Dad was a man of letters. He loved to write to anybody and everybody. Whether he was writing to one of the greatest minds of all time (Albert Einstein) or the Chief Patent Counsel of Apple Computers (Paul Carmichael), I was often astonished at the response rate (at least at the onset).
In fact, writing letters was his preferred and (for a while) just about sole marketing tactic for Olcott International in the 1980s and 1990s. I recall that he really got started by composing a 4 page template on an Olivetti electric typewriter around 1982. This sample letter, into which he could drop hundreds of names and addresses via mail-merge, was a direct and personal appeal to the Chief Patent Counsels of large corporations, the ultimate decision makers on the customer side. Dad’s letters would, without much of an introduction, launch into 1) not-so-brief technical descriptions of his helicopter and air conditioning patents, 2) how he pioneered the concept of calendaring and paying patent renewals by computer in the early 1960s, and 3) how the Chief Patent Counsel’s company could save hundreds of thousands of dollars by delegating such to Olcott International.
For the convenience of the reader, I have boiled the letter down into those three sections. In reality, it was a difficult-to-read, long, rambling, monster of a letter, replete with malapropisms.
The Bernard Olcott Story 