After the death of Harry Reichenbach, the leading ballyhooer of the era was Jim Moran, a Hollywood publicist and prankster.  Active from the 1930s to the 1960s, he made a name for himself by publicizing outrageous stunts that drew attention to himself and his clients.  In February of 1939 he spent 82.5 hours looking through a haystack for a needle. In January of 1940 he led a bull through a China shop and in June of 1946 he sat on an ostrich egg for 19 days to hatch it.  He is probably best remembered for his (failed) April of 1951 stunt to advertise a candy bar by having midgets hold pictures of the candy while they were aloft strapped on kites over Central Park in New York. He claimed that this publicity would not only increase candy bar sales but, at the same time, provide gainful employment for “out-of-work midgets.”  The New York police did not see it that way and refused to let him perform the stunt.  Moran was outraged. “It’s a sad day for American capitalism,” he lamented, “when a man can’t fly a midget on a kite over Central Park.”

In August of 1938, Moran was walking down a street in New York when he heard a salesman remark that a job had been “as hard a selling an icebox to an Eskimo.” Eskimos do buy iceboxes – the 1930s term for a refrigerator because it was actually a box in which you put large chunks of ice – and Moran saw cash in the expression. He immediately went to NBC and convinced them to advance him $300 for a trip to Alaska – about $10,000 in today’s dollars.  He then convinced the National Association of Ice Advertisers that selling an ice box to an Eskimo would be great for advertising.  They agreed and gave him an ice box and guaranteed him $2,500 if he could sell the ice box to an Eskimo – about $100,000 in today’s dollars.

Moran made it as far as Juneau where he found an Eskimo who spoke no English, Charlie Pastolik. Pastolik bought the icebox for “$100, two fox furs and piece of ivory.”  But that wasn’t the end of Moran’s Alaskan adventure. In addition to his broadcasts on NBC, he hacked 300 pounds of “Arctic ice” from the Mendenhall Glacier – which was quite a feat since the Arctic Circle was 1,000 miles to the north – and collected two fleas from the back of Pastolik’s husky which he secreted in a matchbox.  From Juneau he went directly to Hollywood where he pitched Paramount Pictures on using the fleas in a movie.  These weren’t just regular fleas, he told Paramount executives, they were Alaskan fleas. They were snow-blind and would thus be unaffected by the harsh klieg lights on the studio sets.

Then he went further. “They are trained Alaskan fleas,” he continued. “Most Eskimo have nothing to do during the long winters [so they] spend months training fleas. The best fleas are Eskimo fleas as anybody in the flea business knows.” Paramount saw green in the fleas and paid Moran $750 – about $30,000 in today’s dollars – to get Claudette Colbert to allow the fleas to crawl up her back in her next movie. That went nowhere with Colbert who did not see any value in having a pair of fleas, Alaskan or otherwise, crawl up her bare back. But the photo of her with Moran and the Alaskan fleas was published which, to Paramount, was worth the $750 spent.

But Moran wasn’t through. He sold ten pounds of the alleged-to-be Arctic glacier ice to the press agent for Dorothy Lamour for $500 – about $20,000 in today’s dollars – and garnered press coverage for the “oldest, coldest, slickest ice in existence.”  He sold the rest of the ice to the National Association of Ice Advertisers – even though they had already paid him for the stunt – who placed a chunk of it in their window with a placard stating it was from the same glacier as the ice that had been purchased by Dorothy Lamour.

To this day in Alaska, the expression, “as hard as selling an ice box to an Eskimo” is worth an ethnic chuckle because Eskimos do buy refrigerators. But this has not slowed the use of the expression.