Few Chicago TV commercials ever really reach iconic status. It’s a small club. Car dealer Maury Ettleson was definitely a member.
The tagline he proclaimed with his business partner Nick Celozzi was tailor-made for their Chicago accents:
“Celozzi-Ettleson Chevrolet …. Where you always save more money!”
Wearing suits and waving handfuls of cash, the pair implored Chicagoans to visit their dealership at York and Roosevelt roads in Elmhurst.
Soon after the commercial hit the airwaves in the 1970s, the slogan — and the monotone delivery with which it was delivered — became a Chicago pop culture phenomenon.
The automobile-dealing partners became so recognizable that they even got asked to do commercials hawking other products, including beer, pizza and furniture.
Mr. Ettleson, who was 93, died July 16 at home in Lincolnshire from natural causes, according to his family.
The dealership was sold in 2000. Today, there’s a hospital on the site.
Mr. Ettleson was a humble guy, according to his family, but enjoyed being a local celebrity.
A few weeks before he died, he was in the hospital for a medical procedure. Are you related to the Celozzi-Ettleson Chevrolet guys, a hospital employee asked.
“I am one of those guys,” he responded.
The hospital employee proceeded to excitedly ask his colleagues: “Do you know who this guy is?!”
“Dad was just tickled,” said Mr. Ettleson’s daughter Sherry Ettleson.
The commercial was born of desperation. The automobile market had suffered as a result of the oil crisis and rising gasoline prices in the 1970s.
Joseph Pedott, a friend since childhood, knew Mr. Ettleson’s business was struggling. Pedott was an advertising executive and businessman who brought the world the Chia Pet and its “Ch-ch-ch-chia” jingle. Pedott, who died two years ago, spotted Mr. Ettleson the cash for a television ad campaign and came up with the “Where you always save more money” slogan.
“Joe came to the rescue,” Sherry Ettleson said of Pedott, whose company also brought the world the Clapper (“Clap on, clap off, the Clapper!”). “He was a great marketer and had relationships with all the television stations. So he helped negotiate prices to get the commercials on late-night TV and during sports games. And it helped them get through the oil crisis and build an amazingly successful business.”
Mr. Ettleson was born April 24, 1932, in Chicago to Dorothy and William Ettleson. His father worked for a railroad company. His mother worked at a car dealership as a license and title clerk.
Mr. Ettleson, who grew up in Wicker Park and went to Roosevelt High School, originally wanted to become a pharmacist and attended the University of Illinois Chicago’s old Navy Pier campus. But a battle with colitis derailed his plan.
He got his start in the automobile business when he got hired as a parts runner at the dealership where his mother worked. He was taking accounting classes at night. The owner of the dealership saw him with his nose in an accounting book and hired Mr. Ettleson for the business side of the operation.
He worked for several more dealerships before forging a business partnership with Nick Celozzi that resulted in two of them opening Celozzi-Ettleson Chevrolet in 1968.
It was Celozzi-Ettleson and not the other way around because of a coin flip to decide whose name went first, said Mr. Ettleson’s son Mike Ettleson, who followed his father into the dealership business.
Celozzi ran sales. His desk was on the showroom floor. Mr. Ettleson handled the numbers. His desk was in a separate building, out in the parking lot.
Mr. Ettleson raised his family in Morton Grove before moving to Lincolnshire in 1985. His wife of 68 years, Ruth Ettleson, who he met at a Jewish social, died in March.
Mr. Ettleson loved reading, playing tennis, watching sports and eating McDonald’s breakfasts.
“He was so much more than that powerful tagline that we know about saving more money,” Rabbi Schachar Orenstein said at Mr. Ettleson’s funeral service. “He was a true mensch, and he lived by values that in the Jewish tradition are so esteemed… family and kindness and treating everyone well.”
Mr. Ettleson was a supporter of the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation.
In addition to his daughter Sherry and son Michael, he is survived by his daughter Linda Stolberg, nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Services have been held.
oe p