Just Call Me Orville: The Story of Orville Redenbacher (The Founders Series) 9781557535955, 1557535957

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Just Call Me Orville

The Founders Series

Just Call Me Orville The Story of Orville Redenbacher

by Robert W. Topping

Purdue University Press, West Lafayette



Copyright © 2011 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Topping, Robert W. Just call me Orville : the story of Orville Redenbacher / by Robert W. Topping. p. cm. -- (The founders series) Includes index. ISBN 978-1-55753-595-5 1. Redenbacher, Orville. 2. Businesspeople--United States--Biography. 3. Popcorn industry--United States--History. I. Title. HD9049.P65T67 2011 338.7’664805667092--dc22 [B] 2011006939

Cover design by Natalie Powell. Edited by Verna Emery.



For Suzanne, whose help, encouragement, and love helped make this project a joy.

Contents Publisher’s Acknowledgment Preface and Acknowledgments His Younger Years Life Begins at Twenty Amazing Maize To Market! To Market! Bibliography Appendix

Publisher’s Acknowledgment Just Call Me Orville has an unusual publishing history. When the manuscript came to the Purdue University Press, both the subject of the work and its author were no longer living. Kevin Fish, one of Orville Redenbacher’s grandsons, read the manuscript prior to its being edited. He offered suggestions, clarifications, and updates to the work. We gratefully acknowledge his contributions to the success of Just Call Me Orville. We also gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the team at Orville Redenbacher’s® Gourmet® Popping Corn business for their permission to publish this manuscript, which was originally commissioned by the company.

Preface and Acknowledgments Sure, Orville Redenbacher was eighty-eight when he died. But I still have trouble believing he is gone, even though the flow of his letters to me almost every day and the three-or-four-times-a-week telephone calls from his California home have ceased. The piles of his scrapbooks and papers and clippings and envelopes and boxes of photographs and letters and other memorabilia he turned over to me still clutter the bedroom-turned-office in our home as I write this, making it easy to momentarily forget that he is gone. Then wishing he were not. The death of any great and good man is tragic enough. One of the tragedies of Orville’s death is that the book that was to be his joy now becomes his epitaph. He had put so much into it; he had worked relentlessly to provide me with names and telephone numbers and to set up conference calls and interviews. He sat still for hours trying to answer my questions, probably thinking most were kind of silly, probably wishing he were somewhere else. He also virtually demolished his personal files to provide me with a plethora of information that set forth most of the major events of his life. When he visited our home for a couple of days a few months before his death, the book occupied much of his mind; he talked of little else. As we sorted through seemingly bottomless piles of his photos, he mentioned at least twice that he wanted “his” book published for his ninetieth birthday. Orville arrived from California slightly travel-weary. Still, a certain fresh eagerness came over him as we talked about the book. My wife, Sue, and I invited a few friends and neighbors to our home to meet him. Almost magically, his weariness seemed quickly replaced by the enthusiastic, engaging, warm and friendly smile that captured America’s heart. After working closely with Orville Clarence Redenbacher for nearly a year, the only reasonable conclusion I could draw about him was this: Orville Redenbacher was one of the world’s last universally beloved souls. Maybe the last. Orville’s story is one of simple, humble beginnings as an Indiana farm lad whose persistence, tenacity, intelligence, and penchant for just plain drudgery eventually elevated him to unequaled success as a farmer, county agent, agronomist, businessman, and television personality—accomplishments far beyond his wildest imaginings. His successes did not come without risks; he is considered one of America’s most daring entrepreneurs, a man who came out of relative obscurity to conquer the North American popcorn industry by revolutionizing it. In so doing, he managed to do what even the most brilliant Madison Avenue tub-thumper could not or did not: glamorize popcorn. Not bad for a Clay County kid whose biggest delight was bringing home a string of catfish he snagged in a gravel-pit pond. Success stories are not uncommon in America; the nation has always prided itself on creating an environment where skill, hard work, and the will to control one’s own destiny are often richly rewarded. The skill, the will, and the penchant for hard work were all characteristic of Orville Redenbacher. Still, Orville’s story is uniquely his own for the good and simple reason that his gentlemanly kindness tower far above even his imposing success as a popcorn hybridizer and agribusinessman. He never forgot where he came from, never forgot the aromatic discomforts associated with cleaning hog houses and chicken coops to pay for his college education, and never forgot the sticky heat of Indiana cornfields. His dry wit was as sharp as a finely-honed rapier, but used never maliciously and usually on himself. Though he became accustomed to, and truly loved, the public spotlight, he always remained the genuine, self-effacing character who bred the best popcorn in the world. If he had a serious fault, it was probably a good one. He would go to great lengths to avoid unpleasantness with others. Even as a businessman, it was usually more important to Orville to be someone’s friend than someone’s creditor. Collecting overdue debts was not Orville’s bowl of popping corn. In a world growing continually more skeptical, where words more often are meant to manipulate than inform, there were always the skeptics who believed Orville Redenbacher was the creation of marketers, conceived in the minds of advertising copywriters. On the contrary, when you saw Orville Redenbacher, whether on a popcorn label, a TV commercial—wherever— what you saw was what you got. Or, as Orville liked to say, “I’m no Betty Crocker.” When he died September 19, 1995, at his home at Coronado Shores, Orville was still a farm kid from Clay County, Indiana; tuba player and cross-country runner at Purdue; 4-H leader; farm manager; stalwart Kiwanian; popcorn breeder; millionaire businessman; world-traveler; philanthropist; TV “ham”; husband; father; grandpa and great-grandpa; and gracious and caring person whose generosity of spirit somehow touched us all for the better. Is there more we could ask of anyone?

Writers like to think they write alone. They put the words together and get their names, even their pictures sometimes, on the dust jacket. No one says it’s easy; it isn’t. But any author who says he or she writes alone must be doing so inside a vacuum bottle, stopper firmly in place. For it takes many people who spend time and effort to bring a book together and I am indebted to all, particularly to Orville himself. For several months, the U.S. postal routes between his home in California and mine in Palm Coast, Florida, a continent’s width away, began to fray. Orville always seemed reticent talking about himself or his accomplishments, preferring to let his friends and colleagues, as well as his scrapbooks and other evidences of his impressive life, speak for him. Special thanks are due to his friend and companion, Patricia Brown, who seemed as enthused about the book as Orville and provided some insights into “Reddy.” (“Reddy” was a nickname Orville acquired from his fraternity brothers at Purdue. It became the affectionate name by which only a few old friends and close associates always addressed him.) In a letter to me last year, Phil Mangiaracina of ConAgra’s marketing group in Fullerton, California, who worked closely with Orville, penned these perceptive and cogent words that capture Orville as well as any ever have: “The wonderful thing about Orville is that, despite all his success, he is still the same kind and caring person he has always been.” Renee Groblewski, who managed Orville’s public relations as senior vice president of the Chicago firm of Edelman Worldwide, Inc., was truly instrumental in creating this book for it was she who brought Orville and me together late in 1994. She and Orville had a long association, one that seemed more like a loving father-daughter relationship than anything. He trusted her implicitly and always followed her advice on public relations matters. There was little she would not do for Orville, and in this instance, she was invaluable in arranging our meetings and offering a treasure of information and advice as well as, most importantly, encouragement. Renee has an uncanny way of getting people to listen to what she says. I owe special thanks also to Charles and Mary Bowman. Charlie was Orville’s business partner for forty-three years and knew him perhaps better than anyone. He took time from a full schedule as chief executive officer of Chester, Inc., to talk frankly about his old friend. The assistance of Gail Tuminello and Billie Ann Atwood is gratefully acknowledged. Their insights and memories of childhood as Orville’s two surviving daughters were invaluable to the telling of Orville’s story. We now consider them good friends. Interviews with the grandchildren at the Redenbacher biennial reunion at Disney World were also special contributions. All of their names are mentioned in the text and all were most helpful. At the risk of appearing a rank partisan, I will mention four who made extraordinary efforts in contributing: Noel Fish of Medford, Oregon, Billie Ann’s son; Julie Gallant of Harrison, Ohio,

Gail Tuminello’s daughter; J. Kent Gourley of Evansville, Indiana, whose mother, Sue Gourley, Orville’s middle daughter, died in 1993. The fourth person I must also thank is Gary Fish Redenbacher, Billie Ann’s son and the grandson who appeared with Orville on many television commercials for Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn.

Orville Redenbacher (left) and Robert W. Topping (middle) first met late in 1994. In this photograph, taken at the Redenbacher biennial reunion at Disney World, they are pictured with Gary Fish Redenbacher, Orville’s grandson (right). Courtesy of Suzanne Topping.

Many others I must mention who talked to me about Orville include: Earl Butz, the former U.S. secretary of agriculture and Purdue dean of agriculture who was one of Orville’s fraternity brothers; Orval Martin, fellow track star with Orville at Purdue and also a fraternity brother; John Baker, a high school chum and fellow member of the champion 4-H dairy-judging team that went on to national competition; Keith Elsbury, another Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity brother, who was a pledge when Orville was chapter president; Verna Butt, one of Orville’s few surviving cousins, who provided some detail of his early life in Clay County; Ed Copp, who helped Orville establish his liquid fertilizer program; Bob and Rita Ann Dunne, the latter a niece of Orville’s second wife, Nina; Jim Frawley, retired marketing manager of Hunt-Wesson Foods, Inc.; Darrell Fiesel, who picked the name “Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn” when he worked for the Chicago advertising agency that recommended it to Chester, Inc.; and Herschel W. Gulley who first met Orville at a Kiwanis International convention in France. A special salute to Ezra S. Beach, who was Orville’s Kiwanian friend and Coolwood neighbor who wrote that, among other things, “‘Reddy’ is as old shoe as they come,” a Hoosierism that translates into, “Orville is still just a regular guy.” The sentence so intrigued me that I used it as a section heading. Also, Rufus Harrell, Orville’s fishing buddy, and a Chesapeake Bay area farmer whose friendship with Orville began when the two pioneered the use of liquid fertilizer; Bill and Nikki Hiscock, Orville’s lawyer and secretary, respectively, in Coronado, California; Joan Ketchmark, Orville’s secretary at Chester, Inc.; Robert Kroyer, retired president of Ketchum Advertising, who worked on Orville’s early television commercials; Glennas Kueck, director of the Popcorn Festival in Valparaiso; Norman D. Long, director of Indiana 4-H activities in Purdue’s agricultural extension service; Sherman Kessler, AGR fraternity brother, Indiana farmer, and former Purdue University trustee; C. James McCarthy III, former president of Blue Plate Foods and the first person Orville had contact with at Hunt-Wesson; Jewel Mueller, one of Orville’s cousins; Walter Redenbacher of Pawlet, Vermont, the only person outside of Orville’s own family with the name Redenbacher; Jim Myers, a former Hunt-Wesson vice president; William Patterson, a retired engineer who first befriended Orville on a world trip; Les Robinson, a Valparaiso bank officer; Clyde Reed, Orville’s California cousin, who provided some of Orville’s early family photos; Glenn Reese, a Chester, Inc., vice president whom Orville called “the best fertilizer salesman I’ve ever known”; Don Rhody, a retired senior vice president of Hunt-Wesson and one of Orville’s earliest contacts at the company; Donald Schafer, Orville’s nephew, and his wife, Marjorie, an early acquaintance; John B. Schnurlein, former president of the Valparaiso Chamber of Commerce; William E. Smith, executive director of the Popcorn Institute of which Orville was one of the founders; Herbert Steinbach, retired editor of the Valparaiso Vidette-Messenger, Lillian Strohm, home demonstration agent at Terre Haute, whom Orville hired when he was Vigo County agricultural agent; Rubye Smith, who recalled many of the early days at Princeton Farms of which her father, Arch Faulkner, was foreman; and finally, Carl Hartman, plant breeder for Chester, Inc., who developed the “gourmet” hybrid that made Orville famous. A special thanks is also due Garnette Widdifield of Phoenix, Arizona, Orville’s cousin, who has been assembling the Redenbacher and Rodenbarger genealogy for many years—material she gave Orville who relayed it to me. I shudder at the possibility that somehow I have not mentioned everyone who so graciously contributed to this project, and to them I abjectly apologize while reminding them that their contribution is no less appreciated. –Bob Topping

Do one thing and do it better than anyone else. –Orville C. Redenbacher, 1907–1995

