The Legend-News

The Hottest Romance In The Midwest
…is in a bread commercial

By Eric Levin

Jeannie Capps plays Mavis and Jim Finlayson is C.W. in the Old Home truck-driver commercials.

The din in the truck drivers' tavern near Interstate 80 in central Iowa suddenly ceased. Every eye focused on the TV set perched above the bar. Even the wafting smoke seemed to halt and the billowing froth in the beer mugs appeared to stand still. Sixty seconds later, the place erupted again. Laughter spewed across the room and the TV was swamped by the normal cacophony of the room. A hundred people—amazing as it sounds—had just been spellbound by a bread commercial.

It was one of a series of nine spots for the Metz Baking Co. of Sioux City, Iowa, that have become possibly the hottest attraction in the Midwest since spelling bees. Each commercial adds a new chapter to the saga of a lanky truck driver named C.W. McCall, his floppy-eared canine sidekick, Sloan, and their objet d'amour—Mavis, the blondest, gum-chewingest, eyelash-battingest waitress wo ever served up a quart of chili and a cup of hot "C".

C.W. and Mavis' romance began two year ago when the Metz company launched a new campaign for its Old Home bread and cake products. last June, the ads won a CLIO Aword—beating out nationwide campaigns for Kodak, Xerox, Metropolitan Life and Eastern Airlines.

Narrated entirely with music delivered in a Woody Guthrie "walkin' and talkin' blues" style, the commercials introduced C.W., a fictional driver for Old Home, who was delivering a load of bread to the "Old Home Fill-'Er-Up an' Keep-on-Truckin' Café." There he met Mavis, who is "stacked like a truck" and "built like a burlap bag fulla bobcats." As C.W. allowed: "She's got it too-gether."

A minute's worth of hard-drivin' C.W. McCall provides more truck lore and flavor than an hour of NBC's Movin' On. Each new commercial finds C.W. bound for the Old Home Café on wet roads "slick as a beaver" or "fulla holes—an axle-buster." One spot find him prodding his big semitrailer through a blizzard "colder that a Minnesota well-digger's gizzard" that put him "up to my drive shaft in 18 inches of slush …heavy white stuff!" On this occasion, he "tracked on in" to the cafe and asked smiling Mavis, "How's about warmin' up a stool fer an Old Home sled-dog name o' C.W.?" She dishes out some fried eggs on Old Home bread and a few seductive glances and then purrs, "Betcher truck won't start." "Cold truck, warm heart," says the playful C.W. and Mavis gives him a look "that'd melt the crust offa half a loaf o' Old Home Buttertop."

In the next commercial, C.W. "geared that tranny inta Old Home low" and took Mavis and her chaperone-mother to the drive-in movies to see "True Grit." Next time, C.W. shows up with a load of "dunkers" and retriever Sloan, who "give[s] a bark" and "[leaves] his heard at the Old Home Fill-'Er-Up an' Keep-on-Truckin' Café."

In the newest commercials, C.W. and Mavis attend a volunteer firemen's ball, where they kiss for the first time, and C.W., leading Mavis around on the dance floor, confides that she feels "as soft as a 8-pack o' Old Home hamburger buns." Next, Mavis and her mother, in their wrecker, tow C.W.'s rig out of a mudhole. And in the latest installment, the three go on a fishin' trip in which they catch "a tire an' a shoe an' a old gunnysack" and make Old Home sandwiches.

The C.W. and Mavis campaign was created by Bill Fries, a 46-year-old senior vice president and creative director for Bozell and Jacobs, Inc., Old Home's ad agency. Fries wrote all the lyrics, and sings them himself. His gritty bass delivery was so popular that a composite of the Old Home voice tracks was issued as a 45-rpm record. It sold about 300,000 copies and rose as high as No. 10 on the country-and-western hit parade. Now Fries has a contract with MGM records and has brought out another single and an album of trucking songs.

The commercials made a boom town of tiny Iowa community of Pisgah (pop. 250) where, in the commercials, the Old Home Café is located. The eatery doesn't really exist, of course, but Hinkel's Café in Pisgah has renamed itself "Hinkel's Old Home Fill-'Er-Up an' Keep-on-Truckin' Café No. 1." With other highway eateries jumping on the bandwagon, the trend is up to "Café No. 18." The admen used Pisgah residents as extras when the volunteer firemen's ball episode was filmed.

Pisgah school kids got the day off last year when Jim Finlayson and Jeannie Capps, who play C.W. and Mavis in the commercials, came to town and were given the key to the city. Finlayson, the owner of a small ad agency in Tyler, Texas, and Capps, a Dallas housewife and mother—both part-time actors—were also mobbed at a truckers' convention in Sioux City, Iowa. Finlayson, who admits he has never been able to get a truck past fifth gear, says playing C.W. McCall has given him a new respect for truckers. "I rate them alongside airline pilots now," he says.

The Metz company has distributed about 300,000 lapel pins, through its drivers and salesmen and by mail. They read "Mavis" or "C.W." Some waitresses objected to the leering, gum-chewing Mavis image, but most, it sees, slapped on the free pins and happily let customers call they Mavis. Metz and the Bozell agency, even after two years of the campaign, are inundated daily with requests for personal appearances by the actors and for the words to the songs. "A lot of grade schools want to use the lyrics for class plays," says Fries.

The commercials are carried on 25 TV stations in an area the includes Iowa, both Dakotas, Nebraska and southern Minnesota. Requests for exact air times have been so heavy that the baking company has begun placing ads in area newspapers announcing "premiere" times whenever a new commercial is released. And KCCI-TV in Des Moines, Iowa, produced a half-hour documentary about the C.W. and Mavis rage. In all, the campaign has boosted Metz's business handsomely. It has named its newest loaf "Truck Stop Bread."

"This is just like pouring gasoline on an open fire," laughs Bill Fries, who keeps busy cooking up new plots. The last thing he's in a hurry to do, understandably, is send Mavis and C.W. to the altar, because that would finish things up.

"But as long as there's viewer interest," he says, "we'll keep this soap opera going. Soon, C.W. and Mavis will have their first fight. Then there'll be the jealousy angle, as C.W. sees another waitress. we may introduce C.W.'s father, who can get interested in Mavis's mother. And Sloan, the dog, may have a romance with a poodle from Pisgah."