Tom Rogers, a retired advertising copywriter whose beret- and sunglasses-wearing hipster tuna became an icon of pop culture, died June 24 in Charlottesville, Va., where he lived with his son's family. The 87-year-old Rogers drowned while swimming alone in the family's backyard pool.
Charlie the Tuna was the likably obtuse deep-sea striver who never lived up to the taste standards of Starkist Tuna. ("Sorry, Charlie. Starkist wants tuna that tastes good, not tuna with good taste.")
The character was based on an acquaintance of Rogers who was a habitue of the beat scene in 1950s New York City, said his son, Lance Rogers. A beat musician and part-time actor who called himself Henry Nemo, the man personified one of Rogers' favorite aphorisms: "The straightest distance between two points is an angle."
"Everybody knows somebody like that, an appealing character who's totally confident but totally wrong," Lance Rogers said.
Rogers had a hand in creating other memorable ad mascots of the 1960s and '70s, the cookie-baking Keebler elves and the finicky feline in the 9 Lives cat food ads, Morris the Cat. He didn't originate the characters, his son said, but he infused them with distinctive personalities based on a lifetime of observing human nature.
Thomas Russell Rogers was born in Minneapolis. During Prohibition, he occasionally hung out at speak-easies, where he earned a little money cleaning floors and scurrying around town making deliveries for bootleggers, who presumed the police wouldn't suspect a kid.
Although he was never a good student, he knew that he wanted to be a writer. He was still a teenager when he sold his first story to a pulp detective magazine.
In the early 1930s, he dropped out of high school and joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, cutting trails and manning fire towers in the forests of northern Minnesota.
Rogers made his way to Hollywood in the late 1930s. He considered himself a writer, although he landed a day job during World War II as a welder in a Northrop aircraft factory in Hawthorne, south of Los Angeles.
In the late 1940s, he moved to New York City, where he did some writing for the stage and radio and developed comedy sketches for nightclub comedians. He moved back to Minneapolis in 1951, married in 1953 and wangled a job with a local advertising agency.