His Younger Years

Hoosier Origins of “The Catfish Kid” The day felt close and heavy, hot, steamy, not unlike the loads of freshly hung family laundry that his mother regularly pinned on the wire clothesline that swagged across the dooryard. A vaguely dirty buttermilk hue overlaid the central western Indiana summer sky. In the sodden humidity, a six-year-old dug his heels into the loose dirt at water’s edge, grappling clumsily with a fishpole bent nearly double, its taut line making crazy patterns on the water. The scene was a gravel-pit pond, maybe a quarter of a mile yonder down the lane past the fields and pastures that surrounded his family’s farm home. The pond formed after Clay County highway workers excavated gravel to improve two and a half miles of the dirt and mud road that had passed the front of the farm. The pond was a favorite place to catch catfish, sunfish, and bluegill, as well as the best place around to swim on a summer day. As hot as the day was, the youngster instead fished with John Baum, a bachelor who lived a mile west and knew all of the secret tricks of snagging catfish. The young lad’s titanic battle ended finally in his favor, a sweet, sweaty victory that he repeated relentlessly throughout that sultry afternoon until he had landed a giant string of catfish nearly as long as he was tall and about as heavy. He had learned well the lessons Johnny Baum taught him. With his heavy string of fish, Orville ran as fast as his bantam-like legs could carry him up the lane toward the house, anxious to show his triumph to his mother and father and older brother and sisters. Straining mightily to carry his heavy catch, barely keeping the fish from dragging in the gravel lane, his determination and excitement finally surpassed the limits of his immature physique; and as he arrived in the yard, he suddenly doubled over in the excruciation of a suddenly ruptured hernia. The soothing comfort of his mother helped calm him and eased the pain slightly; he even managed a proud, though wan, smile as he showed off the trophies through the tears running down his sunburned cheeks. The display of such tenacity in one so young was a portent of the way Orville Clarence Redenbacher met future challenges— challenges that brought him the success on which he soared far beyond the finned, farm-pond trophies of his childhood (though the hernia problem troubled him for years and catfish was always high on his list of favorite dishes). For all of his worldwide fame, his wealth, and all of the adoration and awards and honors bestowed upon him through the years, Orville never forgot where he came from, nor what, in a figurative sense, it takes to catch a string of catfish. The sweltering day he was born, July 16, 1907, was unusual for Orville’s two older sisters and brother. Their mother’s labor pains started the night before. At daybreak their father packed them in the buggy and drove them over to the Trout farm where they learned they could play all day with the Trout children. What? No chores? No work? Nobody had ever told the Redenbacher kids they could play all day. Orville’s father returned home, did the chores, then summoned the neighborhood midwife, Nancy Gillfilian, who lived a quarter-mile west, and waited for Dr. Knoll. Orville arrived later that day with the understandable squall of the newborn, loudly greeting his new and hostile environment. He would make the most of it as the new son and youngest child of the Redenbachers—Will, then thirty-five, and and Julia, thirty-three—at their modest Jackson Township farm home about seven miles south of Brazil, the county seat of Clay County in west central Indiana. William J. Redenbacher was not only a hardworking farmer and community leader, but also had an impeccable reputation for honesty and integrity as well. Machinery enchanted him; he fancied himself as a mechanic and he was good at it. When the Redenbachers planted chickpeas (soybeans), among the first farms in Indiana to grow them, Will contrived and built his own chickpea huller since there were none manufactured at that time. The Wright brothers’ historic experiment in powered flight in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, intrigued Will. He became enthralled by the idea of an aerial machine and four years later named his new son to honor Orville Wright, who piloted the Wright Flyer a distance of 120 feet in man’s first powered, heavier-than-air voyage. Orville’s middle name was Clarence, which was just a good Hoosier name. Orville’s great-grandfather, Johannes Wolfgang Redenbacher, immigrated to the United States in 1848 from Schweighausen, a tiny village southwest of Nürnberg (Nuremberg) in southern Germany. His forebears had settled near Nürnberg and were probably among hundreds of Austrian Protestants driven from Salzburg in 1731 by order of the Catholic archbishop. Johannes, Bavarian by birth and a weaver by trade, arrived in Philadelphia on the bark Philadelphia with two trunks, a knapsack full of tools, and the equivalent of twelve cents in his pocket. He also arrived with his fiancée, Margarette Barbara Zwerner, from Weissenbronn, Bavaria, who exchanged her wedding vows with Johannes at the St. John’s Evangelical and Reformed Church in Hamilton, Ohio, not long after their arrival. They then traveled northwest to settle along the south side of Wildcat Creek in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, not far from its line with Carroll County to the northeast. Later they built a house on Rabbit Track Road, south of Rossville, Indiana, rearing three sons and three daughters. Their oldest son was John, born not long after the couple arrived in Indiana. He grew up on the farm south of Rossville and was a battlefield water boy for the Union armies in the Civil War when he was sixteen. Later, he married Amelia Ellen Knarr, also of German parentage. They had four children: William, Elmer, Juliana, and Frank. Inexplicably, their father changed the family name to Rodenbarger. Tragedy struck the young Rodenbarger family one day in 1878 when William was six and their youngest, Frank, was still an infant. As their mother stirred a huge black iron vat of apple butter outdoors over an open fire, flames caught her clothes. At twenty-four years old, she was mortally burned and died soon afterward. The children were separated, each sent to live with kindly relatives. William went to his Aunt Hannah and Uncle John Fogel who farmed near the settlement of Clay Prairie in Clay County. A second family tragedy occurred many years later, in 1939, when Orville’s grandfather John, whose business was moving buildings, was killed. Timbers supporting a building he was preparing to move suddenly shifted, and the entire structure fell on him. He was sixty-three. Orville’s father, William Joseph Rodenbarger, grew up with the Fogels, then returned the family name to Redenbacher when he married Julia Magadelena Dierdorff on September 8, 1895. She was then twenty-one, and William, twenty-three. Orville’s maternal grandparents were Conrad and Margaret Koehler Dierdorff. Conrad’s father and mother, Peter and

Gertrude S. Wermeskirchen Dierdorff, came to America from Dusseldorf, Prussia, in 1848. Virtually penniless, they settled in Tuscarawas County, Ohio, on land owned by the Zoarites, a group of German immigrants. Conrad was born there. Seventeen years later Peter and his family moved to Clay County where by sheer hard labor he acquired large land tracts. The Dierdorffs had eight sons and four daughters, a number sufficient to allow Conrad to join the Indiana Infantry Volunteers in the Civil War. He also saw action as a battlefield water boy, but was discharged less than a year later in Virginia when the war ended and he returned unscathed to the family’s Indiana farm. Conrad and Margaret fanned 700 acres of the Dierdorff tracts and had six children of their own, including Julia, known most of her life as Julie. In the first two years of their marriage, Will and Julie operated a small grocery store at Prairie City, a hamlet two miles east of Clay Prairie. In 1897, they bought the 80-acre farm seven miles south of Brazil where Orville and his sisters and brother were born and grew up. By 1907, the year Orville was born, the Redenbachers had added more acreage, expanding the farm to 125 acres, then later to 205 acres. By that time Orville was in grade school. Brazil and Clay County lie astride U.S. 40, the historic National Road, a ribbon of concrete that spans the North American continent and connects two oceans. It is still used, though considered obsolete, made so by Interstate 70, which roughly parallels it about six miles south of Brazil, perilously close to Orville’s childhood home. Clay County, 360 square miles of southwest central Indiana, lies atop the overlap of two important geological riches: the fertile loam where Orville planted his first popcorn, and the deep strata of bituminous coal historically important to the Indiana economy. It had its own personal importance to Orville’s Uncle John Fogel who dug what local folks referred to as “block” coal from a shallow strip mine on his farm. He mined enough to heat his own home and sold it to neighbors, especially during World War I when commercial coal was difficult to obtain. The county is sprinkled with little towns and settlements—homes to Hoosiers, but little more than dots on a highway map to sophisticates—with such names as Stearleyville, Harmony, Cloverland, and Knightsville, not to mention Turner, Center Point, Staunton, Cory, Saline City, and, yes, Hoosierville. One of two Indiana rivers named Eel runs through it. And that’s where Orville Clarence Redenbacher was born and how he came to be.

Nineteen-aught-seven, Orville’s birth year, some things mattered and some did not: • Panic and depression, an economic event causing banks and trust companies across the nation to fail, the largest losing $67 million and 18 thousand investors, was viewed by President Theodore Roosevelt, by his own admission, as “boring.” So he went bear hunting in Louisiana. • Oklahoma achieved statehood after a dispute was settled in which half of the territory, an Indian reservation, had proposed to come into the Union as the separate state of Sequoyah. • The first daily comic strip in any American newspaper, a forerunner of Mutt and Jeff, began in the San Francisco Chronicle. • The debut of the opera Salome in New York’s Metropolitan Opera House raised a storm of protest as being immoral, morbid, and perverse. • The Great White Fleet of sixteen U.S. naval vessels began an around-the-world “good will” tour, a tacit statement to the known world that the United States could and would send its naval vessels into any sea on the planet whenever it wished. • Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel Prize in Literature, at age forty-two, the youngest to do so, for Jungle Book and Captains Courageous.

Though these may have been some of the events that shaped 1907, Orville Redenbacher arrived that year in a region of America where such happenings didn’t matter much; they seemed as remote from Clay County as the moon. Anyway, there were far too many chores on the farm to spend time contemplating the likes of Mutt, Jeff, Gunga Din, Teddy Roosevelt’s boredom, naval jingoism, or Salome’s veils and moral standards, the latter fewer than the former. Orville was of German stock. Perhaps the Redenbacher penchant for hard work and tenacity emerged from some inherent Teutonic stubbornness, an admirable trait, but one that he never permitted to get in the way of his equally inherent, lifelong kind and caring gentleness. His two sisters were Elsie, eleven years older, and Mabel, five years older; and a brother, Karl, seven years older. His was a loving family whose life was dominated by the work of the farm and thus its survival. Work was the glue that held the family tightly together. The values the Redenbachers instilled in their children were priceless. Redenbacher industriousness put food on the table and clothes on their backs and gave them indelible perspectives on what really counts in life. Someone once asked what his family did “for fun.” Orville quickly replied, “We worked.” But work, he quickly countered, was not always fun, especially when Orville and his sisters and brother had to go to the barn by the light of kerosene lanterns on fierce, below freezing Indiana mornings and evenings, twice daily risking the pain of frostbite to milk the cows barehanded. Orville never forgot such boyhood misery and once said with great conviction, “I don’t believe there is anything more miserable than milking cows in freezing weather.” Still, although “work” may have been the Redenbachers’ “fun,” there were also picnics and similar activities at their St. John’s Evangelical and Reformed Church, a mile east of Stearleyville. Orville’s earliest recollections of his boyhood home were of the tomatoes his family planted for the canning factory in Brazil. The entire family went to the field at harvest time, and Orville, then probably three, was hauled along in a small wagon. His mother gave him a slate and colored chalk to keep him occupied, and he sat out in the field in the wooden wagon most of the day while everyone else picked tomatoes. At work’s end, his sisters or brother would haul him back to the house. Orville always anticipated visits to his mother’s relatives’ homes after church for Sunday dinners. Oh, you had to put up with wet kisses from aunts and teasing from uncles, but then you always had cousins to climb trees with or play on the tire swings in the front yard. Orville always remembered Aunt Lizzie Young and Uncle Charlie and their daughter, Anna; and don’t forget Aunt Anna and Uncle Karl Mueller. Uncle Karl, for whom Orville’s brother Karl was named, was a preacher, and half his sermons were in German. They had three children: Margaret, Willie, and Walter. Aunt Christina, his mother’s youngest sister, was first married to Uncle John Lawson, and they farmed over near Clay City. They had a passel of children: his cousins Herbert, Leatha, Anna, Roy, Ethel, Floyd, and John. After Uncle John passed away, Aunt Christina married John Reed, and they had Clyde. Uncle Peter married Bertha Stearley. They farmed near Poland, over east of Stearleyville, and they had Arthur, who was killed in an automobile accident, and Florence, Irene, Josephine—Orville stood up at her wedding—Margaret, and Ruth Catherine, who died when she was five. Orville’s Uncle Willie married Lizzie Romas; they had Verna and Virgil and farmed a mile west of the Redenbachers. Grandfather and Grandmother Dierdorff, Conrad and Margaret, had worked all of their adult lives, quietly farming 700 acres and just as quietly finally retiring to live in Brazil. The first public recognition Conrad and Margaret ever received was after she died. The newspaper made note that her casket was the first one in Clay County ever motored, from the funeral at St. John’s church over to the cemetery. Orville and his family drove to the funeral in their father’s first car, a 1913 Buick touring car with side curtains, haughty with brass acetylene lamps, and a crank starter. Its motor died on the way to the cemetery, and Will couldn’t get it started again despite heroic cranking. Another family stopped and picked up the chagrined Redenbachers. Orville was twelve in 1919 when Will Redenbacher bought his first new car, also a Buick, one that the salesman promised wouldn’t stall in the middle of any funeral procession. Automobile salesmen haven’t changed much. After Orville’s grandmother died, Grandpa Conrad lived alone for a spell until he finally was able to sell his house in town. Then he moved in with Will and Julie’s family on the Redenbacher farm where he lived ten years until his death. Orville’s extended family was large and close; his Indiana family was his “rock,” an essential ingredient of his life. Eventually, he headed his own family, one that included three daughters, a dozen grandchildren, and fourteen great-grandchildren or step greatgrandchildren scattered to all parts of the nation.

Orville was only four when he began to learn the meaning of a day’s work. The family would arise on an icy December morning before daybreak. After chores—milking the cows among other things—but before breakfast, Orville’s father went out and shot two, sometimes three, hogs with his 22 rifle. The hogs were then strung up and “stuck” with a large knife in the jugular veins to properly bleed before they were hauled aboard sleds and pulled with a team of horses to scraping tables set up earlier. Orville’s job was to carry wood and water to replenish the fires and the kettles; hot water was necessary to scrape the hair from the pigskin. By the end of the day, the chore had exhausted the tyke. When the supper bell rang, he scurried eagerly toward the back porch, cold, hungry, and tired, to await the evening meal. Typically it consisted of an omelet, fried potatoes, lettuce salad, homemade bread, and doughnuts or apple dumplings. Sometimes the family meals included Orville’s favorite—fried hog brains. He grew up liking that dubious delicacy, a byproduct of every butchering day. Sometimes after a weekend home from college, his mother packed him a supply of fried hogbrain sandwiches to carry back to the Purdue campus. When the Redenbachers butchered hogs for themselves, they prepared tenderloins, fresh ham, and sausage. Still, Orville smacked his lips over fried hog brains. As the youngest child, Orville easily could have become the family “pet.” He didn’t. He took on his share of the family chores soon after he learned to walk, chores that increased in number and importance as he grew older. At the age of ten, he was paid anywhere from one to three dollars a day to tend the straw blower on the threshing rig during harvest. Yet, he was the “little brother,” sometimes protected by his older sisters but subjected routinely to relentless teasing by his older brother. More often than not, Karl tried to manipulate a youngster’s naïveté to get Orville to do his farmwork for him, including one offer to let Orville sleep with his wife on his, Karl’s, wedding night if and when he married. Orville was young but still old enough and smart enough not to fall for that preposterous idea. Orville was about twelve when he began to raise popping corn himself and sold it on the cob in fifty-pound sacks to stores in nearby Brazil and Terre Haute. His sales started at a mere $10 to $50 a month but his persistence eventually increased that sum to as much as $150 monthly, some for spending money, some stashed away for college. Popcorn sales money was “his.” The family had well-established food routes in nearby Terre Haute, selling in summer eggs and vegetables door-to–door and in winter fryers or German sausage the Redenbachers made after butchering hogs twice a week. Orville’s mother raised turkeys, and at Thanksgiving she usually sold about one hundred dressed for the oven. The money she made was “hers.”

