They made it simple.

When I took a job as a mailroom clerk at Needham, Harper & Steers, in the Armand Hammer building in Westwood, I had no idea I had stumbled into the DDB of the West.

All I knew was I was schlepping boxes, retrieving dry cleaning, moving furniture and otherwise disappointing my father who had paid for half my college tuition at America's most expensive private university.

It's only in retrospect that I can see how fortunate I was to have landed at an agency that valued (and rewarded) creativity.

And to be in the vicinity of copywriting legends, including Larry Postaer, Bob Coburn and my friend, the late David Morgenstern.

One could argue I benefitted from the process of osmosis. Reading. Re-reading. And ingesting the new long copy ads that seemed to be popping up on a weekly basis. One could even attach a fancy word like 'inspiration' to the fire it lit in my belly.

I'll have none of that.

I wanted to be a copywriter because I was jealous of the creative divas on the 8th floor who had their own offices, their own secretaries, their own expense accounts and their own working hours, often strolling in at 10 AM, taking in a movie at 2 PM, and leaving at 4 PM before the 405 freeway began to resemble the parking lot at Dodger Stadium.

I know my friend George Tannenbaum, advertising's oracle of the East, makes a great deal of hay and pays considerable homage to the DDB writers who gave birth to the VW brand. And rightly so. But a student of the craft would do herself or himself well to supplement that with an open eye to the Honda ads that came out of Needham Harper & Steers in the 1980's.

There you will find an economy of words, Creative Director Larry Postaer was a ruthless editor.

You'll also find an honest, conversational style that effortlessly takes you from beginning to end while simultaneously weaving in any number of product points that would have lesser copywriters crying, "I can't fit all that into an ad."

And finally, you'll find something sorely lacking in today's easily ignorable banner ads and diarrheic email blasts -- Persuasion.