“Enjoy every sandwich.”

Warren Zevon’s sardonic views on life and death are apparent in many of the songs he wrote.

An early example is “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” which first appeared on Zevon’s self-titled 1976 album.

Those words were later used as the title of the posthumous biography written about him by his ex-wife Crystal Zevon and as the title of a 2-disc anthology of his music.

The sentiments expressed in that song reflected Zevon’s attitude and lifestyle during his first decades of rock stardom, which were heavily fueled by alcohol and drugs.

“I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” was his version of The Who’s famed line “Hope I die before I get old” or the earlier saying “Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse!” 

(To read about the real origin of the “Live fast, die young…” quote, which is often misattributed to actor James Dean, click this link.)

In the fall of 2002, at age 55, Zevon uttered a different, more poignant quip about life that became equally famous among his fans — “Enjoy every sandwich.”

Earlier that spring, Zevon had released the album My Ride’s Here. At the time, he said it was “a meditation on death.” A few months later, Zevon publicly announced that he had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer.

One of the many longtime fans who were saddened to hear that news was David Letterman. During 1980s and 1990s, Zevon was a favorite musical guest of Letterman on his late night shows. Over the years, they became friends.

On October 30, 2002, Warren Zevon made one last appearance on Late Night with David Letterman. At Letterman’s request, he was the sole guest for the entire show.

During the course of the show, Zevon performed three songs: "Mutineer" from his 1995 album of the same name, “Genius” from My Ride’s Here and one of Letterman’s old favorites “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” from Zevon’s classic 1978 album Excitable Boy (the album that included his biggest hit, “Werewolves of London”).

Before Zevon sang his first song, Letterman talked with him about his life and his medical condition.

Zevon’s usual dark humor showed through in much of their conversation.

For example, when Letterman initially brought up the lung cancer diagnosis, Zevon joked: “I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for twenty years.”

Zevon’s answer was more serious when Letterman asked him if his approach to life and music had changed since he was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

He told Letterman: “You put more value on every minute...You know I always kinda thought I did that. I really always enjoyed myself. But it’s more valuable now. You’re reminded to enjoy every sandwich and every minute.”

Letterman asked if being aware of having terminal cancer gave Zevon some knowledge about life and death “that maybe I don’t know.”

In his reply, Zevon used the sandwich line again, making it forever memorable.

He answered thoughtfully: “Not unless I know how much, how much you’re supposed to enjoy every sandwich.”

After this final appearance on the Letterman show, Zevon survived for about nine months — long enough to finish one more studio album, titled The Wind.

It was released on August 26, 2003. Less than two weeks later, on September 7, 2003, Zevon died.

I’ll admit that I teared up when I first listened to one of the songs on that album, “Keep Me in Your Heart.”

I do, Warren.

And, at age 62, as I become ever more aware of the fragility, beauty and shortness of life, your words “Enjoy every sandwich” resonate ever more loudly in my mind.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Post them on the Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Further reading, viewing and listening…

     • YouTube videos of Warren Zevon’s appearances on Letterman shows

     • The official Warren Zevon website

     • The Warren Zevon Other Page

     • The AmercianHitNetwork.com post about Zevon’s last appearance on the Letterman show

     • The American Spectator post about Zevon’s last appearance on the Letterman

“Serutan spelled backwards spells Nature’s.”

On October 23, 1934 the company Healthaids, Inc. filed a trademark application for an advertising slogan it was using to promote its laxative product, Serutan.

Early cans of Serutan (and later bottles) featured the words “Read It Backwards” under the product’s name.

The trademarked ad slogan, which quickly became famous, made the point more directly:

      “Serutan spelled backwards spells Nature’s.”

In the 1930s and 1940s, Serutan was a sponsor of several popular radio shows, including Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts and news shows featuring the “muckraking” journalist Drew Pearson.

Serutan also sponsored a number of early television shows in the 1950s, like Ernie Kovacs’ morning show Three To Get Ready. (In 1951, when Serutan ads took over a full five minutes of Three To Get Ready, Kovacs sarcastically mocked this extra-long commercial break by calling himself “Ernie Scavok” for weeks.)

Since Serutan’s “vegetable hydrogel” product was heavily targeted to older people concerned about “regularity,” it was a particularly good fit for The Lawrence Welk Show.

In fact, from the 1950s and into the 1970s, Serutan was a major sponsor of Welk’s show, along with other senior-oriented products like the vitamin supplement Geritol.

Bandleader and host Lawrence Welk would often introduce a Serutan commercial and then turn it over to an announcer.

For example, in a typical Serutan commercial break from 1964, Welk introduced the ad by saying: “Here’s Bob Warren to help folks over 35 solve a common problem.”

The ad that followed showed some happy “folks over 35,” then a woman who looked distressed, with the caption “After 35" at the bottom of the screen.