Orville was but five years old when he entered the one-room, brick Clay Prairie School, a little more than a quarter of a mile from his home. In his first two years, his teacher was Elsie Trout who recognized his potential for learning even at the outset of Orville’s formal education. Orville’s schoolwork was excellent; his fourth grade teacher, Alonzo Snyder, who roomed at the Redenbachers’ that year, observed his academic skill, relaying the good news to his parents. By the time he was a seventh grader, his teacher Bertha Killion and her brother Herbert, who taught eighth grade, were encouraging Orville to go on to high school. “We always walked to school, but we were always happy for any offer to ride in a horse-and-buggy if someone came along,” Orville recalled. Occasionally, in bad weather, their dad drove the children to school in the grain wagon with the two-horse hitch. Only rarely did they get to ride to school in the family surrey; usually it was saved for church or social calls. The wagon had a grain bin and a spring seat in which two children could sit, maybe three if they were skinny. Often the wagon was loaded with produce—eggs, cream, live chickens—or sometimes it hauled ear corn or wheat to the mill where it was exchanged for meal or flour, or sometimes bran and middlings to feed the chickens and livestock. Occasionally, the Redenbacher wagon was used for the unpleasant task of hauling dead farm animals to the “tonnage” (rendering) plant at the edge of Brazil. Then it brought back tankage (as it was called locally), which was dried and ground-up farm animal carcasses fed to hogs and chickens. Redenbacher vehicles were versatile in the business of farming and lent themselves to a variety of jobs; bus transportation to school was not one of them—at least not until Orville went to high school. He usually drove a horse-and-buggy seven miles to his grandparents’ house in Brazil—and still had a mile to walk to the high school building. In fair weather, he rode his bicycle. You could ride your bike if you could figure out a safe way to ride on the bumpy road without dropping your lunch bucket. By the time Orville was thirteen, he had learned to drive the family car; in those years, Indiana had no law requiring driver’s licenses. When he was fourteen, his parents let him drive the car loaded with other Clay County 4-H boys his age ninety miles to the Purdue University 4-H Club Roundup at West Lafayette. Orville’s intelligence and ambition made it certain he would go to high school—something his brother and two sisters were unable to do, something not even available to either of his parents whose formal educations ended at the sixth grade. Grandfather Conrad had gone only to the first and second grades. Mabel, the younger of his two sisters, wanted so fervently to go on to high school that she took the eighth grade a second time simply because she loved learning. But the family could not afford to send a daughter to high school. Until 1920, a year after Orville completed the eighth grade, Indiana had no law requiring its young citizens to attend school at least to the age of sixteen; schooling beyond Indiana’s ubiquitous one-room brick schoolhouses was largely a family matter. The bright and eager student that he was, Orville completed all eight grades at Clay Prairie by the age of twelve. He was anxious to enter high school, though he had just turned thirteen the summer of 1920. Orville knew he would be somewhat younger than his classmates; but he was confident in himself, knowing that he was a good student in most subjects, especially in mathematics—though he was admittedly a “lousy speller.” By then, Orville had made it clear that he wanted to go on to college more than he wanted anything else.

Orville was still a schoolboy when World War I raged in Europe, and he had to brave the taunts of schoolmates about his German-sounding name. He found solace within his family and its almost nightly custom of popping a large pan of popcorn in a long-handled, box-shaped, screen-wire popper shaken briskly over the live coals of their pot-bellied stove. The popping corn came from the popcorn patch Ms. Dad cultivated, and was shared in front of a crackling fireplace on a cold winter evening, which probably made it tastier—and the name-calling much less important. When he was eleven, Orville joined the Posey Township 4-H Club and began his first project, the raising and showing (in county fair competition) of a registered Poland China hog. His 4-H activity changed Orville’s life, kindling his desire for vocational agriculture, convincing him he had made the right choice in selecting Brazil High School over Staunton High School in his home district. Staunton had no vocational agriculture course and Brazil did—though that choice meant a fourteen-mile round trip to school each day. Orville’s mother was pleased and proud that he sought the education she and Orville’s father never had. Will may have been somewhat skeptical of it, though he made it a point to never stand in Orville’s way or to dissuade him from academic pursuits. On the other hand, Grandpa Conrad could be downright hostile about it. Even though he had minimal schooling, he read two daily newspapers, one English, the other German, and he knew his ciphers—and that, he was firmly convinced, was all the education a farmer needed. After Orville began high school classes, he often arrived home after evening chores were done—a little too conveniently tardy to suit Grandpa Conrad. “That kid,” his grandfather once snorted in exasperation, “will never’ mount to anything.” One of Orville’s most positive influences in high school was Horace Abbott, Clay County’s first agricultural extension agent (informally, count agent), whose job included the supervision of all 4-H activity in the county. He encouraged the high school’s vocational agriculture students, all of whom were, ipso facto, members of 4-H. Abbott instantly became Orville’s hero and role model; and as early as his freshman year in high school, he had set his sights on becoming a county agent like Abbott, a Purdue graduate in agriculture. “He couldn’t have picked a better role model,” says John Baker, now of Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Baker was a 4-H dairy-

judging teammate of Orville and recalls that Abbott’s reputation among everyone who knew him was as “a splendid individual, a brilliant man with an intense sense of honor.” Orville was not much different from other boys his age in Clay County, except for his outstanding scholarship and devotion to 4-H. He did not seem to get into the mischief that most youngsters occasionally encounter in the early teens when hormones run amok. His one recollection of being “in trouble” was the time a teacher caught him smoking hay straw. He could not remember how or even whether he was punished, though he clearly recollected that smoking had its own punishment: “It burned my throat something awful.” Years later, Orville occasionally smoked cigars to stay awake on long drives home after late-night meetings. They made him so ghastly sick one night he gave up tobacco forever. As a farm kid, Orville learned early the importance of managing his time; there was none in his busy day for dawdling, not with high school homework, farm chores, and several simultaneous 4-H projects to juggle. As busy as he was, he loved music and decided to learn to play the cornet, mastering it well enough to play in the Jackson Township Band. But his mother held another opinion about his musical ability, one she drew from her anguish at listening to his tormented practices at home. “Orville,” she grimly told him one day, “you have many, many talents. But playing the cornet is not one of them.” Because of Abbott’s charisma, Orville found himself in the 4-H dent (field) corn, poultry, calf, and garden clubs; and two years later, he was a member of the Clay County 4-H state champion poultry- and egg-judging and corn-judging teams. A year later, he was a part of the Clay County 4-H dairy-judging team that won the state championship at the Indiana State Fair in Indianapolis and the right to advance to national competition. That meant Orville and his teammates were to go to Syracuse, New York, for the national dairy show. In one of Baker’s reminiscences, he recalls that no money was available for Pullman sleepers; instead, the team—Orville, Baker, Albert Acree and Roy Zenor, escorted by their vocational agriculture teacher, Adam Leftridge Bowle—took a parlor car where they could tilt the seats and become reasonably comfortable under blankets for the overnight train trip to Syracuse. It was the longest trip any of the team had ever taken before. Bowles was a good chaperone. He was another positive influence in Orville’s young life. A product of Indiana State University (then State Teachers College), Bowles taught at Brazil High School at least a quarter of a century. While Bowles was the boys’ teacher and selected the team’s members, Abbott coached them in the techniques of livestock judging. To prepare for the national judging competition, Abbott took the team to various dairy operations in the south central Indiana area to practice. He even drove them ninety miles north to the Purdue University agricultural campus several times to practice and to receive instruction from some of Abbott’s friends on the dairy faculty and staff. The team’s visits to the Purdue campus were also an opportunity for teammate Baker and young Orville Redenbacher to acquaint themselves with college life at the university that they both planned to attend. They were guests at Abbott’s college fraternity house, Sigma Pi, to get a taste of fraternity life. In those days, Sigma Pi pledges addressed upperclassmen and guests as “mister”–the first time Orville was ever addressed as “Mr. Redenbacher.” It further strengthened Orville’s desire to attend Purdue, though he had also visited the University of Illinois and The Ohio State University. In New York, the Clay County dairy-judging team took seventh place among the twenty state champion teams competing from other states. But Orville won second place nationally in individual competition; and with the right hand that knew the cold pain of milking the family’s dozen or so cows on Indiana winter mornings, he shook hands with Al Smith, then Democratic governor of New York and later a candidate for the U.S. presidency. The governor was on hand to award the winners their medals. Under his senior picture in the class yearbook, the editors commented, “Covered with glory, he came back to us from New York.” The caption also summarized Orville’s membership in the National Honor Society; the science, agriculture, and mathematics clubs; the Hi-Y; four years in the high school band and one year in the orchestra—not to mention his 4-H exploits. His win in the dairy show was the highlight of Orville’s first sixteen years, but perhaps no less exciting was the return trip to Indiana via Niagara Falls with John Baker and his parents. Orville was such an impressive student in high school that Bowles helped wangle an appointment for him at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. At sixteen Orville was still too young to meet the academy’s minimum age requirement, but Bowles even got a waiver that would have permitted him to enroll as long as he paid his own room and board until his seventeenth birthday. The entire issue was moot, however. Orville appreciated the efforts in his behalf to provide a chance for higher education, but he had made up his mind several years earlier that he was going to study agriculture at Purdue. By not going to West Point, as he joked many years later, “I probably missed out on some pretty good wars.” In the spring of 1924, he graduated with honors from Brazil High School, the first member of his family to advance their formal education that far. In September, armed with savings from farm work and popcorn sales, Orville headed north to the Purdue campus where student fees and other expenses were a little less than $700 for a school year of two semesters. “Harold Lyons, a classmate of mine at Brazil High School, called me to say he was going to Purdue, too, and asked me to ride with him since he owned his own car,” Orville remembered. “Another friend of mine, Harold Brown, who lived two miles east of me, had already asked me to come to the Alpha Gamma Rho (AGR) fraternity house because he wanted his fraternity brothers to invite me to be a pledge. Lyons had made no plans for lodging at Purdue, so he went along with me to the AGR house. When we arrived, we were both immediately pledged to Alpha Gamma Rho [a national social fraternity for agriculture students]. We moved in that day and lived there for four years until we graduated.” Though he had been to the Purdue campus on several occasions as a 4-Her, Orville was now a university student; and he thus, perforce, acquired an entirely new perspective of Purdue University—the campus at West Lafayette where he would spend the next four years, learning the academic and scientific side of agriculture as an agronomy and genetics major. Purdue introduced Orville to the science of plant breeding and genetics, subjects that ultimately set the course for the future journeys young Orville Redenbacher in 1924 could not have foreseen in his wildest seventeen-year-old imaginings.

The Purdue Experience Purdue University was named for Lafayette merchant and entrepreneur John Purdue, a Pennsylvanian by birth, who pledged $150,000 toward establishment of Indiana’s new land-grant college provided the Indiana General Assembly located it in Tippecanoe County, about sixty miles northwest of Indianapolis. The legislature accepted Purdue’s gift, thereby ending a sevenyear statewide political dispute that centered more on where in Indiana the new school would be sited than about the nature of the proposed “agricultural college” and what it would teach. Eventually, the original campus was built on an alluvial shelf sixty or so feet above the west bank of the Wabash River and west of the hamlets of Kingston and Chauncey, now West Lafayette. Designating the exact site for the campus had been the second official act of the new university’s board of trustees; the first was swearing in John Purdue as a life member of the trustee board, one of the stipulations he had imposed in pledging his gift. Of course, the new school was to be named for him in perpetuity. Agriculture studies thrived at Purdue in spite of an ingrained, pervasive view among Indiana farmers of the late 1860s and 1870s who saw little, if any, point in sending their sons to college to learn to plow fields—an art they presumably already knew. And the sons appeared less interested in scientific farming and more excited by the glamour they saw in mechanics, steam engines, locomotives, and railroads—so how are you going to keep ’em down on the farm? At Purdue, engineering seemed to dominate academics almost from the beginning; yet, agriculture was to have its day. The American railroad industry burgeoned after the Civil War. Purdue became noted for its research and teaching in railroading, steam engines, and the science of improving how mechanical things move under their own power. James H. Smart, the Purdue president who pushed engineering, inevitably became known by his critics as the “engineers’ president.” He answered complaints that he neglected agriculture by declaring, “Purdue is ready for agriculture when agriculture is ready for Purdue,” inferring that he did not believe the Indiana agriculture community properly supported Purdue’s scientific efforts.

