(This story was originally written and recorded for Retrocast 35, released on July 9, 2025.)
For those who remember life before the Internet, paying bills used to be a tedious ritual. You’d get your bill in the mail, tear off the payment stub, write a check, stuff it into an envelope, lick a stamp (yes, lick it), and hope it arrived before the due date. And if it didn’t? You crossed your fingers it wasn’t lost in the mail.
Vacaville, California resident Bob Ewell found the whole process to be a nuisance. He preferred to pay his bills quarterly, explaining, “I never get down to that end of town.” But his local Cablevision office didn’t quite share his philosophy. Every month, like clockwork, their computer-generated system would send him a bill. When he didn’t respond with a payment, they’d follow up with increasingly “friendly reminders.”
Bob didn’t ignore them—but he didn’t exactly cooperate, either. Instead, he’d return the payment coupon without a check, scribbling sarcastic comments like, “I don’t like your friendly reminders.”
Eventually, two secretaries at the cable company decided to join in on the fun. For Valentine’s Day 1977, they arranged for a personalized “news strip” to run on local broadcasts, wishing Bob a Happy Valentine’s Day.
Bob, amused, fired back—this time with an actual check made out to: “Gynral Ilekrik Kubylvyson.”
“I was surprised that the check cleared,” he later said. “I guess the bank figured if I don’t spell well, that’s my problem.”
The playful back-and-forth escalated from there.
For Halloween 1977, Cablevision struck again with another on-screen message: “Hey, kids, there’s lots of special Halloween goodies at 100 Hemlock St. See you there. Yuk, yuk, B.E. from your Poison Pen Pals.”
You might think parents would take the hint from the word “poison” and steer their children clear. They didn’t. That Halloween, the Ewell family had a flood of visitors—200 trick-or-treaters, five times their usual count.
Not to be outdone, Bob and his wife Diane, along with their 14-year-old daughter Wendy and their friend Frank Goldenberg, loaded up a truck with pumpkins and drove to the Cablevision office. They stacked the pumpkins in front of the main entrance and left a sign that read:
“The Great Pumpkin Has Risen from the Pumpkin Patch, Bringing Toys to All the Children of the World—Including a Special Treat for the Good Little Girls at G.E. Cablevision!! Love, Linus.”
Bob made sure he was there the next morning to witness the reactions as employees arrived at work.
With a grin, he declared, “We’re one up on them. But who knows what’s coming next?”
