Not that cash was problem-free. A lot of people actually sent dollar bills through the mail. (This was why I needed people I trusted to open the mail.) You could immediately feel the bills through the envelopes. Money has a certain, unique “spongy” quality that no other paper has. Soon I could tell through the envelopes which ones had one dollar and which two. These I’d sort into separate piles and add them up before tallying the checks. Rarely was my cash estimate off by even a dollar. I often wondered why mail handlers and postmen didn’t just steal the money. Whether it was their innate honesty, the vigilance of postal inspectors, or just the fear of losing a well-paying government job, I’m not sure. As I struggled to keep track of my cash and keep producing horoscopes, I didn’t know that our biggest avalanche of orders had not yet started. In the spring of 1974, my family was going to visit my grandmother for a week at her winter apartment in Florida. I had scheduled our regular free horoscope ad to run in the National Enquirer that week. I’d asked my then girlfriend (and now wife) to go to my post office box every day with a shopping bag to bring the mail to my house. She could open it, if time allowed. If not, I’d take care of it on my return. I just didn’t want the box to overfill.

Unfortunately, to my consternation, the Enquirer had decided to give away their own free horoscope that week as a promotion. They were charging $1 for postage and handling too. All you had to do was send in a self-addressed, stamped envelope. They even advertised the offer in glaring headlines on the front cover. This would surely wipe me out, I was sure. As soon as I saw the paper, I started calling the Enquirer and demanding a refund for my wasted ad.

I was not surprised when Debbie called to tell me there was a problem at the post office. What did surprise me was that the problem was not too little mail, but too much. Trays and trays of mail, to be exact. There was no way she could carry it all to my house and open it. She needed a car service just to pick up each day’s arrival. By the time I came home, mail had filled the entire family room in my parents’ basement and I needed to start using nonfamily members just to open it.

The Enquirer, you see, had put their free offer at the back of the paper to encourage people to read all the way through. My free offer appeared toward the front, however, so that the thousands of people who picked up the paper at the supermarket checkout confused my offer with the Enquirer’s.

People say you should never underestimate your opponents, or any other person, for that matter. This is very good advice, and I live by it. But there is a corollary piece of advice that I’ve learned to also keep in mind. Never overestimate people’s intelligence either. Most people, at least in some aspect of their lives, never outgrow their childhood. They want reassurance, hand-holding, toys, free gifts, costumes, excitement, surprises. In a word, they want to ignore reality and just be kids. Some are actually short on intelligence; others just choose not to use what they’ve got.

Fortunes have been made by those smart enough to not overestimate people’s intelligence. Look at the movie industry (particularly the action movies). Look at Las Vegas. Look at time-sharing. Look at the mail-order business. Don’t just look at those things principally consumed by the poor and uneducated. Look at rich people flying thousands of miles out of their way (and paying more for tickets) in order to rack up frequent-flyer miles, or paying double to buy clothes with a designer label.


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