After Smart died from overwork in 1900, his successor was Winthrop E. Stone, the scholarly organic chemist who, like Smart, was a native New Hampshireman. But there the similarity ended. Though Stone had been vice president under the impulsive Smart, he was an austere conservative who quickly left little doubt that he was “agriculture’s president” at Purdue. Under his leadership, Purdue’s School of Agriculture received new impetus and became one of the most prestigious in the national system of land-grant universities. Orville thus had the advantage of having one of the best agricultural schools extant—as near as a couple of hours up the Monon Railroad line from home. In the 1920s and 1930s, Purdue’s farms were by and large south and west of the campus (though it had then, and still has, large experimental acreages in various regions of Indiana). The Purdue campus’s wide expanses of green lawns and manicured hedges of 1924 stood in stark contrast to the classic, geometric, red-brick buildings that were its classrooms, laboratories, and other educational facilities. But for the next four years, Orville allowed no campus grass to grow under his feet. He jumped into college life with zeal. If he was a country boy, he was certainly not a backward one. He stayed active in his beloved 4-H work as a college student and became a good “Greek” by his work for and loyalty to his fraternity. Purdue freshman Orville was fascinated by the array of extracurricular opportunities available to Purdue students. The one he sought most was a chance to play cornet in Paul Spotts Emrick’s ROTC marching band. Emrick, a Hoosier from northern Indiana, was a Purdue graduate in electrical engineering and had been an instructor in that discipline while he directed the university’s ROTC band as a sideline. Eventually, Emrick became the full-time director and was the innovative bandsman who in 1907 introduced the revolutionary idea of a band breaking ranks to form letters or create other interesting patterns. Emrick’s marching band tricks and his obsession with molding the perfect marching musical organization earned him the sobriquet from another famous bandsman, John Phillips Sousa. Sousa, who visited the Purdue campus and directed the Purdue band, later called Emrick “the greatest band director in America.” Emrick was someone who did things successfully and, thus, someone Orville greatly admired. Purdue’s became one of the nation’s largest university marching bands, particularly noteworthy because Purdue did not have a music school. Emrick’s toughness and his demand for perfection, or as close to it as his part-time amateurs could achieve, was most often manifested at daily afternoon practice on the field. He would stop the music and in high dudgeon inform his musicians that their notes resembled the sounds produced by (to paraphrase his words) a dozen goats flatulating through an equal number of downspouts, a metaphorical description defying need of further explanation. Yet Emrick loved his band and each of its members; his student musicians had a love-hate relationship with him. Orville loved Emrick, despite his scatological criticisms of the band. “He was a great guy and a great leader,” Orville often said of him. Orville was eager to get into the Purdue ROTC band. He had played cornet with the Jackson Township Band back home as well as for four years in the Brazil High School band, including a year with the high school orchestra. The trouble was, Orville learned to his disappointment, ninety other young and hopeful musicians also auditioned and there were only eleven openings in the cornet section. And he didn’t get one. Still, with the largest sousaphone section in the nation, ten to be exact, the band had room for anyone who could play one or was willing to learn. Ergo, Orville learned to play the sousaphone overnight well enough to win a spot in what later became known as the “All-American Marching Band,” an appellation applied by sports commentator Ted Husing. Orville played for two years in the Purdue band where, to repeat his well-worn quip, “I learned to toot my own horn”—albeit a sousaphone. He was in Chicago with the band when it performed at a Purdue versus University of Chicago football game, then again that night for the Indiana Society of Chicago. It was a new and heady experience for the Clay County farm boy. “It was one of the two best courses I ever took,” Orville quipped later. “That was during Prohibition, but the liquor flowed freely anyway. It was my first experience in Chicago, my first time in a big hotel. There were girls there from a Chicago music school. I’ll never forget it.” The unforgettable big-city glamour he had experienced was in stark contrast to Orville’s less colorful daily life of going to class and his job of cleaning Purdue hog houses and feeding chickens at the poultry farm to help him pay his way through school. He also worked for a year for the beef cattle farm not far from the campus, a job that required he be in the barn at 4 a.m. daily to prepare to feed experimental cattle their prescribed diet. He gave up his Christmas vacation in his junior year to work with a fraternity brother, Austin Noblit, to delouse every chicken at the poultry farm. The job required catching every chicken and dusting each with a compound of sodium fluoride. On weekends, for thirty-five cents an hour, he and two fraternity brothers would accompany Prof. Claude Vestal to the hog farm where the experimental animals each were ear-tagged. Their job was to catch each pig, scrape the blood and dirt from each metal ear tag, weigh each pig, and put it back in its pens for another month. Orville was college-bred, but that didn’t mean a four-year loaf. He was not one to shirk undesirable chores, even when they paid little. Besides the jobs he held at Purdue, he returned to the drudgery of the family farm each summer. Academics were comparatively easy for Orville. He liked the classroom and he liked the laboratories. At Purdue he nearly duplicated his pattern of high grades in high school—a classic example of the theory that a student who does well in high school probably has what it takes at the college level. Though he seemed to struggle continually with spelling in his English courses, he kept his grades reasonably high, permitting him the time to devote not only to jobs at the swine, poultry, and bovine farms, but also to other extracurricular activities. Strangely, Orville got into student publications where the ability to spell was, or should have been, a requisite. He went to work for the Purdue Exponent, the student morning newspaper, and became a night editor by the time he was a sophomore. The newspaper published five mornings a week; and Orville was assigned two nights a week to put morning editions “to bed,” a job usually completed long after midnight at a downtown Lafayette printing company. That often meant he had just enough time for a quick snooze before he arose to feed the cattle, grab a quick breakfast–maybe one of his mother’s hog-brain sandwiches—and get to an eight o’clock class. By mid-afternoon of the same day, Orville had to think of band practice, after which he had to attend a meeting of the Purdue Agricultural Society, or the student 4-H group, or perhaps help plan the next edition of The Purdue Agriculturist. Later, after supper, there might be an AGR chapter meeting at the fraternity house and maybe even a bull session with some of the brothers afterward. Or if you couldn’t find anything else to do, there was always studying…. One of the things Orville found important was to hang around extension buildings and see what he could learn from the agricultural specialists. The idea of improving popcorn had been in the back of his mind as early as his high school days. Two staff members at Purdue he remembers best were George I. Christie, director of the Agricultural Experiment Station, and Arthur Brunson, a hybrid corn specialist who came to Purdue from Kansas State University several years after Orville graduated. Besides his principal work with hybrid dent (field) seed corn, Brunson had also dabbled on his own in the hybridization of popcorn seed, a project not funded by Kansas State largely because popcorn was not considered an important American cash crop at the time. Fortunately, Brunson’s popcorn research was enough to impress Christie and others, and Purdue eventually became the principal researcher in popcorn among U.S. land-grant universities in the 1930s. That research was not lost on Orville, by then a country agent. He read the progress reports and watched the popcorn seed breeding experiments closely, tucking away mental notes he would draw on years later. Orville played in the Purdue band for two years—partly to avoid the ROTC training required of all freshmen and sophomore men and partly because he loved band music. In his junior year, he left the band to try out for the cross-country and track squad. By then he was also involved in the campus press club, a group called the Agricultural Editors Society, and worked for the Purdue Student Union. He reallocated the time he spent as an Exponent night editor to become a junior editor on the Purdue senior yearbook, Debris. A year later he was appointed associate editor of the book that, strangely, misspelled his name in several places as “Redenbacker.” Orville was not a natural athlete, but he conditioned quickly. In 1927 he won the annual interclass cross-country meet, running the standard two-and-a-half-mile university cross-country course in 13:50 minutes ahead of more than a dozen other

intramural competitors, and beat the best time of the previous year’s race of 14:22 minutes. Now encouraged and confident, Orville presented himself to Eddie O’Connor, the bachelor coach of varsity track. Orville qualified for the squad where, happily, he joined an AGR brother, a sophomore with the same first name, though it was spelled O-r-v-a-l—Orval Martin, whose legs were among the fastest in Purdue track history. He held at least nine Big Ten and individual records. The two became close friends and roomed together in the AGR house for a year. Orville helped Martin with his studies and Martin, in turn, helped Orville win his letter in track as a senior. “Orville was a plodder,” Martin recalls. “I remember a dual meet with Indiana [University] where Orville was running the mile but kept looking back to see where his competitors were. [Assistant Coach] Mel Taube ran alongside him and shouted, ‘For God’s sake, Reddy, keep running and stop looking around!”’ That was to become a standard part of the Redenbacher philosophy of life: “Once you’re ahead, keep running and stay ahead.” In another home dual meet in Ross-Ade Stadium, Purdue competed with the University of Chicago. Orville and his teammate Martin ran together in the mile event. Martin ran abreast of Orville and said to him, “Stay with me, Orville, and we’ll tie and you’ll get your letter.” The two led the race until the last lap when their Chicago competitor started to pass them. Martin left Orville and surged ahead to barely win, the Chicago runner coming in second. Orville was third, but that was close enough to win his varsity letter in track. For one so busy with student life, Orville still found time on occasional weekends to return to Clay Prairie to visit his family and the farm. Late Sunday afternoons, he would say his goodbyes to his mother and father at the interurban station in Brazil where he boarded the electric traction car between Terre Haute and Indianapolis and would ride as far as Greencastle. Then he would taxi two miles across town to the Monon station for the evening train trip through the Hoosier countryside of woods and fields. The train stopped at Crawfordsville, probably also at Linden and Romney, or even Taylor Station, glided down the long, gradual grade into the Wabash Valley, slowly rode through the southern outskirts of Lafayette onto Fifth Street and into downtown Lafayette, and finally came to a grinding halt at the Monon Station at Fifth and North streets, less than three blocks from the Tippecanoe County courthouse. Then Orville would walk two blocks to Main Street to hop aboard the orange-and-cream-colored streetcar with the “Purdue Only” sign for the trip across Main Street bridge over the Wabash River and the steady climb up State Street hill to the West Lafayette “village.” Moments later the familiar red-brick, red-roofed Purdue campus came into view—the Memorial Union, the library, Fowler Hall, University Hall, Ladies Hall. Orville rode to the end of the line a few feet west of the intersection of State and Russell streets, got off, and walked two blocks, suitcase in one hand, a bag of fried hog-brain sandwiches in the other, to the three-story, white clapboard Italianate structure that he and his AGR brothers called home. He usually arrived back at the house in time for a quick review of his books before Monday’s daily quiz—or quizzes. The nice thing about fried hog-brain sandwiches: You don’t have to bother sharing them with the brothers—or anyone else for that matter.

The late 1920s were exciting for Purdue University. Its president was Edward C. Elliott, the iron-jawed orator from Nebraska who had already completed two careers: one as a professor-consultant in higher education at the University of Wisconsin, and the other as chancellor of the University of Montana system. The Purdue board of trustees appointed him to succeed Winthrop Stone, a skilled mountain-climber who fell one thousand feet to his death from near the peak of Mt. Eon in the Canadian Rockies in 1921. Elliott foresaw the great potential of Purdue and coaxed it with firm-fisted insistence to reach ambitious goals for its faculty, students, and alumni that they had previously never imagined. One of the battleships in his administrative armada was John Skinner, the acerbic dean of the School of Agriculture, a Hoosier farm boy himself, who feared no combat when it came to the defense of the School of Agriculture. But to most students, deans and presidents seemed unapproachable, and as a rule, students, Orville included, made no attempts to visit Skinner. Alas, too bad. Knowing John Skinner was an education in itself. As a senior “big man on campus,” Orville sensed the change and growth at Purdue. He could not have been unaware that new laboratories and classroom buildings were about to emerge; that the first unit of a new dormitory complex, Cary Hall, was about to be built near the stadium; and that a new residence for women students, eventually named Duhme Hall, would go up in a few years a block west of the AGR house. (Both Duhme and Cary are names of university benefactors.) In fact, the growth of the Alpha Gamma Rho house itself made it necessary to move to new quarters on University Street bordering the west edge of the central campus. Orville was elected noble ruler (i.e., chapter president) in his senior year; and while he never lived in the University Street location, he was instrumental in the chapter’s move from 201 Russell Street. Keith Elsbury, an AGR pledge when Orville was the chapter’s noble ruler, remembers that he and a friend were on the campus for a 4-H Roundup and were invited to the AGR house for an evening meal. Both high school seniors, they left the house that night wearing pledge pins months before they would enroll at Purdue. Elsbury moved into the house as a pledge the following fall when he registered for classes. Orville was his “senior” adviser and pledgemaster—and for the first semester shared his room and clothes closet with Elsbury. “Orville was a poor boy like the rest of us,” Elsbury says, “but as noble ruler he sat at the head of the dining table, said grace for our meals, and just made an impressive appearance … dressed in his senior [yellow] cords and bow tie. He always wore bow ties.” Orville’s track team buddy, Orval Martin, agrees: “Like E. F. Hutton, when ‘Reddy’ talked everyone listened. And no one ever called him ‘Redenbacher’; it was always ‘Reddy’.” Martin also recalls Orville as one of the best in his fraternity house at a dinner-table contest called “pie-flipping.” The object was to flip your piece of dessert pie as close as possible to the dining-room ceiling without hitting it. “‘Reddy’,” recalls Martin, “was a pretty good pie-flipper.” One of Elsbury’s tasks as a pledge was caring for Orville’s clothes. He remembers that once in pressing Orville’s trousers, he left the iron in one place too long, leaving the inevitable scorched imprint of the iron. “Fortunately for me,” Elsbury remembers, “the trousers were almost as brown as the scorched place and hardly showed. I don’t remember what ‘Reddy’ said, but I won’t soon forget scorching his pants.” Nor will Elsbury ever forget that he was escort-designate for Orville’s date for the annual AGR pledge dance, its biggest social event of the year. Orville had asked his girlfriend from Brazil to the dance, then found he had a track meet the following day and could not break the team’s training rules, especially the one prohibiting dates and dances the night before a track meet. Pledge Elsbury then was pressed into service as Orville’s surrogate and squired the young lady to the dance at Allen’s Dance studio in downtown Lafayette. Later, as they left, Elsbury and his date were distressed to find they had missed the last streetcar to the campus. So they walked. And walked. And walked, finally arriving very late at the AGR house where out-of-town dates for the affair were staying. They found Orville pacing the floor, wondering what had happened to the two. No one was more relieved than he when they finally returned—except possibly Elsbury. The previous fall, as Orville began his senior and final year, football took most of the campus spotlight as it has every year since Purdue first played the game in 1889. In 1927 the highlight of the season was a Purdue win over Harvard, 19–0. More frosting was added to the athletic cake that year when Purdue basketball great “Stretch” Murphy helped Ward “Piggy” Lambert add another Big Ten championship to a crowded trophy case.

So now it’s the Catfish Kid’s last year at Purdue, 1927–1928, a fabulous year, a fabulous decade. The Twenties roared past Warren Harding’s Teapot Dome, “Silent Cal” Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. It was flapper time, the age of rumble seats, bathtub gin, the Charleston. “doh-doh-dee-oh,” “boop-boop-a-doo,” “twenty-three skidoo,” and “… so’s yer ole man.” Still, a few folk worked quietly and doggedly to find and pass along new ways to feed a growing, ravenous, but temporarily giddy, country.

There was a chicken in every pot—or nearly every pot—put there not by political rhetoric but by the American Men and Women of the Soil, such people as Orville Redenbacher.

As a senior, Orville continued the writing and editing he had begun as a freshman—his claim that he was a lousy speller to the contrary notwithstanding. Thomas R. Johnston, Purdue’s legendary director of agricultural information, had talked Orville into taking a part-time student job in his office to help prepare material for Indiana newspaper farm pages and/or Indiana’s ninetytwo county agents. In all, he had at least four different campus jobs to support his college education. He received help his final year from a generous great-uncle who gave him $200 for college expenses in his junior year, and he received a $200 scholarship from the Clay County commissioners when he was a senior. Now graduation was not far off, and Orville began to do the things all seniors do to wind up their college careers, including preparing for finals. His last month of school was complicated by a new and serious romance and—momentarily more urgent—a fire that consumed his boyhood home at Clay Prairie. No one was hurt, but little was salvaged. In Orville’s case, his only possession to escape the flames was a solid cherry table he professionally and beautifully crafted in high school manual training class. The wood came from a tree he cut, sawed, and dried. (The table resided prominently in the entry hall of his Coronado, California, condominium and was bequeathed to his grandson Gary.) June arrived and it was finally commencement time. Amid the traditional ceremonies, the farewells to classmates, the martial airs, the caps and gowns, the anticipation of spring and new life, the young lad from Clay Prairie heard his name announced as he began his walk across the stage in Eliza Fowler Hall, his last act as a Purdue student. President Elliott smiled proudly as he did for all of “his” graduates as he handed him his diploma, signifying he not only had earned a Bachelor of Science degree in agriculture, but also signaling an end to the younger years of Orville C. Redenbacher. He had not yet turned twenty-one.

