

Canoes and Commas

In 1980, my friend Eric King was working as the assistant sales manager for Grumman Boats. They were part of the same Grumman that built many of the fighter planes used in WWII and whose lunar module put Neil Armstrong on the moon. This division made boats and canoes. The canoes, in particular, were especially popular with summer camp owners because they were virtually indestructible. Millions of campers had fond memories of paddling around in one.

That’s why Grumman kept making them long after it was profitable to maintain such a tiny division: Roy Grumman always believed that the memories of summer fun at camp warmed the hearts of the congressmen and Pentagon staffers to whom the company was so beholden. (I have been told that it’s the same reason Johnson& Johnson still makes baby products, even though they bring in a tiny percentage of J&J’s profits. The emotional connection for most people is transcendent.)

Grumman Boats had for years retained a one-man PR shop in Manhattan—Rockwell& Newell. Dwight Rockwell started the business in 1975 with book publicist Ellie Newell. By the time I got there, he was in his mid-50s. Newell had moved on a long time before, but Dwight liked the symmetry of Rockwell& Newell. Plus, he’d once ordered 144 ballpoint pens embossed with the name from an in-flight magazine, and nothing was going to change until the supply of pens dried up.

Dwight was a great guy but a bit of a one-trick pony. His specialty was getting the senior editor ofOutdoor Life magazine to run quarterly special features on camping and fishing expeditions, which always prominently featured a Grumman canoe. He usually undertook these adventures by meeting the editor in one of the backwoods watering holes that punctuated the side streets east and west of Madison Avenue. They ser