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The average citizen does not wake up in the morning, hell-bent on becoming a direct marketing reporter. My own path was a circuitous one, and I offer what I hope is an inspirational tale of my transformation from a lad without focus into the direct marketing chronicler I am today.

In setting down these memoirs, I join the ranks of James Frey, Margaret B. Jones and JT LeRoy, and it is in their spirit that I tell my story.

Although I did not know it at the time, the experiences that led to my life in direct marketing journalism began with my service within the U.S. War Department during World War II. In 1943, while toiling quietly as a civil servant, I was plucked from behind my desk by the Office of Strategic Services and assigned to make contact with Allied force sympathizers in Croatia. I was accompanied on this mission by a young British Intelligence officer named David Ogilvy.

As this was the heat of wartime, Ogilvy and I were given scant time to prepare before we boarded our flight to Central Europe. While we slipped into the city of Zagreb easily enough, Axis soldiers soon discovered our attempted subterfuge. This was partly due to David’s stubborn attachment to his tailored Hathaway dress shirts, a sartorial style that stood out among the full cut of Croatian men’s blouses. But it was also partly due to the lack of any language training. Ah, well, in the heat of wartime such preparatory details are occasionally overlooked.

Facing certain execution for spying, Ogilvy and I fled the city and headed into the woods near Zagreb. Even there, however, safety eluded us. Before long we stumbled across a German machine gun nest near the Slovenian border.

I wanted to give them wide berth, but Ogilvy jumped from behind our vantage point and bellowed “To the end!” It turned out that Ogilvy -- or perhaps it was a tailor within the War Department -- had altered each of his Hathaway shirts to hide a holstered Mauser C96. Before the startled Huns could do more than turn, Ogilvy had whipped the pistol out from under his Hathaway, closed one eye and took aim.

I, weaponless, could only cower as he quickly dispatched the Nazis to whatever final reward awaited them. “I like to directly advertise my presence,” Ogilvy said, grinning, as he holstered his pistol. “It’s my secret weapon.” (Years later, he applied the same terminology to direct response marketing. I believe I am one of a handful of people who know of its true origin, in the forests of Central Europe.)

We relieved the gunners of everything of value. One had a small, thick, red leather address book, which I debated leaving, as roughly half of its creamy white vellum pages were already written on, covered with names and addresses penned in a precise Teutonic hand.

Had Ogilvy seen the book he doubtless would have immediately recognized its value. But he was too busy stripping the soldiers of their wristwatches and wallets.

That night, when we made camp, we were intoxicated by the day’s triumph and let our guard down. Ogilvy spent most of the evening gazing at a particularly fine Steinhausen timepiece he’d taken from one of the soldiers.

“Look!” he said, admiring it by the light of the moon. “For 60 miles around, the loudest noise in this forest comes from this watch!” Alas, he was all too correct: Neither of us heard the German patrol that had snuck up on us, and we spent the next 18 months in a P.O.W. camp.

After our release, the silver-tongued Ogilvy managed to charm his way back into British Intelligence. I was not so fortunate, and once liberated was consigned to desk duty at a rank lower than that I held when I first set out for Croatia.

One could understand, given the ignominy with which my field service ended, if I did not choose to pore over what few trinkets I had managed to keep while in the P.O.W. camp. Yet had I left them in the shoebox to which they had been consigned, my participation in the direct response industry would have been severely curtailed.

Let me explain. In 1951, I was still riding a desk for what was now called the Department of Defense. At the same time, I became involved in one of the early tests for charge cards. Alas, owing to a few missed payments I also became an early target of one of the first collection processes.

During one particularly impoverished month, when the card issuer very kindly offered me the choice between making a payment or foregoing the use of my kneecaps, I remembered the items I had taken from the German machine gunners.

The pain of the reminders of my failed service having been outstripped by my collection-agency-induced panic, I opened the shoebox and began sorting the items based on their value to a pawnbroker. In the middle of this effort I took a close look at the address book I had liberated from the machine gunners’ nest.

What the soldier had not been able to accomplish as a shooter, he apparently more than made up for as a lover: The names and addresses in the little book represented a healthy cross-section of Bavarian womanhood. I doubt any man could have kept track of the plethora of Annas, Janas, Joannas and Brunhildas that populated his life without such a book.

Next to each woman’s name were notes listing small, cunning personalized gifts: stuffed animals covered in rabbit fur, cuckoo clocks, bracelet charms and other baubles. The value of the gifts, I saw, increased based on the number of little stars sketched next to each name. Clearly these gifts were intended to charm madchen out of their dirndls.

This was my first introduction to the awesome power of database marketing.

At that very moment, Saxon organization combined with American ingenuity and changed direct response marketing. I immediately saw the potential for similar merchandise, personalized and geared toward engendering warm feelings among their recipients.

Now in the early 1950s, crafts and knick-knacks were not considered an appropriate business for a grown man. In order to avoid the whiff of impropriety, I created a fictional female alter ego. She would be a housewife from a suburb chosen for its innocuousness. She would take an active hand in selected every just-so item featured in my company’s catalogs.

The gifts she offered would reflect taste and sentiment, and would be priced to move. Additionally, she would care about children and animals, at least enough to consider them legitimate recipients of her offerings.

I chose her first name in honor of the charming mother of a young Navy lieutenant I had met while we both studied at Union College -- Jimmy Carter, whose mother Miss Lillian served as a surrogate parent to those of us who shared Carter’s residency hall.

For her surname I hearkened back to my early days as a civil servant in Washington, DC, when due to gas rationing weekend trips had to be kept to local destinations. During that time I whiled away many happy hours in George Washington’s Mount Vernon residence.

Thus, the Lillian Vernon Corporation became my first true entry into direct marketing. For public appearances, I retained an actress from the Actors’ Studio. At the time both she and I thought it would be a ruse that would last no more than a year or two. Little did either of us suspect it would become, quite literally, the role of a lifetime for her, a role in which she has equaled any performance by Meryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave, or any other thespian one might name!

The intervening years have treated us both well. My little actress proved to be quite the shrewd investor herself: With a few well-timed stock purchases she has managed to elevate her fortune to a level she would have achieved had she, in fact, been the company principal we have posited her as, adding to the verisimilitude of her performance.

My own share off the firm’s fortunes have been devoted to maintaining my credit card payments, although despite eschewing any further use on the card, it has taken me well into the 21st Century’s first decade to break free from that 1951 outstanding balance.

But the company did offer just enough solvency to allow me to pursue a life of letters. Alas, the two areas I knew well enough to write about were marketing and the military. Given the failings of my service to the War Department I was not in a position to ask any favors of it. Fortunately, just as I was ready to pull back from the day-to-day operations of Lillian Vernon Corp., a position opened up on Direct magazine.

Much in the way I took on a feminine persona when starting my company, I thought it prudent to take on the veneer of a young, hungry reporter. Thus the “Richard H. Levey” character was born, with what personal appearances are necessary handled by a young man who waited on me one day while I dined at the Quilted Giraffe. While the great majority of bylines produced under his name have sprung from my pen, he has written the occasional article under his own power, and may someday come into his own as a writer.

To respond to this column, please contact richard.levey@penton.com