Life Begins at Twenty

Orville Takes On the World Orville Redenbacher’s undergraduate career at Purdue demolished the twaddle that those who are college-bred have been on a four-year loaf. He spent his years at Purdue virtually on a dead run, involving himself in the study of agronomy and plant genetics. He played in the band, he ran for the track squad, he juggled editorial jobs on at least three student publications, he joined several professional societies, he was an active 4-Her, he was a leader in his fraternity, and he made good grades. Besides, he fed the cattle and deloused the chickens, he worked in the livestock barns, he cleaned the hog houses, and he wrote news stories for the agricultural information office to pay for it all. As he started his senior year, along came Corinne Rosemond Strate, the most important person he met at Purdue University in four years. She was the pretty daughter of William F. and Anna Lannert Strate. Corinne’s father was a West Lafayette roofing contractor who had been campaign manager for Republican Harry G. Leslie’s successful run for Indiana governor.* Corinne was a musically, artistically talented, vivacious, laughing West Lafayette High School senior nicknamed Peggy, though sometimes called “Creeny” by her friends. She met Orville on a “blind’ date arranged by Jess Burt, one of his fraternity brothers. When Corinne heard the name “Redenbacher,” she confused it with “Rickenbacker,” the last name of national hero and World War I ace Eddie, who happened to be on a well-publicized visit to Indianapolis. Although Orville turned out to be a farm boy from Brazil instead of the World War I flying ace, he nevertheless charmed Corinne, and she him. They were steady daters; ultimately she wore Orville’s AGR pin. It was 1928 and they even talked of marriage. Yet Corinne, who wanted to write fiction, was scheduled to enter Indiana University as a journalism student that fall, and Orville was scheduled for his re-entry into the “real world.” Still, they pledged their mutual troth even as Corinne graduated from West Lafayette High School and headed toward Bloomington, while Orville began his first job as a rural high school teacher. When his undergraduate days neared an end, he had some tough decisions to make. Orville’s desire to become a county agricultural agent was still uppermost for him though he knew it was a “one-of-these-days” ambition and would take time. He already had an offer to go to work for Allied Mills of Fort Wayne. Thanks to a recommendation from his boss, Tommy Johnston, another real possibility was a writing job with The Prairie Farmer, then probably the most widely read farm journal in the Midwest. Instead, because it offered the best pay and was close to home, he accepted an offer to become the first-ever high school vocational agriculture teacher at Fontanet, Indiana, a tiny town northeast of Terre Haute, west of Coal Bluff, and down the road a mile or two from Sandcut—and, incidentally, not more than an hour’s drive from a certain girl’s dormitory in Bloomington. “I had my biology teaching license when I graduated in June, and I decided to take the teaching job—it paid more than the other two, anyway,” Orville remembered. “So two weeks after commencement, I reported to Fontanet to teach vocational agriculture and to get ready for the fall semester. I commuted from my parent’s home which was only fifteen miles away.” Two things Orville quickly learned when he arrived at Fontanet: it did not have a vocational agricultural program nor an industrial arts teacher. While he might have liked to have been the teacher for the former full time, he was asked to take the latter also. So he taught a half day of vocational agriculture, a class in biology, and a class in industrial arts, plus seventh- and eighth-grade agriculture. When he signed his teaching contract, Orville had not counted on teaching industrial arts. But he was good at it, having gained competence from his own experience in manual training as a Brazil High School student and from his own love of working with fine wood cut from his own farm. He never forgot the fire that destroyed his childhood home, not to mention the destruction of all but one of the painstakingly crafted pieces he had made. Orville taught the vocational agriculture studies he had himself developed, one of the reasons he had been employed in the first place, and also found time to organize Fontanet’s first 4-H clubs. Meanwhile, he asked Corinne to marry him. She had pledged Phi Mu sorority, then decided not to return to Indiana University after her first semester. Corinne was a good student, but she was discouraged by her studies and some homesickness that Orville recognized but which she refused to admit. One of his many letters to her at the university attempted to encourage her to continue her studies, but it also revealed some of his own deep and rarely expressed thoughts about why he so ardently pursued a university education himself. On September 28, 1928 three months before they married, he wrote, in part, this prophetic letter: Dearest Corinne: [You] must have received a zero in French or else a bawling out from your psychology professor from the way your letter sounded…. Corinne, I’m very sorry that you do not like your school work, but I’m afraid that won’t help matters a whole lot. But really, you haven’t been there long enough to tell. Why is it that you hate it at I. U.? Did you find it like [Horace] Abbott pictured it to you? Gee, I can remember when I was [in Purdue]. I got spells when I thought I would quit. But there were three things that kept me going. First, I always wanted my children to know I was a college graduate and I could tell them all of the college yarns about Dad of ’28. I don’t know whether you believe this, but I’ve had that one thought ever since I’ve been in high school and that’s what I’m working for now—a name my children will be proud of. I never told this to anyone before and it does sound rather awkward on paper. Second, I was afraid the people back home would think I couldn’t make my grades, or else got kicked out, and [the third reason] was because I told my folks that I was going to college and I’ve never had nerve enough to back down on any of my promises. The first two summers I went home [from Purdue] with the full intention of quitting, but these other things got to working and every fall found me back at Purdue. Here I’ve been rambling on about “I, I, I,” but Peggy, maybe if you would think of the future and what a college education means, even for only a year, you wouldn’t be so down-hearted. I suppose you think that when I see you [next] I’ll be preaching sermons to you, but really—I won’t …. With love, Reddy

In the same letter, Orville hinted at marriage by saying that he preferred living elsewhere than at home on his parents’ farm and wanted a place of his own near Fontanet, writing, “I only wish you were here so we could keep house out there. Do you?” She did. The day after Christmas in 1928, the couple was married at Corinne’s parents’ home in West Lafayette. The wedding could hardly be called elaborate; only Corinne’s mother and father, Grandpa and Grandma Lannert, and Grandma Strate were there. Orville’s family from home did not attend; they felt the trip was too far. Besides, if they did go all the way to West Lafayette just for Orville’s wedding, who would be home that day to do the milking? Reverend Melvin C. Hunt, pastor of the First Methodist Church, performed the ceremony. Orville had paid for the marriage license at the Tippecanoe County courthouse, but he had to borrow five dollars from Corinne to pay the Reverend Mr. Hunt. Afterward, the newly wedded Mr. and Mrs. Orville Redenbacher said their goodbyes and drove Corinne’s father’s car to Indianapolis for an overnight honeymoon. The next day they drove back to West Lafayette, then headed south in Orville’s Model T Ford to set up housekeeping in a little four-room house a mile southeast of Fontanet High School. It included three acres, a chicken house, and an outhouse; Orville and Corinne rented it for ten dollars a month. Corinne’s mother and father had given them a $500 cash wedding gift, which they wisely decided to use to buy their first furniture. “We spent it all in Lafayette,” Orville recalled. “We loaded all of the furniture in her father’s truck and her parents drove it to Fontanet for us. After they arrived my mother and father came over from the farm to meet them. We prepared dinner on our new coal and wood burning stove we bought in Terre Haute earlier. The store installed it for us just a day before we moved in. The stove also provided heat for the house—that, and an electric space heater and a fireplace.” The Redenbachers’ little country house soon became a home, the most popular place for kids in the Fontanet neighborhood; thus developed a kind of lifetime pattern for the family. They knew how to do the things youngsters liked and spent hours devising ways to keep kids busy—possibly something Orville retained from his own busy years in 4-H clubs. They carried that tradition to their three daughters and beyond to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Twice widowed, Orville visited them all as often as he could. “We always seemed to have the school children around,” Orville remembered. “Both Corinne and I had golf clubs. The house was situated in the middle of the large lawn so it was possible to lay out a small, seven-hole golf course on it. Corinne and I and the children would draw to see which club we would use. Then you played the entire course with the one club you drew. So you might be playing with a putter, or a driver, or a nine-iron. None of those kids had ever seen a golf course before and they had a lot of fun.” Orville had been married only three days when he came down with chickenpox. His doctor ordered him to stay away from his classrooms for at least three days. There was no substitute teacher available for his subjects. Instead, the principal suggested Corinne could take over the classes for three days. Immensely talented, resourceful, and vivacious, but totally inexperienced in vocational agriculture, biology, and manual training, Corinne took over Orville’s classroom chores for three days without serious mishap—and enjoyed the work enormously. She was a “natural” teacher. She was also a “natural,” though new, wife who wrote exuberant letters home to her mother and father, especially the one in which she wrote of her new-found prowess as a cook and announced her pregnancy: My dearest honeys, While my baby [Orville] has gone up to the high school to practice basketball I shall write letters and read until he comes back at 8. I could have gone along, but there were the dishes to be washed and a good book to be finished and the new Women’s World (which I got today) to be looked over…. Besides, I have the crepe paper, wire and everything to make apple blossoms and I could start on them tonight. Also I have lots of little holes in my and my sugar’s stockies to be mended. Then, too, I have a big pan of nuts cracked, ready to have their “goodies” taken out of them. My, my! I don’t suppose I’ll much more than finish this letter and write another before Red [Orville] gets back. Today I cleaned up my house a little and wrote a bunch of letters for Reddy, I had a nice steak for supper, mashed potatoes, gravy, peas and carrots creamed together, hot pocketbook rolls, milk to drink, and date pudding and whipped cream. Wasn’t that a nice supper? Tomorrow I’m going to try Aunt Grace’s Mexican meatloaf…. Red wanted me to go to the Dr. tonight to see if there’s really anything up, but I thought I’d wait a while first. [I’m] almost sure now, though, that I’ll be holding my very own baby in nine or ten months. I’m thrilled to pieces if it’s true…. Gallons of hugs and freight cars of love, “Baby” Strate Redenbacher P.S. Reddy calls me “2 in 1” now. He says I’m his “li’l 2 in 1.”

Orville’s appointment as a county agent occurred much earlier than he ever dared dream. His old friend and mentor, Horace Abbott, who had been Clay County extension agent when Orville was in high school, had become county agent of Vigo County while his young friend was away at Purdue. Before Orville completed his first year as a high school teacher, Abbott had obtained some newly appropriated federal funds and asked Orville to be his county 4-H club agent, only one of eight appointed in Indiana that year. Orville was euphoric. Finishing his year’s work at Fontanet High School late in May 1929, Orville, not yet twenty-two, and Corinne, not yet twenty and very much pregnant, moved to Terre Haute to work for the man who had been his role model since he was a high school freshman in Brazil. But becoming an assistant county agent was not the only cause for Redenbacher elation in 1929. Orville drove Corinne to West Lafayette in mid-October for the expected arrival of their first child, where Corinne would have the help of her mother in the first weeks afterward. Their new baby girl arrived October 28, 1929. Orville and Corinne immediately named her Billie Ann—Billie for Orville’s father, William, and Ann for Corinne’s mother, Anna, but primarily they named her Billie for Billie Dove, at the time their favorite show-business celebrity. Back in Terre Haute, his new family settled, Orville repeated history by coaching the Vigo County 4-H dairy-judging team to a state championship, just as he had been part of a team coached to a state championship by Abbott years earlier. He also organized the nation’s first 4-H Junior Leadership club, and later organized and directed the first Indiana 4-H Junior Leadership camp sponsored by the Indiana District Kiwanis clubs. Kiwanis, by the way, became as important in his life as 4-H had been. He joined in 1930 in Terre Haute, a thirty-five dollar membership gift of his father-in-law, Bill Strate, a charter Kiwanian of the Lafayette club. Orville was never half-hearted about anything he set out to do, which in large measure explains why he was ultra-successful. He was not timid about jumping into Kiwanis activities with both feet. In less than nine years, he was a club officer and by 1939 was elected its president. Sixty-five years later, in years of membership the oldest Kiwanian extant, Orville was still active, rarely missing a weekly luncheon regardless of where he was. He had a perfect attendance record of thirteen years—which does not begin to indicate the long hours of committee work, travel, and other chores he performed in behalf of this international service organization. Milestones began to fly by rapidly for Orville. In little more than a year since he graduated from Purdue, he was married, moved to Terre Haute as the county’s 4-H club agent, achieved fatherhood, and became a Kiwanian. Billie Ann was not yet two years old when on March 21, 1931, Corinne and Orville were blessed with a second daughter. They named her Sue—not Susan or Suzanne, but Sue, and with no middle name. One day early in 1932, Abbott called his staff together to announce that he had accepted an offer to become the county agricultural extension agent for Marion County, Indiana’s most populous county since it encompassed Indianapolis. Orville reacted to Abbott’s announcement with mixed feelings. Sadly, he would miss working for, and learning from, his old friend and

role model; happily, he could make a boyhood dream come true by succeeding Abbott. So he did; Orville’s inevitable appointment as county agent was made official on April 1, 1932, the day after Abbott left Terre Haute. Orville was good at making his dreams come true.

