http://www.signonsandiego.com/tvradi...11_remote.html
Writing a newspaper column is a lot like writing a note in a bottle and tossing it into the ocean.
You never know where it will go, or who will read it.
Last week's column on the long-running Discount Tire commercial – the one where the angry old lady tosses a tire through a window – brought some questions, and some answers.
One person who read the column was Priscilla White, in Bonita, who led me to the answers to some questions about the woman who starred in the commercial, Maxine Olmsted. (I had thought her name was "Olmstead," but that turned out to be wrong.)
White is a friend of Cassa Olmsted, one of Maxine's two daughters. White had met Maxine, and she called to give me Cassa's number in Phoenix.
Cassa, recently retired at 62, remembered that her mother enjoyed talking about her brush with fame. "She loved it. She liked being the center of attention," said Cassa. "And I enjoyed telling people, 'That's my mother.' "
Her sister, Spalding Olmsted, 56, owner of a Phoenix ad agency, said that Maxine was 84 when she died in 1993, making her about 66 when she filmed the commercial in 1975. She had majored in drama in college and pursued an acting and writing career in radio, TV and the stage. Her husband, Joel Olmsted, was a career Air Force officer.
And the sisters addressed the issue of how much Maxine was paid. It was $500, both said. Spalding added that her mother later got checks totaling about $440 a year, and that she was paid for appearances at car shows.
"The pay part was a mystery for many years," said Cassa. "She never really talked about it. Everybody would say, 'Oh, you're getting residuals,' but she wasn't. Shortly before she passed away, she and I had the same tax man, and he told me they had paid her $500 and bought her contract."
With residuals, said Cassa, "that commercial could have put her on easy street." But she said her mother harbored no resentment. "That was her decision to make, and she was happy at the time."
Sandi Hveem, Discount Tire's director of corporate community development at the company's Scottsdale headquarters, disputed the sisters' version of how much their mother was paid for the longest-running commercial in TV history, but he wouldn't give specific figures. Maxine was paid, she said, "substantially more" than $500.
And several readers wanted to know if life had ever imitated art. "In all these 28 years," asked Rudy Van Ewijk of Scripps Ranch, "has there ever been a real dissatisfied customer returning a tire the way depicted in the commercial?"
Hasn't happened yet, said Hveem.
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