Fries penned a series of three 60-second musical commercials that told the story of C.W., an alluring waitress named Mavis Davis (“this gal's built like a burlap bag full of bobcats; She's got it to-gether,”) and their friends and family. Davis worked at the mythical Old Home Filler Up and Keep on Trucking Café in Pisgah, just off Interstate 29, where C.W. regularly delivered bread.

“When I wrote those commercials, the name Old Home Bread appeared in each one at least 10 times. People just couldn’t forget the name Old Home Bread,” he says. “When we came up with the idea, Metz wasn’t too sure about it. (Company president) Bill Metz said to me, 'are you sure you’re not making fun of us? Our truck drivers aren’t those kinds of guys.' I said, 'We’re going to make heroes out of them.'”

The accompanying music for the commercials was written by a colleague of Fries’ who was employed as a jingle writer at the agency. Fries had discovered Chip Davis – best known today as leader of Mannheim Steamroller -- playing at a nightspot in the Old Market area in Omaha and asked him if he was interested in getting into the advertising business. “He told me he would write any kind of music as long as it wasn’t country and western.”

The commercials were mini-soap operas that glamorized life on the road and made Old Home Bread a household name. The commercials were shot on a tight budget -- $7,000 for all three – at an old truckstop in Pisgah. But some of the storyline was based on Fries memories of life at the White Stop, a 24-hour-day truckstop on U.S. Highway 71 in Audubon, when he was a boy.

The commercials were so popular that the Des Moines Register and Omaha World-Herald regularly printed the times and channels where they would air. In 1975, the commercials won the Clio Award as the best advertising campaign in the country, beating out far more expensive campaigns for national brands like Xerox and Ford.

“We got a letter and a ticket from the Clios that said to come to the awards ceremony at the New York Hilton, but we had no idea why,” Fries remembers. “We sat through the whole ceremony and watched all these advertising people go up to accept their Clios. At the end of the ceremony they said they were going to present the award for Best Advertising Campaign of the Year.

“After we won, I told someone at the table, ‘this is really a great thing for the agency. He looked at me and he said, ‘this is a really great thing for you.’” Fries had no idea how his life would be changed.

Fries went on to script a dozen Old Home commercials and the little truck stop in Pisgah became a Mecca for travelers from all over. As the popularity skyrocketed, Fries, Miller, and Don Sears, the owner of an Omaha recording studio, decided to release the song as a single which was offered as a premium to Old Home customers; more than 33,000 copies were sold.

“When you sell that many records, people take notice,” Fries said. “MGM and Universal offered us a record deal. I said, ‘what would that involve?’ and they said, ‘we’ll put the song on an album and you’d have to write ten or 11 other songs.”

A retooled version of the Old Home song reached number 10 on Billboard’s country chart that year, enough that MGM came back and asked the group to sign a five-record deal. Fries wrote several songs about the places he was familiar with, western Iowa and the mountain towns of Colorado. The title song,



INDEPTHIowa
In 1973, people across the Great Plains were enthralled with a series of television commercials for Old Home Bread, an advertising campaign that doubled company sales and changed the life of an Audubon native who became a musical superstar overnight.

Bill Fries was creative director at Bozell and Jacobs, an Omaha advertising agency, where he oversaw a staff of 30. When the agency landed Metz Baking Company his employees were all too busy on other projects to take on the account, so he assigned it to himself. It was during a conversation with the account executive that C.W. McCall was born.
  WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO...
The Wild Ride of Iowan C.W. McCall
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“I said, ‘What does Metz want to do?’ and he said, ‘sell some bread and build name recognition.’” They were about to hit the motherlode.

Fries learned that Metz was located in Sioux City, but as he looked out his office window at the traffic on Interstate 680, he saw an Old Home delivery truck roaring down the road. “It struck me that every day they haul truckloads of bread down Interstate 29 from Sioux City. I thought to myself, ‘there’s a truck driver out there who spends his days making deliveries’ and I tried to imagine what he might be like.”

Fries imagined a driver who lives life on the open road, a stereotypical character who was reliable, friendly, and pure
The Old Home Filler-Up And Keep On Truckin' Cafe in Pisgah.

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Fries imagined a driver who lives life on the open road, a stereotypical character who was reliable, friendly, and pure Americana. “I wanted to give him a name that we could stitch on the front of his shirt and I came up with C.W. because it was short for Country Western.

"My account rep said, ‘he needs to have a last name’ and I looked down at my desk and there was a copy of the old McCall's magazine. ‘McCall,’ I thought, ‘that’s a strong name.’”
The Song:
Intriguing Iowans Who Captured Our Attention
Americana. “I wanted to give him a name that we could stitch on the front of his shirt and I came up with C.W. because it was short for Country Western.
towns of Colorado. The title song, Wolf Creek Pass, became a minor hit.

As Fries’ star rose, he appeared in most of the big talk shows of the day, including the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, where he was accompanied by the Doc Severinsen Orchestra. At that point in his career, Fries had spent plenty of time in the recording studio but hadn’t appeared in front of a live audience since his days singing the Messiah with his high school choir in Audubon.

“I was scared to death, just petrified,” he said.

On the ‘B’ side of the album was a song different than anything C.W. McCall had recorded before. Instead of the banjos and guitars that were mainstays on his other songs, Davis and Friese agreed to record was Fries calls “a production number,” with backup singers, French horns, and a pronounced percussion section.
Wolf Creek Pass included the hit song "Convoy" which changes Bill Fries' life.
The song was based on the frustrations that truck drivers were expressing in the mid-1970s because of gas prices and a new 55 mile an hour speed limit that was costing drivers time and money.

“I still get letters from truckers or friends of truckers asking for autographs and calling it the National Anthem of trucking,” Fries says.
Shortly after it was released, the album sold 6 million copies in six days; convey was a cross-over number one hit on Billboard and stayed in the Top 40 for 16 weeks. “In the recording industry they call that sort of thing a ‘Monster’ and it was. It changed my life forever. That year, I gave the IRS a check for $100,000.

It also allowed Fries and his wife to retire to Ouray, Colorado, a postcard pretty mining town nestled in the Rocky Mountains. The Fries family had been visiting Ouray for years, fell in love with the place, and promised themselves they’d live there one day. In Ouray, Fries served three-terms as mayor and oversaw the renovation of the historic town hall.

Fries’ fame followed him to Colorado, although days now pass without someone referring to him as C.W. McCall. The royalty checks from Convoy have allowed him to live a comfortable life in retirement. Recently, Hallmark bought
Today, Bill Fries lives in Ouray, Colorado with his wife,
rights to Convoy and a snippet of it plays in a musical greeting card the company is marketing. He says he’s still amazed when people bring up the song; a friend in New York called him recently from a hospital there asking if a fan could talk to him.

“The guy had just gotten out of bypass surgery and he just started singing Convoy when I got on the phone,” he says. “It amazes me. It also amazes me that someone in Iowa would still remember C.W. McCall 30 years later.”
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