Gordon Bowker’s Best Advice to Me: “It’s Crackers to Slip a Rozzer”

The best piece of advice I’ve ever received came from Gordon Bowker, who died last month. This was remarkable because Gordon was not a dispenser of advice. It’s not that there weren’t people and situations that irritated him; he just didn’t dedicate much energy toward trying to rearrange the furniture of life, or even complain about it, unless it was absolutely necessary. And then it was usually done with an eyeroll or a vivid expression rather than words.

We both worked at Heckler Associates, the company he founded with Terry Heckler. I was the rookie writer and Gordon was a few months away from retiring because he and his two business partners had just sold their small coffee company.

Gordon and I were driving to meet with a client whose work I was about to take over from him now that he was retiring. Feeling anxious about that responsibility, I was yammering away, complaining about minor stuff or the sorry state of the world or the last bad movie I’d seen. Since the Heckler Associates offices had open cubicles, Gordon was used to overhearing my extemporaneous rants, so I assume he was tuning me out. I was used to his silences and was taking advantage of the free airtime and captive audience to bloviate aimlessly.

When I finally took a breath, he took advantage of the brief gap in my monologue to say, in his distinctive deadpan delivery, “You know, Kathy, you don’t have to talk all the time.”

That was so inarguably true that I had to laugh. It was offered more as an observation than a criticism, as if my mindless nattering, which is what Greg Palmer called it (more about him later), was an phenomenon that he had been quietly considering.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ve never given that idea much thought until now. But I will.”

“No problem,” he replied.

If you’re one of those people who has always wished that real people delivered the kind of concise and trenchant bits of wisdom that the characters in movies do, you’ll know why that moment has stayed with me, and why Gordon was so much fun to be around. I’ve been trying to follow his suggestion about giving peace-and-quiet a chance ever since. Like all self-improvement projects, it’s been a work in progress.

In case it’s not clear, that story was intended to demonstrate Gordon’s kindness. He wasn’t one of those people who are so performatively and aggressively kind that it becomes a sort of sinister bullying. He was inherently kind. It was in his bones. Fortunately, Silly Putty thinned with a little java also ran through his veins, which kept his kindness from becoming soft or sloppy, just as his gentleness took the sharp edge off his brilliance. It was all perfectly balanced, which is why everyone liked him so much, and why no one who had an ounce of emotional intelligence was ever intimidated by him.

Okay, I was intimidated by him because he was so good at the thing we were both paid to do at Heckler, which was to dream up stuff that would entertain people, thereby convincing them to drink beer or buy coffee beans or other things that they didn’t really need but would probably make them happy. It was harmless but hard work. At least it was for me. It never seemed to be hard for Gordon.

I’m proud of myself for getting this far into the story without writing the word Starbucks — although god knows I’ve dropped enough hints. But in case this is news, Gordon was not just a creative genius. He was also an entrepreneurial genius, a quality that earned him more attention than he was comfortable with. He never talked about being a private person the way many public figures do without really meaning it, but he was. Being one of the three founders of Starbucks took some of the privacy away from him.

I don’t think he ever said this to me, but I always got the feeling that he was embarrassed by the size and scope of the retail behemoth that he and his partners had inadvertently unleashed on the planet when they sold their sweet little company to a guy who knew how to take a great idea and run with it and run and run with it. Unfortunately, the one thing they weren’t able to wrap up and pass along in that deal was their sense of proportion.

In the month since he died, I have been struggling to figure out how to approach the problem of writing about Gordon. It wasn’t going well until I heard that Robert Redford died. I started thinking about that, which distracted me for an hour while I made lunch and enjoyed the sensation of my self-imposed deadline withering away. However, it is a truth almost universally unacknowledged that distraction is a writer’s best friend. The toasted tomato-and-cheese sandwich was barely out of the pan when a random thought about one of my favorite Redford movies leaped a gap in my brain, crashed into a memory about Gordon, kicked off a spark, and I found my way in.

A little more than a year ago, Gordon and I were exchanging phone calls about our involvement in a documentary film (Rainier: A Beer Odyssey) about the cult of Rainier Beer, which was created by the ads that were created by Heckler/Bowker (later, Heckler Associates), the company that Gordon and Terry Heckler founded and where I worked as a writer and producer from 1978 to 1998. During our telephonic backing-and-forthing about this, he left me a voicemail (remember those?) at the end of which he added, “Remember, it’s crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.”

I immediately realized that he figured — and to be fair, it was a good bet — that I would have no idea what that meant. He was wrong. I called him back and left a voicemail, at the end of which I added, “I know it’s crazy to try to bribe a cop with counterfeit money. That’s why I’ve never tried it.”

The next day, he called me back. When I picked up, he said, “How did you know what that meant?”

I said, “Greg Palmer.”

“Oh,” he said. “That explains it.”

The phrase, “It’s crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.” comes from a crime novel (The Fashion in Shrouds) by Margery Allingham, which is one of a series of books that feature the aristocratic amateur detective, Albert Campion, who, among other quirks, armed himself with a squirt gun instead of a real one. The character who first uttered that sentence was Magersfontein Lugg, a reformed burglar and burly tough guy who was Campion’s factotum and comedic foil, whose command of 1930s British street slang was flawless.

The first person to utter that colorful maxim to me was Greg Palmer. I don’t remember when or why — he and I communicated largely via non sequitur — but it’s the kind of thing that once you’ve heard it, never leaves your mind. At least that’s true for Gordon and for Greg and for me, and possibly for you now, for which I apologize. But you never know; someday, you may find it useful.

If you have been following the wayward breadcrumbs, you’ve probably figured out that what it means is: “It’s crazy to bribe a cop with counterfeit money.” And that is what Robert Redford’s character in The Sting tries to do, which is what makes this is a classic Gordon Bowker story: You never see it coming, you have no idea where it’s going, it is populated with odd characters, some strange things happen along the way, but the point, or lack of it, always becomes clear in the end.

I was lucky that I got to work with both Greg Palmer and Gordon Bowker when I was young enough to appreciate that you can be mentored by people who aren’t actually trying to mentor you. In my first job out of college, I was the producer for Greg’s talk show on KTW; working with him for three years was life-changing. A few years later, after the station was shut down (there’s a story), Greg went on to become the on-air arts and entertainment reporter at KING and a documentary producer at KCTS. I took a job as the copy director at KZOK, hosted and produced a talk show at KRAB, and became a contributing writer for The Weekly. Shortly after that I was hired as a writer and creative director at Heckler Associates, where I worked with a bunch of brilliant people, including Gordon.

Watching and listening to Greg and Gordon, I learned to be a better, more self-critical, and more imaginative writer. They were both organically and genuinely original, always drawn to whatever was odd, obscure, goofy, and sublime, preferably all at once. Neither was interested in performing or personifying any of those qualities since they were connoisseurs and contemplators, not comedians, but encountering those qualities in the wild brought them them joy. Just to pick two random examples, they both liked Mickey Rooney and they both knew that it’s crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide. The more the world seemed to welcome weirdness, the happier those two were.

Greg passed away 16 years ago, Gordon died last month, and Robert Redford a week ago. That confluence of loss reminded me that everything is connected to everything else just as those three people will be connected by that ridiculous phrase in my mind for as long as I have one. Gordon would have enjoyed that.