ecently, while Jim and Barbara
Dale were flying cross-country, the
passenger next to them gasped
when she discovered that her
seatmeats were the Dales of Dale Cards.
When she recovered, she recited by heart
her favorite Dale cards, cards with such
lines as "Mom, remember all the aggrava-
tion I used to cause you? . . . I'm almost
done," and, "You're perverted, twisted and
sick . . . I like that in a person."
Dale Cards is the only line of greeting
cards in the country, probably in the world,
with fans — and with a full-fledged fan
club based in West Bloomfield. People write
to the Dales, praise the Dales, quote the
Dales. As one Dale fan said, "When I first
saw their cards, I thought, "This is the way
I think, this is the way I talk? Their cards
speak for me?'
The former Detroiters' cards come out
of a second-floor studio in Baltimore where
Jim Dale is a top executive of W.B. Doner's
Baltimore office. Doner's is based in
Southfield.
With its white Haitain cotton couches
and teak-and-leather Scandinavian chairs,
"studio" might be too imprecise a word. It
implies paint-splattered floors, ashtrays
full of Lucky Strikes, a few empty bottles
of Scotch — and a lot of angst. "Salon"
might be better. Maybe even something as
artsy as "atelier?'
There's not much angst in this tidy
"studio." Not even a Lucky Strike butt in
sight. But there is plenty of good humor.
Here the chipper Dales, Barbara and Jim,
are giving such industry stalwarts as
Hallmark a run for their money with their
witty, irreverent, occasionally risque "alter-
native" cards.
Started with a $500 investment eight
years ago, Dale now sells about 10 million
cards a year. Assuming that each card gets
at least two chuckles (one from the person
who bought it, another from the person
who received it), that works out to 20
million chuckles annually.
Although Dale Card aficionados strad-
dle the globe, probably no one loves them
better than Sheldon and Judy Levin, pro-
prietors of the Downing Pharmacy in West
Bloomfield.
"I am a fan of Jim and Barbara's," said
Judy, booster extraordinaire. "A fan! Their
brilliance is incredible. I feel about them
the way I felt about movie stars when I
was a teenager?'
Three years ago, the Levins started the
"Dale Card Fan Club." For $2 a year,
members get discounts on any Dale pro-
duct — cards, helium balloons, mugs, note
paper, books. In the corner where Down-
ing Pharmacy displays the Dale line, said
Judy Levin, "people just laugh and laugh.
People buy ten cards at a time and laugh
all the way out the door."
A few years ago, a customer handed her
credit card to Judy Levin. Levin looked at
it. She looked again.
"I know that name," she said of the
"Dale" imprint on the credit card. That
meeting with Jim Dale's mother, Evelyn,
a resident of Farmington Hills, was Judy
Levin's first encounter with a live Dale. She
soon met Jim and Barbara.
The Dales never planned to get into
greeting cards. When the business started
in 1979, Barbara, a ceramicist and artist,
was working in a Detroit art gallery. Jim
was based in Southfield as executive
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creative director of the W.B. Doner Com-
pany. He was responsible for the creative
product of the ad company's eight offices.
For their first getaway one year after the
birth of their only child, the Dales flew to
Florida for a week. As with most new
parents, their time away from their kid was
spent talking about their kid. Over what
Barbara calls "a romantic dinner," she sud-
denly gushed that she had an idea for a
card about how their first year of parent-
hood had changed them.
"Congratulations, Mom," went Barbara's
brainstorm. "Soon, your baby will be walk-
ing, then talking, then in grade school,
high school and college."
"And pretty soon after that," went the
kicker on the inside, "your episiotomy will
heal."
Singles, beware! This was the sort of
humor only a mother — or the Dales'
friends — could appreciate. (An episiotomy
is a surgical slit performed by a doctor on
the perineum of a woman in childbirth.)
Card writing continued throughout their
trip. After Barbara wrote the first epistle,
Jim kept coming up with others. But all
the while, he kept saying, "Why are we do-
ing this?"
According to Barbara, they were doing
it because "we thought our cards were fun-
nier than what you could find in stores. We
sent a few to our friends. It was a time
when you could get only flowery cards
from Hallmark or cards with slick, Califor-
nia air-brushed male torsos."
Back in Detroit, Barbara had a few cards
photocopied around the corner from where
she worked. The owner of a gift shop
greeted her while she was returning to
work.
"Hey, Barbara," he said, "what do you
have there?"
Glancing at the cards, he asked whether
he could sell a few. Whenever Barbara ran
into him after that, he would say that he
hadn't sold many gifts that day, "but I sold
a lot of cards."
The Dales soon found a few sales "reps"
and a real printer — not a storefront
photocopier — for their cards. Within six
months, they realized they had a money-
maker on their hands.
"We knew it wasn't a local fluke when we
began getting a good response from reps
in other cities and other states," said
Barbara.
A part-time staff was hired as orders
poured in from around the country. Jim,
who collaborated with Barbara on the
cards' wording, had no idea that they had
a real business on their hands until he was
home sick one day. Around 10 in the morn-
ing, he dragged himself out of bed and
down the stairs. Pandemonium greeted
him. Three strange women were scurrying
around, answering phones and filling
orders. Their children were playing nearby.
Suddenly, the doorbell rang and a hefty
fellow in a brown uniform strolled in.
"Who's that?" asked a confused Jim.
"Oh," answered his business savvy one-
year-old, "that's the UPS man."
Jim decided to retreat upstairs and leave
the women — and the UPS man — to their
business.
Within a year after its founding, Dale
Cards had 1,700 accounts. But the firm
was still a cottage industry. It had no
business phone. Calls would come from
Idaho while the Dales were eating dinner.
"Hello," Jim would answer, and then,
realizing it was a business call, quickly
switch to a more business-like tone.
Aside from their humor, the Dales were
renowned for shipping orders in boxes from
Huggie diapers. When the company was
prosperous enough to buy boxes with its
name printed on them, the Dales showed
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
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