1896–1980 · New York advertising man; publicity manager of the Daily News
Leo McGivena was a New York advertising man who served as publicity manager of the Daily News, then the city’s biggest picture newspaper. Quote researcher Barry Popik gives his dates as 1896–1980 and notes simply that he “worked in advertising”; it is not known when or where he first wrote the drill-and-hole line, only that Percy H. Whiting quoted it under his name in 1947. He is the rare case of a man whose single most-repeated sentence outlived every record of his own career — Theodore Levitt eventually misspelled him “McGinneva” in print.