This picture of a turkey on fire is an ad for chewing gum. It appears in a Woman’s Day magazine from December 1969.
Here’s how the pitch meeting went down.
Dick: Tom, what do we have?
Tom: Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum.
Harry: Everyone loves delicious Wrigley’s Spearmint Gum.
Dick: Very useful if you can’t smoke.
Tom: What?
Dick: Sure. Imagine if you couldn’t light up. You’d have to chew gum instead.
Harry: But where?
Dick: I don’t know. On an airplane. Or at the movies.
Tom: The hospital. The maternity ward. School.
Harry: You have got to be kidding.
Tom: You’re right, it doesn’t bear thinking about. Speaking of which . . . give me a toke of that.
Dick: Where were we?
Harry: Hey, Tom. Tommy Boy. Thomas. Sir. Pass it along.
Tom: Oh man, that’s the good sh*it.
Dick: You can’t say “shit.”
Tom: I didn’t; I said “sh*it,” with an asterisk. It doesn’t count.
Harry: I’m hungry. Remember that turkey your sister made the other day?
Dick: The one she burned?
Harry: Yeah. Let’s use that. Let’s have a turkey on fire.
Tom: For what occasion?
Harry: Christmas. We could tell people to sing “Happy Turkey” instead of Happy Birthday. It would be hilarious.
Dick: It could work. It could work. My sister better not see it.
Harry: We could adorn it with burning sugar cubes. Anything will do.
Tom: It’s the work of a lunatic genius. Three lunatic geniuses. Like the Three Wise Men. We could drape the thing with a garland of cranberries.
Dick: You understand that we are using a birthday Christmas turkey which has been set on fire to sell chewing gum, yes?
Harry: It’s mad. It’s the work of mad, mad, very stoned men.
Dick: No-one will notice. We won’t be able to get away with this sort of thing in 1970. Better do it now while we still can.
Tom: What’s happening in 1970?
Dick: Looking for a new job, I expect. Going to get kicked out of this one for sure. Might as well go out in style. Wow, I’m high.
Woman’s Day, December 1969