Announcer Bob Warren helpfully explained:

“You know the years over 35 could be the best of your life. But as you get older, you may feel grouchy and out of sorts, because of irregularity. After 35, your system slows down. What you may need today is the all-vegetable laxative aid Serutan, which is specially made for folks over 35. That’s because Serutan provides the peristaltic stimulation for more normal regularity. This is different from pills, salts or oils. Serutan acts like the naturally laxative hydrogel in fruits and vegetables to help keep you regular. So, if after 35, if you feel grouchy and out of sorts, take Serutan daily to help stimulate your slowed-down system to more normal regularity. Remember, when you read Serutan backwards, it spells nature’s.”

By the time The Lawrence Welk Show went off the air in 1982, Serutan was being pushed off store shelves by newer laxatives.

Today, it’s no longer sold. But the slogan “Serutan spelled backwards spells Nature’s” was firmly embedded in our language and is still being quoted and spoofed.

Many people who never saw a bottle of Serutan — and even those who have no idea what Serutan is — are familiar with the slogan or at least with the “X spelled backwards spells Y” catchphrase formula, which is often used for humorous effect.

If you’re a National Lampoon fan (like me), you might recall that the Lampoon’s great spoof Bored of the Rings: A Parody of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings used the name Serutan for the character who was Bored’s version of the evil wizard Saruman in Tolkien’s Trilogy.

Not long ago, I saw a YouTube video of some giggling teenage girls gleefully spoofing the old Serutan slogan.

Well, yuck it up while you can, girls. Someday you’ll be old yourselves and downing your daily laxatives. It won’t be Serutan. But it might well be a product made with the same key ingredient that was in Serutan — psyllium.

Psyllium is in a number of modern “fiber supplements,” such as Metamucil.

I suppose Metamucil may be as good or better than Serutan at helping “folks over 35 solve a common problem.” But it doesn’t have the same potential for a good slogan when spelled backwards.

For more Serutan trivia see...

• The Healthaids, Inc. entry in the book Sold on Radio: Advertisers in the Golden Age of Broadcasting by Jim Cox

• “Serutan Yob,” the spoof song “For Backward Boys And Girls Under 40” by Red Ingle & The Unnatural Seven

• The “Laxative ‘In’ Product For Over 35 Crowd” page, on the great Old-Time Radio website

• The discussion of the pursuit of "regularity" in the book Inner Hygiene: Constipation and the Pursuit of Health in Modern Society by James C. Whorton

• The 1945 Health Instruction Yearbook entry noting that the Federal Trade Commission had issued a cease-and-desit order against Healthaids, Inc. to stop “any advertisement which represents directly or indirectly that Serutan is a cure or remedy for constipation.”

*     *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

Comments? Corrections? Post them on the Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading, listening and viewing…

“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.”

It’s difficult to pigeonhole Teddy Roosevelt.

He was a Republican for most of his political career, including his two terms as President of the United States from 1901 to 1909.

Then, in 1912, he decided the Republican Party had become too cozy with big corporate interests.

So he left the GOP and founded the Progressive Party (nicknamed “the Bull Moose Party” after Roosevelt told reporters he was fit to run for president again and feeling as “strong as a bull moose”).

Some of statements Teddy uttered during his long political career make sound him like a right-wing conservative. Some make him sound like a left-wing liberal.

On October 12, 1915, he gave a controversial speech to the Knights of Columbus in New York City that managed to combine Tea Party-style anti-immigrant rhetoric with comments that FOX News commentators would likely attack as liberal, anti-business and soft on the issue of illegal aliens.

This was the speech that launched the famous and still controversial term “hyphenated American.”

“There is no room in this country,” Roosevelt bellowed, “for hyphenated Americanism…German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans. There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.”

Those words sound like something Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck might say.

And, many conservatives would certainly applaud the part of the speech in which Roosevelt said immigrants to the United States should be required to learn English.

They might find it harder to embrace other parts of Roosevelt’s “hyphenated Americans” speech.

Like the part when he said:

“Any discrimination against aliens is a wrong, for it tends to put the immigrant at a disadvantage and to cause him to feel bitterness and resentment during the very years when he should be preparing himself for American citizenship. If an immigrant is not fit to become a citizen, he should not be allowed to come here. If he is fit, he should be given all the rights to earn his own livelihood, and to better himself, that any man can have.”

This speech and others that Roosevelt gave on immigration and immigrants continue to generate controversy.

People on both sides of the current debate over “illegal aliens” have used excerpts from his speeches to support their views.

Ironically, there’s an element of truth to both uses of his quotes — because it’s just as difficult to pigeonhole Teddy Roosevelt today as it was when he was alive.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

NOTE TO HISTORY BUFFS: You can read the story the New York Times published on October 13, 1915 about Roosevelt’s “hyphenated Americans” speech by clicking this link.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Post them on the Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading…

 

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…”

Three years after Jack Kerouac coined the term “The Beat Generation” a group of Beat poets gathered at the Six Gallery on Fillmore Street in San Francisco for a poetry reading.

The date was October 7, 1955 and Kerouac was there. So were local Beat celebrities Gary Snyder, Phil Lamantia, Michael McClure and a then virtually unknown poet named Allen Ginsberg.

In his novel, The Dharma Bums (published in 1958), Kerouac called it “the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance.” He then described this memorable scene:

“Everyone was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbook was reading his, wailing his poem ‘Wail’ drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling ‘Go! Go! Go!’ (like a jam session).”

