Youth: What’s Your Stuff?

To the grey-flannel dismay of advertisers everywhere, thousands of teenagers, are lining up across country to buy a product with almost no value of any kind except for laughs. Its name: Greasy Kid Stuff.

Taking off from the Vitalis TV commercial (says Bart Starr, root-deep in Vitalis. to the oily-headed locker-room amateur beside him: “Say, you still using that greasy kid stuff?”). Greasy Kid Stuff was invented last summer as a gag. Its college-boy creators. Bill Cole and Larry Frohman, each invested $50, mixed up a batch of mineral oil and lanolin in a lard can, threw in a pinch of spice perfume, churned the whole with an egg beater, and turned out 120 bottles of Stuff. Their advertising was built in: the $10 million Bristol-Meyers campaign for Vitalis worked wonders for that Greasy Kid Stuff too. And since greasy kids like their greasy hair greasy, the original supply was soon out of stock.

Cole and Frohman copyrighted the name, got approval from the Food and Drug Administration, and today are busy shipping an estimated 50,000 bottles of Stuff to outlets ranging from Jordan Marsh in Miami to Gimbels in New York to A. D. Clark in Los Angeles. The boys, who make a 35% profit on every 98¢ bottle, are sure they’ve struck oil.