The father of Sauerkraut Week: Shoddy Goods 095How a prolific PR hustler launched a hundred "food holidays"
Happy National Barbecue Month to all who celebrate. I’m Jason Toon and one of the things I like to do with Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about consumer culture, is try to uncover the stories of people in advertising, marketing, and publicity who shaped parts of our lives but themselves stayed mostly unknown…
“Who comes up with this stuff?” That’s the common and understandable reaction when confronted with some contrived commercial occasion like National Pickle Week, or National Macaroni Week, or National Kraut & Frankfurter Week. Most of us understand vaguely that the answer is “somebody in advertising.” But thanks to a cache of vintage food photos I bought on eBay, I stumbled onto at least one name - the guy whose agency came up with all three of those “celebrations” I mentioned, and plenty more. As I dug into the story, a picture came together of how consumer PR worked in the analog age: a few dependable attention-getting ideas repeated over and over, and backed up by lots of grind-it-out gruntwork. “A hearty potful”“1950s 60s Professional Advertising Food Photographs” jumped out at me when I was browsing vintage ad listings on eBay. I’d never bought anything like that before, but the full-color 8x10s in the listing photos looked gorgeous, and I thought I might get a newsletter idea out of it. The photos arrived, as spectacular as advertised. Especially interesting were the slips of paper taped to the backs of the photos. In typewriter script, each one carried a caption like “Celebrate National Kraut and Frankfurter Week with a hearty potful of Kraut and Frankfurter Stew” under the name and New York address of Theodore R. Sills and Company. Also listed was the client for whom the Sills company was speaking: in the above case, something called the National Kraut Packers Association.
These were press photos sent out to newspapers to get the client’s products featured in food and homemaking pages. Other clients in this packet included outfits like the National Macaroni Institute, the Louisiana Yam Commission, Western Iceberg Lettuce, and the Carnation Company. And it was clear that “National Whatever Week” was one of Theodore R. Sills and Company’s favorite tactics. So this got me curious about the Sills outfit. It turns out that this random eBay find was just the tip of the iceberg lettuce. Long live the Pickle Queen“Packers preach their product’s perfection with a peck of publicity,” said the tongue-twisting LIFE Magazine headline in 1949. The occasion was National Pickle Week, “celebrated” in Chicago with events ranging from presentations on pickle classification to a pickle parade. A man whose name was actually Dill Pickle was recruited to recline in a giant vat of pickle brine. The event’s crowning moment (literally) was the coronation of a Pickle Queen. Her royal duties included posing with the Three Stooges and a giant pickle.
This pucker-inducing party was the brainchild of Theodore R. Sills. His Chicago public relations firm had been contracted by the National Pickle Packers Association to get their product some media attention. It wasn’t Sills’s first trip to this particular well. I assume the NPPA hired him based on his success a year or two prior with the National Kraut Packers Association, launching National Kraut and Frankfurter Week. That mouthful of gimmickry won unlikely attention from content-hungry newspapers nationwide. Eventually Sills would add a smorgasbord of grocery clients to those already mentioned, including the Tuna Research Foundation, Sunshine Biscuits, the Paper Plate Association, and the wonderfully ridiculous Chocolate Milk Research Foundation. Sills had left his job as ad manager for a carpet company to found his own firm in 1933. After representing the steel industry during wartime labor negotiations in 1942, Sills acquired enough prominence in the field to co-write a PR textbook with Philip Lesly. He doesn’t specifically mention national food weeks in Public Relations: Principles and Procedures (1945). But you can see the blueprint Sills would soon follow in his advice on effective “stunts” (his word): “Contests of all sorts, anniversary celebrations, and Fifty Year clubs are common vehicles for injecting reader appeal into efforts to put over a point. More and more, pictures are becoming the controlling factor of publicity activities... Today the story that is most likely to reach a widely circulated publication and achieve a clear-cut effect on the reader is based on good photographs. Every idea for a story must be approached with the question: ‘What are the picture possibilities?’”
Every “week” involved a Herculean job of organizing parades, beauty contests, cook-offs, celebrity appearances, industry conventions, and photogenic gimmicks, often with children and/or animals. Professional food photography had to be staged, shot, and printed. Press kits had to be organized and sent out, and then someone had to follow up with those editors, one by one, back when long distance meant long distance. Sills, or his team, also came up with narrative hooks for their products, like the claim that workers wouldn’t have been able to build the Great Wall of China without the healthful properties of sauerkraut. And statistics, like that Americans consumed 194 million gallons of chocolate milk in 1956. And practical ideas, like a “Macaroni Money-Maker” supper as a church fundraiser. If you were a “Ladies’ Editor” who needed column inches filled, Theodore Sills was your man. Let us now praise nurses and hoagiesHe knew what he was doing. Sills-promoted occasions like National Macaroni Week and National Pickle Week remained annual promo staples for decades, and the approach itself has grown far beyond what he could’ve imagined. Literally not a day goes by that isn’t part of dozens of such observations, from the serious and worthy to the purely silly. The day this hits your inbox (May 5), it’s both National Nurses Week and National Hoagie Day. Buy your favorite nurse a hoagie today. Over a long career, Sills did well enough to endow a journalism professorship at Northwestern University in his will. He died in the year 2000 at the age of 96. He didn’t necessarily invent the “national week” concept: I couldn’t pinpoint when local produce festivals first mutated into coordinated national publicity campaigns. Good PR people stayed in the background so it’s hard to track them down now. But now we know Theodore R. Sills was one of the guys who “came up with this stuff”. Funny what can happen when something catches your eye on eBay.
What food and nutrition 'commercials' do you most remember growing up? It always seemed weird to me to advertise milk. Like...milk seems like just a substance on Earth, not a product to push. And yet, milk mustache ads every Saturday morning and in every magazine. I remember cheese ads, too, though I may need some help remembering the slogan. Remember any other weird foods being pushed in between your cartoons? Let's hear 'em in this week's Shoddy Goods chat. —Dave (and the rest of Meh) Celebrate National Shoddy Goods Week with these delicious stories: And if you like Shoddy Goods, don’t miss Jason’s new other newsletter, Gnomenclature. Every week he digs into the 178-year-history of Hammacher Schlemmer, America’s oddest retailer. It’s gonna get weird!
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