“Alvah Goldbook” was Kerouac’s humorous alias for the Ginsberg and “Wail” was the fictitious name he gave to Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” — which Ginsberg first read in public that October night.

“Howl” was a stylistically wild, groundbreaking poem that quickly became both famous and infamous.

The beginning of the long run-on sentence that makes up the first part of the poem is the most quoted bit:

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
       starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
       looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
       to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking
       in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating
       across the tops of cities contemplating jazz..."

“Howl” was instantly revered by the Beat crowd and eventually gained worldwide fame. But it had a rocky start in printed form.

In the poem, Ginsberg writes graphically about heterosexual and homosexual sex and about the use of illegal drugs — forbidden subjects in the uptight society of the 1950s.

When “Howl” was printed by a British book publisher in 1955, copies were seized as “pornography” by Customs officials.

In 1956, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, owner of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and a popular beat poet in his own right, published “Howl” in the U.S., in a small collection of Ginsberg’s poems titled Howl and Other Poems.

Copies of the book were soon seized by the San Francisco police and Ferlinghetti was arrested for publishing and selling an “obscene and indecent” book.

At the trial, Ferlinghetti was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union.

During the course of the trial, Judge Clayton W. Horn listened to nine literary experts testify about the book’s literary merits. In October 1957, he issued a carefully thought out ruling.

Horn concluded that Howl and Other Poems met the current legal test of having redeeming social importance and was not “obscene.”

Thus, Ferlinghetti was found not guilty — and “Howl” and Ginsberg moved on to wider and everlasting fame.

Here are some of the other famous quotes and phrases linked to October 7:

• Former Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz’s infamous comment about blacks wanting “good sex, ‘loose shoes’ and ‘a warm place’ when they use the toilet” was published in the October 7, 1976 issue of Rolling Stone magazine.

• “Here is America struck by God Almighty in one of its vital organs, so that its greatest buildings are destroyed. Grace and gratitude to God.” - You may not remember those words, but if you were watching the news in 2001 you remember when Osama Bin Laden delivered them. They were the opening words in the videotaped statement he released on October 7, 2001, gloating about Al-Quaeda’s September 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon building in Arlington, Virginia.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? Post them on the Famous Quotations Facebook page.

 Related reading, reading and viewing…

“The forgotten middle class…”

On October 3, 1991, Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, held a press conference in Little Rock to announce that he was officially running as a candidate to be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. 

Clinton used the phrase “the forgotten middle class” several times in his announcement that day.

It later became become closely associated with him after he won the Democratic nomination and used it in subsequent stump speeches during the 1992 presidential election.

In his speech on October 3, 1991, Clinton spoke of “the forgotten middle class” three times.

At the beginning, after thanking his wife Hillary, his daughter Chelsea and his friends and supporters, he said:

“All of you, in different ways, have brought me here today, to step beyond a life and a job I love, to make a commitment to a larger cause: preserving the American Dream; restoring the hopes of the forgotten middle class; reclaiming the future for our children.”

In the middle of the speech, Clinton said:

“Together I believe we can provide leadership that will restore the American dream — that will fight for the forgotten middle class.”

Finally, he closed by saying:

“This is not just a campaign for the Presidency – it is a campaign for the future, for the forgotten hard-working middle class families of America who deserve a government that fights for them.”

After that, Clinton used and reused “the forgotten middle class” many times in his stump speeches on the way to winning the Democratic nomination and then the presidential election of November 1992.

So, it’s no wonder that his use of the phrase is famous. But he didn’t coin it.

Democratic politician Alfonse D’Amato used the slogan, “A Fighter for the Forgotten Middle Class” in his successful 1980 campaign to win a New York Senate seat.

Before that, in 1977, “the forgotten middle class” was used in newspaper interviews by Pat Caddell, the pollster and political strategist for then Democratic Presidential Candidate Jimmy Carter.

Before that, it was used by a number of other politicians and candidates in the 1960s.

And, of course, “the forgotten middle class” was inspired by a similar rhetorical phrase made famous in the early 1930s by Franklin D. Roosevelt: “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.”

But we’re not quite at the bottom of the quote pyramid yet.

Roosevelt’s famed phrase was inspired by the “the forgotten man,” a term coined by Yale social scientist William Graham Sumner. He used it as the title of an essay that was published in his 1883 book What Social Classes Owe to Each Other.

Sumner may have been inspired by some earlier phrase but, if so, it has apparently been forgotten.

Here are some of the other famous quotes and phrases linked to October 3:

• “Dig for Victory.” – World War II slogan used to urge British citizens to plant gardens to increase food supplies, first used by British politician Reginald Dorman-Smith in a radio broadcast on October 3, 1939. The slogan helped inspire the term “Victory gardens” in America after the U.S. entered the war.

• “I’m Cheryl. Fly me.” - The infamously suggestive ad slogan used by National Airlines in the 1970s. According to the company's trademark filing for the slogan, it was first used in commerce on October 3, 1971.

*     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *     *

Comments? Corrections? on the Famous Quotations Facebook page.

Related reading, reading and viewing…