Vigo County is plastered tightly against the Indiana-Illinois state line, of which the southern five miles in Vigo County is the Wabash River. Vigo is considered urban because of Terre Haute, the county seat, a city of about sixty-six thousand when Orville lived there. Unfairly, Terre Haute always seemed to get a bad rap; it never had much of a good reputation for anything, even though it produced such souls as Eugene V. Debs, the most prominent American socialist leader of his time. He is credited by some with founding industrial unionism in the United States by leading the bloody Pullman strike of 1894, an activity that led to his becoming, simultaneously, a Socialist presidential candidate and a prison convict. Terre Haute also produced the somber Theodore Dreiser, the editor and novelist who wrote An American Tragedy, and Sister Carrie. Dreiser’s Terre Haute brother, Paul Dresser, was the composer of “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away,” the nostalgic title of the state song he wrote far away in a dreary Manhattan walkup. Terre Haute was movie comic Buster Keaton’s hometown. It was also the site of the world’s first pay flush toilet (a nickel), a technological wonder that drew throngs of the curious, thus obviating privacy. For seven years, through 1939, Terre Haute also claimed then County Agent Orville C. Redenbacher, not to mention earlier years when as a farm kid he came to town weekly to sell popcorn, sausage, eggs, and vegetables. The Wabash meanders roughly north to south across Vigo County, bordering the west edge of the city. That is the high ground from whence Terre Haute gets its French name—Terre, for ground, and Haute, for high—from the description of the terrain given by the early voyageurs, the French fur traders who canoed the river between the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. “Haute” was a comparative, since the ground on the east bank was only slightly higher than the west bank. The west side was largely a floodplain where capricious overflows of the muddy Wabash tried to ruin a grain crop every other spring or so—despite flood levees—in exchange for a new layer of soil from northeastern Indiana, all to the consternation of Vigo County lowland farmers and Vigo County agricultural agents. Despite the distractions inherent in co-parenting a growing family, Orville was relentless in his zeal to support and improve the well-being of Vigo County’s diversified agriculture. Orville was not afraid of innovation nor was he himself afraid to innovate. His deep well of courage stemmed partly from the self-confidence he gained from knowing how to avoid foolish ventures; mostly, however, he had no fear of failure. As Charles Bowman, his business partner for nearly half a century, once marveled, “Orville had the greatest ability to ignore defeat of any man I’ve ever known.” Orville’s new job as county agent carried an extra burden; the uncertain economics of the Great Depression touched nearly every American, most certainly every farmer. Money was scarce; and those who had any held on to it tightly, manifested by deep cuts in government programs, including state and federal revenues for agriculture. Such cuts directly affected the operations of county agents the nation over; Vigo County and Agent Orville Redenbacher were not excepted. Before Black Friday in 1929, county agent funds could afford the luxury of an assistant county agent for 4-H work. Later, when Orville was promoted from assistant agent for 4-H to county agent, his former job remained temporarily vacant, meaning he had to conduct not only the work of the county agent, but also carry on the activities of the county’s by-now extensive 4-H programs as well. He could not even get funds for an assistant agent, meaning the county agent worked virtually solo at all the jobs even though he was paid about three-thousand dollars a year for only one of them. Even his full time office secretary was written out of his budget, and he had to conduct his widespread activities with a halftime office girl paid by the Milk Producers Association to answer the office telephone. In desperation he occasionally recruited Corinne to help out even though they had two babies at home to care for. Sparse as money and paid help was, Orville managed to sustain his existing programs for Vigo County farmers and their families; and even in the face of tough times, he expanded some projects through use of volunteers, especially in the 4-H programs where his exceptional Junior Leader clubs provided project supervision. Orville pioneered the use of radio in agricultural extension. He was the first county agent in the nation to make five-minute farm news and crop report broadcasts every noon over Terre Haute radio station WBOW. He continued the practice throughout his seven-year stint as county agent, and expanded the radio service to Vigo County farmers by broadcasting directly from farms, or other pertinent locations, via WBOW’s mobile broadcast unit, one of the earliest. It was a good method for the new county agent and soon became a widespread practice elsewhere. Today, radio, television, and other technical marvels are routinely used as essential ingredients of agricultural extension everywhere. But in the early days, when radio farm broadcasts were new, an occasional glitch could cancel the entire effort—such as the time Orville and his new home demonstration agent, Lillian A. Murphy, made a five-minute noon broadcast from within a large poultry building at a local farm. Both were proud of that broadcast; when they returned to the extension office in the Vigo County courthouse, Lillian asked fellow workers how they liked it. “We couldn’t hear a thing,” one responded somewhat apologetically. “Too many chickens clucking.” Orville was extremely proud of Lillian Murphy and her accomplishments. She had been an outstanding 4-H Club member in northern Indiana, having undertaken eight projects that won her a national 4-H championship and the title of Outstanding 4-H Girl in Indiana. An Elkhart, Indiana, native, she graduated from Madison Township High School at nearby South Bend, and was a member of a family of five daughters and two sons. She attended Purdue on a scholarship, graduating in 1938 with a degree in home economics. As did Orville, Lillian began her career as a teacher in a small Indiana high school and was teaching vocational home economics at Bainbridge, Indiana, a hamlet thirty or so miles west of Indianapolis. Orville was seeking to fill a vacancy on his staff for a home demonstration agent, the “county agent” who worked with farm wives to improve the home environment for families, especially rural families. Acting on enthusiastic recommendations of the 4-H department in Purdue’s extension service, Orville hired Lillian Murphy as the county’s third home demonstration agent, the youngest such appointee in Indiana at the time. “I was really fresh out of college and Orville gave me the confidence to go ahead and organize the [home demonstration] programs that I thought Vigo County needed,” Lillian recalls. “He taught me to ignore the negative and that helped me do the work I enjoyed so much.” Lillian worked closely with Orville in pioneering radio extension; he showed his appreciation by recommending her for a tenmonth extension fellowship, granted that year to only two people in the nation’s entire extension service. That gave her the opportunity to earn a master of science degree in radio education at Georgetown University while also studying at the United States Department of Agriculture in the nation’s capital. She also won an award for having written the best thesis in that subject. Her recollections included being invited to the White House with others on two occasions for tea with Eleanor Roosevelt who, recalls Lillian, seemed intensely interested in home demonstration extension work. After she returned to Terre Haute, Orville one day introduced her to John Strohm, an Indiana reporter for the Prairie Farmer, who made regular stops at Orville’s office in search of newsworthy articles for his publication. Strohm was a colorful individual who had traveled the world, a small-town Illinois farm kid with a journalism degree from the University of Illinois. When Strohm got home from his world trip, he went to work for the Prairie Farmer and met Lillian, thanks to Orville. After wanderlust took Strohm on a long second trip throughout South America, he proposed to her; and they were married in her hometown, South Bend, in 1941. Lillian thus left Vigo County to become a wife, mother, and community leader; Orville remained as a busy county agent and father. Both remained close friends. Though Orville’s young Terre Haute family grew purposefully and happily, Orville and Corinne were not immune from tragedy. She got the dreaded telephone call one day in 1933 that her father, William Strate, had been killed in an accident with a steel

truck on U.S. 52 as he returned to Lafayette from a Republican state convention in Indianapolis. Strate was to be remembered for engineering the election of Gov. Harry G. Leslie in 1932. By the mid-1930s, Orville’s Vigo County staff had been completely restored but the work load had tripled, and in some cases quadrupled. Orville pleaded for and finally got more office space and in 1935 moved from a tiny cramped office in the Vigo County courthouse to a five-room suite in the new Federal Building. He was able to employ an assistant county agent and eventually expanded his staff with a 4-H Club agent about the time he found Lillian Murphy. He was also able to employ an office secretary, who had the assistance of four National Youth Administration youngsters; and later he cajoled enough federal and state funds to be able to hire a WPA instructor, who ran the extension office’s soil tests and did crop-disease and insect analysis. Orville performed what most of his colleagues saw as a miracle since public funds in the 1930s were sparse. He knew how to be a squeaky wheel. In addition, mostly through Orville’s efforts, vocational agriculture classes were in place in each of Vigo County’s ten high schools, expanded from only a handful in the early 1930s. They each also had a program in vocational home economics. Orville always made it a point to credit the teachers in these programs with the success of the county’s dynamic 4-H programs. He also worked with a number of local agricultural organizations; one of the foremost was the Terre Haute Milk Producers Association. Small-herd dairy farming was Vigo’s principal agricultural activity because of the large Terre Haute milk marketing volume. But Vigo was also a fresh fruit-and-vegetable county; he worked closely with the Terre Haute Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association and the Vigo County Beekeepers Association, the Vigo County Agricultural Association, Vigo County Agricultural Conservation Association, and the Older Youth Group. He cultivated many civic organizations that supported the extension program, especially 4-H work: Kiwanis, Rotary, the local chamber of commerce, and merchants. In his last year as county agent, Orville maintained the same dogged pace he had known as an agriculture student at Purdue. He traveled nearly 40,000 miles within the county, attended more than what seemed infinite meetings with total annual attendance he estimated to be nearly 45,000, spent 340 days in his office, and roughly the same number in Vigo County farm fields. His individual farm consultations totaled more than 16,500, not to mention 7,600 hundred calls to his office with questions, and a nearly equal number of calls he made with answers. News articles about extension appearing in local papers totaled more than 1,200, nearly all of them emanating from Orville’s office. But he was proudest of “his baby,” his radio broadcasts from the field, or from wherever he could carry the extension message. The number rose every year and in 1939 totaled 344, an average of one, sometimes two, broadcasts every day of the year except Sundays. He worked hard to expand 4-H activity in Vigo County; when he began his work as Vigo County club agent in 1930, 4-H membership was less than 270. In one year, he managed to raise that number to nearly 640 boys and girls. When he became county agent in 1932, his annual report showed 910 youngsters working on more than 1,000. By 1939, under Orville’s influence, 4-H enrollment in Vigo County varied between 1,000 and more than 1,200. For all of the programs he put in place—including the hard work of carrying on the one-to-one direct work with individual farmers—Orville suffered great frustrations. The years served as a county agent were the years of the Great Depression. How many times could he endure standing by, sad and powerless, to prevent a hardworking friend from surrendering his farm to the relentless damage done by a blighted farm economy? The Vigo County Agricultural Association was founded in 1931, while Orville was club agent, to revive the annual county fair that had been abandoned in 1910. He first organized a 4-H fair in 1930; the new county fair became a natural outgrowth of that effort. The association was composed of Vigo County farmers and businessmen; its purpose was to conduct the county fair by providing space and premium money for the 4-H Club show that was to be central to the event. But it took Orville and the association four years to get the fair organized and staged. In 1935, the first Vigo County Fair was successfully held; and within five years, it awarded premium cash of more than six thousand dollars. Attendance passed the seventy thousand mark for the six-day event, its revival a tribute to his organizational skill. For all of that, Orville still found time to work on his master’s degree in radio communication, both at Purdue and Colorado State University. He completed the required courses, some by correspondence, but he did not complete a thesis and thus was not granted the degree. Meanwhile, the Redenbacher family grew. Billie Ann was ten and Sue was eight when Gail Rosemond, given her mother’s middle name, was born December 12, 1939, in Terre Haute. Orville wore many hats in his work as a county agent, but the one he wore most proudly was the one that said “father” on it. What little spare time Orville could corral, he spent with Corinne and his daughters. A good bit of that involved his second fondest hobby, photography—mostly taking his daughters’ pictures. Christmas always involved Dad’s photographic ritual, Billie Ann remembers. “We couldn’t come out to the living room where the tree was on Christmas morning until Daddy had his movie camera ready and on the tripod. It took quite a bit of preparation and we could hardly wait. Finally, mother would call us to come in, and we had to pretend to act excited as we rushed into the room from our beds while Daddy took movies of us around the Christmas tree.” At one time Orville had four cameras and always carried them on family trips, mostly to take pictures of his girls, usually standing in the foreground of spectacular scenery somewhere. Once at the Grand Canyon, Orville lost one of his cameras; and Corinne and the girls kidded him for years afterward, telling him it slipped off the edge and was still at the bottom of the canyon. Corinne and Orville liked to attend local dramatic productions “… and once when I was about six,” Billie remembers, “they took me along and I remember I got restless and sleepy, so they laid me across their laps and that’s how all of us enjoyed the play.” Corinne and Orville had the usual family tribulations, such as the time Billie Ann, about three, immaturely and impulsively grabbed a pair of scissors from her grandmother’s hands and in so doing accidentally plunged them into her own eye. Her mother saw her grab the scissors but didn’t see them stab her eye. Corinne quickly grabbed her and began a spanking when to her horror she noticed blood dripping from Billie Ann’s eye. Fortunately, the accident didn’t cause permanent damage. Sue and Billie Ann were not above concocting pranks. They once went to the Vigo County courthouse to their father’s office after hours and, while he worked, sneaked into the hallways, rang for the elevator bell, then ran and hid. This occurred several times until the elevator operator either got tired of the game or became suspicious and surprised the two little girls in the act. End of prank. They often visited Grandma and Grandpa Strate in West Lafayette, especially on Purdue football weekends when the girls would stay with Grandma while Orville and Corinne walked to see the game at Ross-Ade Stadium. Whether Purdue won or lost, Orville was always happy to get back to his mother-in-law’s house. Inevitably, she had one of his favorite dishes—oyster soup with tiny, round oyster crackers. One of Billie Ann’s favorite recollections was an extended visit she and Sue had with her grandmother in West Lafayette in 1939 while Orville and Corinne, still pregnant with Gail, traveled to the New York World’s Fair. “I loved walking to the library. It was only a couple of blocks down North Chauncey Street from Grandma’s house. I loved looking at all of the 3-D slides through the stereopticons they had there.” Orville’s daughters also had vivid recollections of visits near Brazil with Grandma Redenbacher “and all of the aunts, uncles, and cousins.” Billie still remembers the time her family took their Pekinese to Grandma Redenbacher’s house on a weekend and “Grandma’s dog bit our dog in the face and Daddy had to rush the dog to the veterinarian and we all cried.” A vacant lot next to the Redenbachers’ home in Terre Haute was the place all of the neighborhood kids played. Orville spent one weekend digging holes and setting steel pipe in concrete, making swings, a trapeze, and rings for the girls and their friends to play on. In winter, he flooded a large area of the lot for neighborhood ice skating and sliding. Oh, there are enough stories for another volume—stories of skinned knees, of rescues from overly ambitious tree-climbing, of becoming separated from mother in the department store, of coming home for lunch in the third grade and panicking upon finding the house locked but then remembering mother told you to stay at school for lunch that day, or of the time Billie Ann screamed painfully when she thought someone slammed the car door on her thumb, then realized it didn’t hurt and discovered

that it hadn’t been caught in the door at all. Orville and his family spent much time with his parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins in nearby Clay County and in West Lafayette with Grandma Strate. Orville made certain his daughters were blessed by the concept of “family,” that it was more than merely mom, pop, and the kids. Orville and Corinne were profoundly blessed with the charm of their three little girls who, like all little girls, are little only once and far too briefly even as the fondest recollections of parents keep them that special way forever: “… Sugar and spice / And everything nice / That’s what little girls are made of.” Orville and Corinne knew all about sugar and spice.

One day in 1939, wealthy Terre Hauteans Henry P. Smith and his brother Hi came to see Orville. The Smiths, owners of Princeton Mining Company, had purchased the land over their mines and oil wells and needed a manager to profitably organize it. They knew about Orville’s dynamic management skill as a county agent and his innovative farm broadcasts. Another wealthy Terre Hautean, Anton “Tony” Hulman, who owned a wholesale grocery company and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, was the Smith’s first cousin and had a one-fourth interest in the vast acreage. “We need,” the Smiths told Orville, “someone like you to organize and manage our acreage—12,000 acres to be exact.”

