Perhaps this is precisely the point. Perhaps people aren’t really so stupid after all. Perhaps people just need a little thrill, a little entertainment, a little excitement in their lives. I mean, in reality, no one in America will starve to death or die one day sooner if he or she spends a buck on a horoscope or seven bucks watching Arnold Schwarzenegger battle to save civilization, or a hundred thousand dollars, if you can afford it, to sleep in the White House and have the President pretend he really values your advice. You’re just looking to spice up your life. And if people can get a few minutes’ or a few hours’ excitement reading their horoscope or sharing it with a friend, then I guess they got a really good deal for a buck.

Eventually, as I became more religiously observant, I began to have scruples about whether astrology was entertainment or some kind of phony religion. Concerned that it might be inherently evil, I stopped selling the ’scopes. In retrospect, I think in 99.5 percent of the cases $1 horoscopes were just entertainment, but that half percent just made me uneasy and so I had to quit.

My entrée into the world of mail-order advertising had opened my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities. There were other products that could be sold through the tabloids with even greater potential. I had already learned that there is one thing people are obsessed with more than sex or money or horoscopes. What Americans really want are plants. That’s right. Plants. Gardening is America’s No. 1 hobby, and I could capitalize on that. I found that plants filled the same void in people’s lives as horoscopes did. From the horoscope business I’d learned that people really were most interested in their romantic futures. Would they meet the man or woman of their dreams? That was the most important insight that they hoped a horoscope would reveal. People ordered their horoscopes because they were lonely, the same reason they often adopted pets or doted on their houseplants. Perhaps that is why plants and pets are so important. Putting these thoughts together, I came up with the idea of pet plants—the Venus’s-flytrap that consumed insects became the “hungry plant,” the plant that curled up its leaves at night became the “praying plant,” and the fern that contracts when touched becomes the “feeling plant.” You guessed it! These pets could be had for only $1 each, postage and handling, or $2.50 for all three.

I had learned to harness my creative talents to the particular demands of mail order. Okay, so I wasn’t responsible for “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing,” but I could write a coupon that would knock your socks off, and I could make people order pet plants at an incredible clip. I placed quarter-page ads in all the tabloid newspapers, and pretty soon I was sending out so many plants that I had run out of willing classmates and started trying to hire teachers I thought highly of to work for me. This not only kept the orders flowing, but seemed to help my grade-point average as well.

True, we still weren’t able to convince any large advertisers to use our agency, but so what? I had developed a better advertising client. Me. And it seemed we couldn’t lose.