Gary Dahl (entrepreneur)

Gary Ross Dahl (December 18, 1936 – March 23, 2015) was an American copywriter, creative director, advertising agency owner, entrepreneur and the creator of the Pet Rock.

Early life

Dahl was born in Bottineau, North Dakota and raised in Spokane, Washington. His mother was a waitress and his father was a lumber-mill worker. He studied at Washington State University. He worked as a freelance copy editor.^[1]

Career

Pet Rock

While living in Los Gatos, California, he was sitting in a bar listening to friends complain about their pets. He joked that he had the perfect pet, a rock.^[1][2]

This led to the idea of selling rocks to people as pets, complete with instructions. The instruction book was the real product, which was full of gags and puns. The 1975 fad only lasted about half a year, but that was enough to make Dahl a millionaire.

From the proceeds of his fad "pets," Dahl opened a bar in Los Gatos, the ironically named Carrie Nation's (named after the famous bar smasher). He later attempted to follow up this success selling "Sand Breeding Kits" and "Red China Dirt," ostensibly a plan to smuggle mainland China into the US, one cubic centimeter at a time. These novelties failed to attract as much interest as the Pet Rock.^[3]

Advertising and writing

Dahl's agency, Gary Dahl Creative Services, in Campbell, California specialized in electronic advertising. He had written and produced hundreds of television commercials and thousands of radio commercials for a wide variety of businesses, including financial, automotive, wireless, education, retail, high-tech and dot-coms.

In 2000, Dahl won the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, the San José State University sponsored competition that awards authors for crafting particularly bad "purple prose." He defeated over 4,000 entries from all over the world. Dahl's winning entry:

The heather-encrusted Headlands, veiled in fog as thick as smoke in a crowded pub, hunched precariously over the moors, their rocky elbows slipping off land's end, their bulbous, craggy noses thrust into the thick foam of the North Sea like bearded old men falling asleep in their pints.^[4]

Personal

Dahl lived in the hills above Los Gatos and owned another house in Milpitas, California.^[1]

His wife recalled in an interview with The Daily Mail that the Pet Rock craze 'was great fun when it happened'.^[5] Over time, however, 'people would come to him with weird ideas, expecting him to do for them what he had done for himself. And a lot of times they were really, really stupid ideas.'

By 1988, Dahl said he had avoided interviews for years because of what he called 'a bunch of wackos' appearing out of nowhere with threats and lawsuits.

He died on March 23, 2015 in Jacksonville, Oregon of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.^[1]

Bibliography

• Dahl, Gary (2007). Advertising For Dummies. For Dummies. ISBN 978-0470045831. 

References