I'm Jason Toon and I'll be honest: if it turned out Orville Redenbacher was a fictional character, I wouldn't have been surprised. But in this week's Shoddy Goods, the newsletter from Meh about the stuff people make, buy, and sell—I discover that the nerd king of popping corn was the real deal. The harvest wind rustled the stalks of corn outside the Chester Inc. plant hybrid laboratory in Valparaiso, Indiana. That wind was an unwitting partner in what Carl Hartman hoped would be the biggest triumph of his career. The year was 1965. Hartman was a 40-year-old former seed salesman with an animal husbandry degree. After showing an aptitude for plant breeding too, he'd been tending this acre of popcorn for five years, some 3,000 plants from 83 varieties, letting the breeze strew pollen where it may, creating new hybrids. He tested them for flavor, for fluffiness, and, most of all, for how close they came to the standard his boss had been chasing for decades: 44 cups of popped corn for every 1 cup of unpopped kernels. Typical popcorn had a popping ratio more like 25:1. Now, had he finally done it? As his latest strain popped in the Chester labs, Hartman let himself hope. This batch was popping up better than he'd ever seen it. But it would be his boss, armed with a specially calibrated plastic cylinder for just this purpose, who would have the final say on whether this new hybrid had crossed the elusive 44:1 threshold.
"44 to 1… 44 to 1… 44 to 1…" Corn this way Advertising is rife with fake nerds, and fake farmers, and, especially, fake scientists. Orville Redenbacher was the genuine article of all three archetypes. And as detailed in the book Just Call Me Orville by Robert W. Topping, popcorn was his life. He loved everything about it. Picking it as a child from the family garden on their farm in Clay County, Indiana. Popping the corn in the family hearth on chilly nights. Selling it by the sack to stores around Terre Haute to fund his college education. Colonel Sanders may not have cared that much about chicken and Vince "ShamWow" Shlomi didn't grow up dreaming of wiping up spills, but Orville Redenbacher had popcorn in his veins. While studying agriculture at Purdue University, the bow-tied big man on campus Orville first fell in love with plant hybridization and genetics. In the years after he graduated in 1928, he'd stay in touch with Purdue as the school took the lead in developing experimental popcorn varieties, thanks to a faculty member who was every bit Orville's equal in popcorn obsession. Arthur Brunson had come to Purdue from Kansas State, where he'd dabbled in unfunded hybrid-popcorn projects in his free time. "Frequently, I get so disgusted with the popcorn breeders when they think that pounds per acre is the prime criterion. Of course, they check expansion carefully, too, but they forget that tenderness, flavor, and absence of hard hulls are so extremely important to the eater. The Orville Redenbacher popcorn is the answer for the critical consumer who wants the best…." Were these guys were made for each other or what?
That's snow on the ground, not popcorn. I'm pretty sure. Anyway, even as Redenbacher built a diversified agricultural business called Chester Inc. through the 1950s, he never wavered from his vision of a perfect popcorn variety, a superstrain where every kernel would pop nice and fluffy. He called hard kernels "old maids" or "shy fellows", criticisms tinged with compassion. Orville's not mad at you, unpopped corn. He's just disappointed. Chester became the biggest wholesaler of popcorn in America, accounting for some 55% of all popcorn sold. But the big popcorn brands weren't interested in Orville's more expensive gourmet kernels. Popcorn was junk food hawked at carnivals and movie theaters. Those customers weren't going to pay more for fancier popcorn. Farmers didn't want to grow it, either. Chester had to pay them more to make up for the lower yields. And yet he just kept pushing, on and on, toward that 44:1 ratio. As his Chester co-founder Charles Bowman said, "Orville had the greatest ability to ignore defeat of any man I’ve ever known." But what choice did he have? The perfect corn was still out there somewhere, unpopped. How could Orville Redenbacher have done anything but keep chasing it? Pop star It all led up to that day in Valparaiso in 1965. As the test batch of Carl Hartman's latest hybrid corn popped up, Orville Redenbacher sifted a sample in his special beaker. He peered through his heavy black glasses to measure the popped and unpopped kernels against the markings. And he smiled. 44:1 was no longer a dream, but a fluffy, flavorful reality. Oh, the joy in Valparaiso that day. "We did it! We did it!" Orville kept whooping. A worker at Chester named Esther Lacy recalled that Redenbacher "was like a little kid, laughing and running around the place, he was so elated." OK, great… now what? At this point, Orville was 58 years old. He was a successful agribusinessman. Most guys in his position would've coasted to retirement and shuffled off to enjoy his dozen grandkids and his beloved Indiana countryside. But most guys aren't nerds like Orville Redenbacher. It would take another six years of rejection by the existing popcorn brands before he'd start marketing his popcorn under his own name. And several more after that, a relentless schedule of gladhanding and dealmaking and driving himself around the country to publicize his "gourmet popping corn", until he became that true rarity: a celebrity who gets famous after 65.
Shy fellows and old maids need not apply. You’ve got Orville Redenbacher, Colonel Sanders, Dave Thomas…and who else? Who are your corporate faces and marketing icons (and are you sure you know which are real and which are fictional)? Let’s break out the brand spokespeople nostalgia in this week’s Shoddy Goods chat. These gourmet Shoddy Goods stories are genetically engineered to contain zero unpopped kernels:
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