Princeton Farms Gail was only a month old when the Redenbachers moved from Terre Haute south down U.S. 41 seventy-five miles, not far from Princeton, the Gibson County seat. Orville’s mission was to consolidate, organize, and manage the operations of Smiths’ and Hulman’s 12,000 acres scattered as twenty-four separate tracts mostly in Gibson County with one farm of 450 acres in Warrick County, next door, and two other farms totaling 500 acres in neighboring Vanderburgh County. More than half of the land lay in the Wabash, White, and Patoka river valleys—rich ground but subject to frequent spring floods. The levees that protect about 85 percent of the land today were built in the 1950s after Orville left the farms. Orville was thirty-two when he officially began the day-to-day management of the Smith brothers’ land on January 1, 1940. His first decision was to call the vast complex Princeton Farms. It was headquartered on one of the farms fronting on U.S. 41 not far from Princeton. The foreman and his family occupied a house on the east side of the road, and the Redenbachers lived in a large white clapboard house on the west side of U.S. 41 near the farm office and numerous outbuildings. Another early decision Orville made was to stop the Smiths’ long practice of sharecropping; following the 1939 crop year, all of the farms were operated by hired labor. The owners gave Orville an excellent contract for the times: A home, food, $4,500 a year, and 10 percent of farm net profits. Still, it was little enough for the professional manager responsible for the profitable success of Indiana’s largest farm. Orville never forgot one year when he had corn, soybeans, and oats planted in the bottomlands only to see all three crops ruined by flooding too late in the season to replant. The entire farm’s profits that year—his 10 percent included—were wiped out. To Orville, such setbacks were not defeats; he viewed them simply as lessons not to be forgotten. Orville’s older brother, Karl, had worked the bottom lands for the Smiths for more than a year before Orville was hired as manager; Karl then became Orville’s foreman for the entire farm complex. Eventually Karl was forced to leave due to ill health. Orville promoted Arch Faulkner, a Kentuckian from the tiny settlement of Poole, who migrated to Indiana several years earlier, to succeed him. Faulkner was the father of eight children, six of them living when he moved to southern Indiana to work for the Smiths and help Karl cultivate their river bottomlands. Faulkner was a savvy farmer and became Orville’s right-hand man, remaining as general foreman of Princeton Farms until his death in 1952. As a county agent, and then as manager of Indiana’s largest farm, Orville was constantly tuned to Purdue University’s agricultural experiment station and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Extension Service, both based hand-in-glove within the same facilities at Purdue. He was an innovator, ready to try anything new in agriculture—such as hybrid dent (field) corn and liquid fertilizer. Soon after he moved to Princeton, for example, Orville became one of the first farmers in Indiana to plant hybrid dent seed corn. For a time, Orville managed the largest hybrid seed corn acreages in a state where today hybrid seed corn is an agricultural mainstay. He processed and sold hybrid dent seed corn under the “Princeton Farms” label. In Terre Haute, he had been president of the Kiwanis Club in 1939; less than a year later in Princeton he wasted no time in associating himself with a new Kiwanis Club—though it had only seven members at the time. Orville made Princeton Farms into a Hoosier agricultural show-place. He diversified his operations in such a way so as to make the farm show a profit. In his first year as manager, Orville invested heavily in hybrid dent seed corn; and in his second year, 1941, he planted the crop with which he had the most familiarity and a great deal of interest: hybrid popcorn seed developed in the 1930s by plant scientists at his alma mater, Purdue. He first built a processing plant for the dent corn hybrid seed, soon erecting another to process hybrid popcorn seed. Princeton Farm first began raising the Purdue inbreds in 1941, the first year they were released by the university. Princeton Farms sold popcorn seed throughout the United States and Canada and eventually to growers in Hungary, Israel, Columbia, Argentina, Chili, and South Africa. But in 1944, Princeton Farms began raising commercial popcorn for the supermarket trade and continued to increase its acreage. By 1951 Princeton Farms had six thousand acres under contract, twelve hundred of that on Princeton Farms, and the balance under contract with farmers in southwestern Indiana and southeastern Illinois. Orville first raised a Purdue variety called P32, but in 1948 Princeton Farms began to plant one of the popcorn hybrids he had developed. They processed and sold it in sealed containers under the “Princeton Farms” label. Princeton Farms also emphasized certified wheat, soybeans, registered Aberdeen Angus cattle, registered Guernsey dairy cows, registered Hampshire hogs, and registered Hampshire sheep—all premium livestock that Princeton Farms regularly showed at state fairs and other events. The farms routinely fed 1,700 steers and 1,000 lambs annually, mostly with hybrid corn and/or forage raised on the farms. Taking his cue from Purdue extension bulletins, Orville began feeding cattle a combination of corn cobs and urea, a nourishing mixture much cheaper than the usual corn and soybeans. Orville delighted in telling how steers did not gain as quickly on the corncob-urea recipe as did bulls. There was a good market for bulls for bologna in those years, Orville recalled. “I was shipping in as many bulls as I could get, feeding them, and shipping them out to market,” he explained. “It became a routine thing—I was shipping them in, shipping them out, shipping them in, shipping them out.” He would pause for a moment, then adds with an wide irreverent grin, “I got to be known as the biggest bullshipper in Indiana.” At the same time, Orville began his own popcorn breeding experiments at Princeton Farms. Although that to Orville was a personally challenging and important work, a milestone development in agriculture also grabbed his attention. Eventually his enthusiastic acceptance of it eventually earned him a million dollars many years before his wealth and fame in popcorn. That development was liquid fertilizer. Four years after the end of World War II, Orville bought a barrel of a new Allied Chemical Company product called Solution 32, or Uran, the company’s brand name. Orville first experimented with it by spraying square-rod (16.5 feet square) test plots throughout his fields with Uran and liked the crop results so well that he bought the second and third tank car loads Allied Chemical ever manufactured. That meant he had to build the first farm storage tank for liquid fertilizer ever erected anywhere in the United States. Orville’s fame arose as a pioneer in popcorn improvement; less widely known is that at the same time he pioneered the use of liquid fertilizer, now virtually a universal farm practice in North America. In the first years, Orville used what he described as a fertilizer solution; anhydrous ammonia (liquid nitrogen) came later when Orville moved to northwest Indiana to begin his lifelong partnership with Charles Bowman. Meanwhile, Orville’s experimental hybridization of popcorn seed continued. Whether it is popcorn or dent (field) corn, hybridization requires hard physical labor: detasseling. Suffice to say here, it is

part of the process necessary to cross two varieties of corn so that breeders get the best qualities of both. Detasselers go through the fields and from preselected rows remove the tassels so that corn plants, which are bisexual, do not pollinate themselves, receiving instead pollen from the variety in the next row, thus creating the cross-hybrid seed. The process is repeated until the desirable qualities are achieved. In the large acreages under Orville’s management, detasseling required large crews and could not wait. In World War II when manpower was critically scarce, everyone pitched in, even the two oldest Redenbacher daughters and Rubye Faulkner, daughter of foreman Arch. None of them liked the job much; it was hot, dirty drudgery without the slightest interest or challenge for preteen girls. After thirty-six young men who had worked for him were drafted into the armed forces—before the draft rules were changed to exempt agricultural workers—Orville managed to bring in Jamaican labor for farmwork between mid-March and midNovember. He had a bunkhouse and kitchen built near the office. None of the Jamaican workers spoke much English, but Orville remembers them as generally happy and hardworking. “They all brought their own machetes with them from Jamaica,” Orville recalled. “They used them to clean our drainage ditches. We had fifty miles of those, and they got filled with willows and weeds They could clean them faster and better with machetes than did our regular people using scythes.” Orville made it a point to see that the Jamaicans had a party at least once a month with Jamaican music—or thought to be— played on a record player Orville provided. Mostly, however, the Jamaicans seemed to prefer the music they made themselves with their harmonicas. Rubye (now Mrs. Rubye Smith) remembers the time she and Sue were given the Jamaicans’ paychecks to be distributed. Barefooted, they walked down to the bunkhouse and gave them to “Russell,” the cook—they never knew his last name—who was one of the few Jamaicans who spoke English well enough to understand and distribute the checks. The girls became a little anxious when the men seemed upset and began grumbling; they did not understand the concept of paychecks and expected to be paid in cash. Russell finally calmed the men and explained that the checks could be cashed for exactly the amount they had earned. Although the Jamaicans finally returned to their homeland, one who had come later stayed behind to work for Orville on Princeton Farms. He was Huntley Robinson, who spoke impeccable English with a distinct British flair. He refused coffee and always drank tea, saved nearly all of his wages, learned to drive, and eventually bought an automobile. Sue and Rubye were still young and naive; until the Jamaicans came to Princeton Farms, neither had ever seen a black person. They thought all blacks were called “Huntley”—unless they cooked. Then they were “Russell.” Sue was a pre-adolescent when she came down with rheumatic fever. Corinne put aside her many community and church activities for a year while she and Orville nursed Sue back to good health. The family united for the emergency with Orville and Corinne devoting themselves to Sue while Billie Ann looked after Gail, then enjoying the vagaries of toddlerhood. Sue and Rubye were nearly the same age and became the closest of playmates. They played together and got into trouble together. One Sunday afternoon they somehow got into Orville’s farm office. Rubye picked up the telephone and called her mother across the road, chattering until her mother finally had to say, “All right, Rubye, that’s enough!” Meanwhile Sue eyed the office Dictaphone, got it running, then screamed into it as loudly as she could. The next day, Orville’s secretary turned it on and, after putting on the earphones, was nearly deafened by Sue’s recorded scream. Orville’s office was summarily put off-limits to children.

One of Orville’s frequent visitors to Princeton Farms in the 1940s was Charles F. (for Frederick) Bowman, then in his twenties. Bowman, like Orville, was an Indiana farm kid, though from the other end of the state. Like Orville, Bowman was a Purdue graduate in agriculture, Class of 1941, and had been an honor student of his 1937 high school graduating class at Lowell, Indiana, a farm and railroad town of about eight thousand. Orville’s high school community of Brazil is almost the same size. Bowman was born in May, 1919, and like Orville, arrived on his family’s farm. Lowell is in southern Lake County, tucked into the rural northwest corner of Indiana, but almost within shouting distance of the smoky Calumet area. Like Orville, he attended Purdue University and was a student in agriculture. He majored in agricultural education, was a member of Alpha Gamma Rho, and worked his way through school. He was employed by Prof. Keller Beeson, then in charge of Indiana seed certification, and became so intrigued by seed standards that he made a career of seed certification. After graduation in 1941, he went to work as manager of the Indiana Corn Growers’ Association (now Indiana Crop Improvement Association) seed certification service based at Purdue. The job involved maintaining high standards and quality of the hybrid grain and pasture grass seeds raised and sold by Indiana farmers. That meant Bowman spent a great many days traveling throughout Indiana, inspecting crop products. Bowman’s visits to Princeton Farms, one of the state’s largest producers of hybrid seed corn and popcorn seed in the 1940s, became routine. A lifelong friendship developed between Orville Redenbacher and Charles Bowman. About a year after the end of World War II, Bowman became manager of the Purdue-based Agricultural Alumni Seed Improvement Association, which continued as the state’s seed certification agency. One night in the late 1940s, Bowman and Orville met for dinner at a Princeton hotel. “It was raining that night,” Bowman says, “because I can remember the hotel roof leaked.” The two ignored Gibson County’s inclemency and talked at length about “ways we can sell our know-how,” which was considerable. Sometime later, Bowman was in Valparaiso in northwest Indiana, at a meeting of 230 regional hybrid seed corn growers, lecturing on the techniques of maintaining high standards for hybrid seed corn. At the meeting were some familiar faces he had not only met in his work but had also known when he was a farm boy in Lake County. Two of them were George and Marie Chester, owners of one of Indiana’s oldest seed corn businesses. It was based at a Porter County village called Boone Grove not far southwest of Valparaiso. Their son, John, also a Purdue graduate, virtually ran the company but had suffered a back injury that prevented his farming actively. “I’d like to hire you to manage the business,” George Chester told Bowman, who replied, “No, George, I won’t do that. But if you’ll sell the business, let me know.” Geo. F. Chester & Son Seed Company was established by the Chesters in 1936 as an extension of their large farm operation in Porter County. They were progressive farmers, and the new business reflected their interest in the production of newly developed hybrid seed corn varieties as a means of increasing the nation’s general farm production and income. The Purdue Agricultural Experiment Station (as well as other land-grant universities) were not only sources of foundation seed and inbred lines, but also provided educational programs as well for Hoosier farmers who were encouraged to produce and sell the new hybrid seed corn to replace the open-pollinated varieties. George and Marie Chester were among the first farmers in Indiana to do so. One day late in 1950, Bowman’s telephone rang. It was George Chester: “Charlie, we want to sell.” His price: $82,000. Bowman immediately called Orville at Princeton Farms, told him of Chester’s call, and waited for Orville’s reaction. “Well,” Orville replied deliberately, “I think we ought to look into it.” “Are you serious [as I am] about this, Orville?” Bowman asked in reply. Orville found himself in the same dilemma he had encountered in 1928 when he graduated from Purdue and had to make a career decision from among several job offers. At about the time Charlie Bowman gave him the news of the Chester proposal, Orville was contemplating a possible move to Hagerstown, Maryland, to become manager of a popcorn processing plant, an offer from a large eastern purchaser of Orville’s popcorn seed. Several months earlier, Orville and his family had made an extensive western automobile trip through Texas, California, Oregon, and across Montana. He had bought cattle in Texas and Montana and hoped to be at Princeton when they arrived. Meanwhile, Gail stayed briefly at Grandma Strate’s in West Lafayette while Corinne and Orville contemplated the move. Billie Ann and Sue were in college, Billie Ann in Purdue and Sue first at Purdue, then at Indiana State in Terre Haute. One November night in 1951, after a long talk with Corinne, he decided to roll the dice with his friend Charlie Bowman.

Orville then went to the telephone and called him in West Lafayette.

The Partnership Within a matter of months, Charlie and Orville had scraped together the comparatively few dollars they both had—about $10,000 apiece for the down payment, floated a small bank loan, and negotiated a five-year contract. Charlie and Orville, both married with families, were taking big chances; both were turning their backs on strong, steady jobs with good incomes to strike out for themselves in an ultra-competitive undertaking, to (as they put it) “sell our know-how.” At Princeton Farms, Orville was set for life, so to speak, with lifelong job security, a handsome income, and a role as a respected Indiana agricultural leader and Princeton community pillar. He had already served as president of three important Indiana farm organizations: the Professional Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers, the Aberdeen Angus Breeders Association, and the Indiana Farm Management Association. But the new challenge was the thing. The Chesters had developed a strong and solid business. They named their seed corn Kankakee Valley Hybrids, producing in their fields the Purdue hybrids best adapted to northern Indiana soils and climate. Then they bought a garage building in Boone Grove and converted it into a seed corn drying, shelling, and grading plant and established a dealer network, mostly through Farm Bureau Co-ops, in five northwestern Indiana counties: Lake, Porter, LaPorte, Jasper, and Newton. Those five counties occupy an area of arguably some of the best farm ground in the known world. On the eastern edge of the Grand Prairie that stretches west nearly to the Rockies, the land is flat, fertile, mostly treeless countryside that many early westward pioneers bypassed, erroneously believing that because soil did not produce trees, it could not possibly produce grain or pasture crops. The Chester company’s growth was slow until it began producing hybrid corn and other seeds on a contract basis for several large eastern U.S. seed companies. Chester & Son had expanded its physical facilities and opened a seed store and agricultural chemical business in Valparaiso when the Chester family sold it to Orville and Charlie. The Redenbacher family was growing and changing and somehow big events all seemed to occur at the same time. As Orville and Corinne contemplated going into business and moving to Northern Indiana, Sue was planning her wedding. She was nineteen, a Purdue student in education, and very much in love with Dewey Elden Gourley, the Princeton youth she had met in high school. He was a Marine Corps veteran of the battle for Guam in World War II. After the war, he entered Indiana State University on the GI Bill of Rights to study arts and crafts education. Inevitably, Sue transferred to Indiana State to finish her education with Dewey. They were married at the Princeton United Methodist Church on December 26, 1950, the twenty-second wedding anniversary of her mother and father. Meanwhile, in her senior year at Purdue, Billie Ann lived with her Grandma Strate at 315 North Chauncey, two blocks east of the campus, the house she and her sisters always looked forward to visiting when they were younger. Grandma Strate had been a wonderful, built-in counselor to Billie Ann during her college years. Billie Ann recalls she had been a student two years and still had no idea what kind of a career she wanted to pursue. Grandma came to her rescue. She had a good friend who was a Purdue faculty member in institutional management, learning the techniques of managing large feeding operations, such as at hotels, hospitals, restaurants, and student residence halls. Billie Ann soon became a major in that option. “Good old Grandma,” she still says. “I felt like the weight of the world had been lifted from my shoulders.” As a senior in institutional management, she was scheduled to graduate in June, 1951. She was also engaged to be married to Keith Fish, a student in electrical engineering. They were married June 16, 1951, at the Redenbacher home at Princeton Farms following commencement and moved to Fort Wayne for Keith’s first job with General Electric Co. Orville spent a great part of 1951 working with his successor to the Princeton Farms managership, H. B. Fulford, while he, Corinne, and Gail began to cut ties to the community in which they had been so active while preparing to make their next—and most significant—move due north two-hundred-plus miles to Valparaiso. The cultural, geographic, demographic, economic, and even climatic contrasts between southern and northern Indiana can be so sharp as to defy any single, overall description of the state except that while it may sit midst the other forty-nine, it is unlike any other because, as humorist Irvin S. Cobb once theorized, it is the most typically American of all fifty. Cobb once described Indiana as “the middle layer of perhaps the noblest slice of cake [in history]” and called upon Hoosiers to revel in their state’s averageness—more average, he contended, than all of the other states put together, and thus unique. The fact that Indiana has produced so many vice presidents, Cobb believed, is because the average Indianaian makes a good vice presidential candidate just because he is average. “If he were sub-average he couldn’t get it and if he were above average he wouldn’t want it,” wrote Cobb in Indiana: Intellectually, She Rolls Her Own. The Redenbachers moved north to Valparaiso in December, 1951, and rented a new home in the northwest end of town. Orville went to work January 2, 1952, as the proud new co-owner of the company where he and Charlie Bowman hoped to “sell our know-how.” By agreement, Bowman retained his job with the Purdue Agricultural Alumni Seed Improvement Association for eighteen months; he and Orville calculated that in the beginning the business might gross $100,000 annually—and they did not think that would net enough to support both families. While Charlie continued to work for the seed improvement group, he was still very much a part of the new business and met regularly with Orville, who made no major decisions without him. Purdue friends of both Orville and Charlie—mutual acquaintances who knew both men well—predicted the partnership would not last beyond one or two years. There were, they believed, too many differences in their respective temperaments to hope they would succeed: • Orville, the persistent, positive-thinking idealist who pushed ahead relentlessly, ignoring any possible defeat; • Charlie, the pragmatic, articulate, hard-headed realist, a dozen years Orville’s junior.

On the contrary, despite such doomsaying, Charlie and Orville were an unbeatable combination; their friendship remained solid after nearly fifty years, and the multi-million-dollar business they formed in 1952 thrived. Charlie and Orville did not always agree on all business matters, but they took the time and made the effort to respect each other’s opinions, resolve differences, then back each other totally on whatever decision that had to be made. In 1953, Charlie joined Orville in the full-time operation of the new business. They decided to move the entire operation to Valparaiso and bought twenty acres east of the city on U.S. 30 to build the company’s offices and additional grain and fertilizer processing facilities. They also added a third partner, G. L. “Jack” Findling, who left his job in 1954 as sales manager for Crib Filler Hybrids at Windfall, a central Indiana village of less than eight-hundred. Findling became vice president for seed corn and small grains. He retired to Arizona in 1985, though he still is, as Orville called him, a “silent partner” and still serves on the firm’s board of directors. He returned to live in Valparaiso in 1993. The trio of Findling, Bowman, and Redenbacher, an experienced, imposing team of seedsmen, expanded the company to become the major producer and seller of Kankakee Valley Hybrid seed corn and certified small grain and soybeans in northwest Indiana. They changed the name of the company to Chester Hybrids, Inc., and prepared for some high-powered diversification. Chester Hybrids soon introduced several agricultural services and products, giving substance to the coinage of a new word, agribusiness, to describe the combination of the producing operations of a farm; the manufacture and distribution of farm equipment and supplies; and the processing, storage, and distribution of farm commodities. It is as if Merriam-Webster’s lexicographers visited the Chester firm in Valparaiso before they wrote the definition. The company diversified into liquid fertilizer, application and spray equipment, as well as an engineering service to develop and install grain-drying and grain-handling equipment and systems. Orville and Charlie decided in their first year as partners to include the development and production of hybrid popcorn seed. They devoted land for a plant nursery at Valparaiso and acquired a small plot near Homestead, Florida, as a winter nursery so they could raise two, occasionally three, hybrid

generations instead of only one each year. Carl Hartman came on the scene at Chester in 1959. A thirty-four-year-old Iowan from the Davenport-Rock Island area, Hartman is a 1949 graduate of Iowa State University in animal husbandry. He worked for the Chicago Stockyards until he and his wife, Phyllis, who was born and reared in Porter County, decided they had had enough of big-city living in Chicago and began to look around Valparaiso for employment. He answered a Chester “help wanted” advertisement in the daily Valparaiso Vidette-Messenger and soon began working for Charlie and Orville in garden seed sales, at which he was less than enthused. But he soon found his way into plant breeding, at which he became an expert, and gave Chester KV hybrids a needed boost. He was given the task of breeding and developing closed pedigree Kankakee Valley-brand hybrids. In a comparatively brief time, Hartman came up with hybrids that fell into the early maturity range for northwest Indiana; his corn excelled in the Indiana Five-acre Yield Contest and was quickly accepted by farmers throughout the Chester sales region. Farmers’ rising demands for liquid fertilizer—pioneered at Princeton Farms by Orville in the 1940s—created a need for Chester to build a production plant and adopt a name for its new product, KV Liquid Fertilizer. Allied Chemical Corporation, with which Orville had first dealt at Princeton Farms, continued to supply ingredients for the new Chester plant. But there was not enough corporate capital to build both a liquid fertilizer plant and a needed new seed house for Chester’s expanding hybrid and certified dent seed operation. Chester instead chose to sell the seed operation, including the trade name and all breeding materials, to Cargill, Inc. Simultaneously, Charlie, Jack, and Orville agreed to change the name from Chester Hybrids, Inc., simply to Chester, Inc., reflecting the company’s extensive diversification. Despite the monumental distractions of a farm business that dealt in a wide variety of products and services, Orville never lost his taste for popcorn acquired as a farm kid when his father grew it in the family garden in southern Indiana. His idea of improving its qualities grew partly from his fascination with the plant genetics and breeding to which he had been introduced as a Purdue student, partly from the discomfort of suddenly biting on an unpopped kernel, an “old maid,” or, as he sometimes called them, “shy fellows.” He had been one of the first to use the new strains of popcorn developed at Purdue—which gave him one hundred grains to start with—and continued to further improve it with hybrids he developed himself at Princeton Farms. Orville credits Arthur Brunson, the Purdue grain breeding specialist who taught him all he knew about popcorn breeding. As a matter of fact, Chester’s summertime plant nursery for popcorn was a counterpart of a similar Purdue plot at Lafayette; and Purdue and Chester operated contiguous plots at Homestead, Florida, for winter popcorn breeding experiments. The south Florida plots permitted both Chester and Purdue to raise at least two generations of hybrid crosses a year instead of only one in northern Indiana’s climate. Hartman had become Chester’s prime plant breeder and now devoted his full attention to improving the qualities of popcorn seed Orville and Charlie sought and that they sold under the brand-name RedBow Popcorn Hybrids. RedBow was a combination of REDenbacher and BOWman, and the signet was a red bow tie, not unlike the bow ties Orville wore constantly and that became a feature of his own persona. Hartman planted a solid acre of 3,000 popcorn plants of eighty-three varieties of popcorn, hybrids from both the United States and South America, each with different characteristics. He let the wind do the pollinating and came up with about two thousand new crosses. He then selected these for purity and quality year after year. By 1965, Hartman achieved what Orville had sought for thirty-five years: light, fluffy, poppable corn that left few if any unpopped kernels, minimal hulls, had excellent taste, and met the ultimate test—a 44-to-1 ratio in volume of popped to unpopped corn. That is, for each cup measure of unpopped kernels, forty-four cup measures of popped corn. At the Chester laboratory in Valparaiso, Orville had a tall, clear plastic cylinder calibrated just for such tests. The day the new variety was popped and met the 44-to-1 unpopped-to-popped ratio, Orville was, remembers Esther Lacy, a worker at Chester, “like a little kid. He was laughing and running around the place he was so elated.” Yet, words that seldom failed Orville failed him now; as he paced around the room, he could seemingly only utter three words: “We made it! We made it!” The test culminated his thirty-five-year dream: to produce a top quality popcorn with optimal characteristics. Most popcorn of the time had a popping ratio less than 25-to-1. The dream was actually older than thirty-five years; it harked back to his childhood on the Clay County farm where he made popcorn picked from the family patch and popped on the coal stove on cold winter evenings, and where he raised popcorn and sold it to corner grocery stores in Terre Haute in fifty-pound sacks. The dream went back to the Purdue University campus where he was student in the late twenties, and later in the 1930s when he observed the work of Arthur Brunson, the plant breeder in the Agricultural Experiment Station who worked actively to improve the popcorn strains. It included the work Orville did himself in developing new strains of popcorn hybrids at Princeton Farms in the 1940s. Part of the dream was the popcorn hybridization conducted by Chester and the milestone work of Carl Hartman who produced the popcorn hybrid Orville had sought for so many years. Orville himself closely oversaw that work and spent weeks and months at the Homestead winter plot planting, pollinating, and detasseling the various strains that led to the “right” hybrid. Hartman today admits that the work included much luck; Orville freely gave Hartman all of the credit for the patient work that led to the 44-to-1-ratio goal. “He did a tremendous job,” Orville often repeated. “It was Carl who developed the gourmet hybrid that made Redenbacher a famous name.” At this writing, Hartman and his wife are retired and live quietly near Valparaiso. Though it required a thirty-five-year struggle in laboratory and field, and the crossing of 30,000 popcorn hybrids to achieve the improved product, Orville and Charlie now faced a new struggle in the less-familiar labyrinth of the marketplace. The world beats a path to your door only when it is convinced your mousetrap is better. Only after five or six years and an episode with ulcers did the path to Orville’s door began to appear well-trafficked.

All In The Family Orville and Corinne only had a one-year lease in their first house in Valparaiso and moved to an apartment near downtown for several years. Eventually, they built a large home on the southeast side of Valparaiso in an upper middle-class area called Coolwood Acres. The address, 959 Coolwood Drive, became the hub around which the Redenbacher family’s life revolved, the place the grandchildren always looked forward to spending summer vacations. Now adults, Orville’s and Corinne’ grandchildren are virtually unanimous in recalling their good times at grandpa’s and grandma’s big house on Coolwood Drive, experiencing the gemütlich of family. Often in summers they accompanied grandpa to the steamy northwestern Indiana cornfields or to the processing plant east of town to learn what the world of toil was all about. Orville used his inherent dry sense of humor and keen awareness of human absurdity with those who best understood such things—children, in this case his own grandchildren. He had become active quite early in the international People-to-People Program originated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954. Ultimately, the program took him to 134 nations and his knowledge of world demographics became expansive. One day, one of his curious grandchildren asked why his mother and his two aunts each had exactly the same number of children—four each. “Because,” Orville replied, straining to keep a solemn countenance, “every fifth child born in the world today is Chinese.” Billy Ann’s four children are Kevin Robert Fish, born April 27, 1953; Kyle William Fish, born May 17, 1954; Gary David Fish, born May 12, 1955; and Noel Christopher Fish, born June 1, 1957, all in Syracuse, New York. Sue’s four children are J. Kent Gourley, born October 24, 1954; Greg Lee Gourley, born December 5, 1955; Todd William, born May 5, 1959; and Krista Sue, born November 15, 1960, all in Evansville, Indiana. Gail was only a few days from her seventeenth birthday when she married Owen Jones of Blue Island, Illinois, in Valparaiso. She also had four children: three daughters and a son. Julie Ann was born June 28, 1957; Lori Beth, born June 9, 1959; Pamela Corinne, born July 28, 1960; and Eric Dale, born December 14, 1961, all in Valparaiso. Orville and Corinne thus were blessed with a dozen grandchildren in a period just shy of nine years, both perhaps wondering whether they might have needed a policeman to direct all of the sudden pediatric traffic in their now burgeoning family. They

were both in their early fifties and they loved it, especially Corinne. A naturally talented person, Corinne had been musically inclined as a teenager but held a persistent yearning to become a writer (hence her brief sojourn as a student in Indiana University’s journalism school). Instead, she became a successful wife and mother, which undoubtedly was far more challenging. Her ebullience as a youngster matured into an exuberance for all that life had to offer in her marriage to Orville. She was supportive of his dreams and goals and entered into new projects with uncommon zeal. She was there to help with the office work when the demands on Orville’s county agency exceeded the rigidity of his budget. She did her housework, got the meals, and wiped the noses of her young children. She worked hard as a 4-H leader in Terre Haute and dove headlong into the work of the United Methodist Church in Terre Haute, