Dave Adeney penned ‘Our product is steel …’
You know what they say, “Yes, fun, until someone loses an eye,” and we laugh because no one’s really going to lose an eye. Right?
Dave Adeney lost an eye. As a boy. In a bow and arrow accident.
You know what else they say? “Our product is steel; our strength is people.” Dave, who died on Jan. 13 at the age of 73, wrote that famous slogan.
It was a bow and arrow game, but the arrow was sharp and hit him on the brow. As Dave told his grandkids years later, “It looked like just a bad cut.” The doctor bandaged him up, and it appeared to heal well, but got infected.
You noticed Dave’s glass eye right away. Maybe because its immobility contrasted so sharply with the rest of the face that formed a smile around it, the quickness of his features, full of lively play and the sparkle of wit. You noticed but instantly forgot, because the story wasn’t about what had stopped — but what was in continual progress.
We still haven’t forgotten “Our product is ...” The motto is draped across the overpass on Burlington Street in the industrial heartland. That heartland isn’t pumping out as much steel as when Dave wrote those words in 1969. But the words are part of the culture.
Yet Dave could no more be reduced to the fixed, one-ply identity of “famous slogan guy” than he could be captured whole in the dimensions of a glass eye.
The accident, the slogan, these were signposts in his life, but there was his piano playing and composing. There are his children (Kathryn, Heather, Peter, and Chris a.k.a. indie act Wax Mannequin), by first wife artist Jane (Baker) Adeney. There was his writing, sense of humour, playful intelligence and tenor singing.
He wrote a story for his six grandkids to explain the glass eye. He entitled it “Grandpa looked to see if an arrow was coming and it was.” Classic Adeney.
Dave was born in Paris, Ont., delivered newspapers on his bike, was an honours’ student and class valedictorian in high school, and studied history and English at McMaster.
He cast about in the insurance business, the teaching profession and writing copy for the Sears catalogue. But he caught his stride when he landed at R.T. Kelly Advertising in Hamilton, in 1968, partly on the strength of a resume that lamented “I’m a young copy jockey from Simpson Sears/This catalogue writing drives me to tears.” Classic Adeney.
The next year, he was assigned the Dofasco account. With the help of then creative director John Lawrence Reynolds, who built a radio campaign around Dave’s slogan, the new guy had hit one out of the park and it sailed around the country on radio waves for several decades. Marketing magazine put it among the 50 greatest Canadian ad campaigns of all time.
Over the years Dave worked for Urban Associates, again at R.T. Kelly’s for a second run, as creative director, and as head of his own consulting firm. He volunteered widely.
In 2000, Dave married Linda Layton. They sang in Oakville’s 100-voice secular Tempus Choral Society and attended the First Unitarian Church of Hamilton.
His son Peter, the famous Mr. Money Moustache blogger (frugal “badass” personal finance), featured a moving eulogy to Dave in his latest post.
“Our childhood came with free impromptu concerts every day,” Peter recalls. “He was always disappearing to play some badass jazz piano, throwing in formal or silly lyrics with his fine tenor voice.”
Linda tells me, “If there was a lull in conversation with new people, I’d mention Dave’s slogan. That embarrassed him, but often got the reply, ‘That’s famous!’ Younger people would just say ‘Huh?’”
Seven weeks before his death, he was diagnosed with brain cancer. “He bravely declined surgery,” says Linda. He died at the Carpenter Hospice in Burlington. A celebration of life is scheduled for Feb. 18, 1 p.m., First Unitarian Church of Hamilton, 170 Dundurn St. S.