Tom Dawes(1943-2007)

Musician and TV commercial jingle writer Thomas Webster Dawes was born on July 25, 1943 in Albany, New York. He met fellow musician, Don Dannemann, while attending Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Dawes and Donnemann founded the folksy pop-rock group, The Cyrkle, in the mid-60s; the band had a big hit with the extremely bouncy and upbeat song, "Red Rubber Ball", in 1966 and were the opening act for The Beatles for their 1966 concert tour of America. Tom co-composed the score for the tawdry sexploitation feature, The Minx (1969). After The Cyrkle broke up, Dawes went on to produce the albums, "Rock & Roll" and "Energized", for the 70s rock group, Foghat. Moreover, Tom became a hugely successful writer of popular jingles for numerous TV commercials. Besides his famous "plop plop fizz fizz" jingle for Alka-Seltzer, other jingles Dawes either wrote or co-wrote are "Coke Is It!" for Coke-a-Cola, "7-Up, the Uncola" for 7-Up, both "We're American Airlines, Doing What We Do Best" and "Something Special in the Air" for American Airlines, "You, You're the One" for McDonald's, and "Our L'eggs Fit Your Legs" for L'eggs hosiery. He met his wife and frequent collaborator, Ginny Redington, at a jingle writing competition. Dawes retired from the jingle-writing business in 1990. Tom and Ginny penned the book, lyrics and music for the off-Broadway musical, "Talk of the Town", which ran for nearly two years at the Bank Street Theater and was also done as a cabaret show in the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel. In addition, Dawes and Redington wrote the books, "The Bakelite Jewelry Book" and "Victorian Jewelry: Unexplored Treasures". Tom Dawes died at age 64, following a stroke, on October 13, 2007.