Huckster Shuckers

Nothing makes U.S. admen wince more than the huckster label which Adman-Novelist Frederic Wakeman hung on them like an albatross six years ago. Even Tide, an advertising trade paper, has often used the term. But in a recent editorial, Tide said it was doing its best to strike the offending word from its copy, sermonized that admen should help banish the term by not acting like hucksters.

In Tide last week, President Arnold R. Deutsch of Manhattan's Deutsch & Shea agency praised the magazine's "right note on the subject of 'hucksters.' " Richard L. Scheidker, of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, wrote that it would be better to "clasp the term 'huckster' to our bosoms . . . use it to describe the bad actors in advertising." Nashville's H. C. Daniels, advertising manager of the Methodist Publishing House, complained that Wakeman's usage had now even got into Webster's. "When it is discovered . . . that I am in the advertising business," wrote Daniels, "there is either a nervous titter or hastily changed conversation."

But the embarrassing word would not easily down. Last week, in the heart of "Ad Alley" on Manhattan's Madison Avenue, huge billboards announced the September opening of a new restaurant with "persuasive personality''and an "ultimate Ad Lib Bar." Its name: "The Huckster."

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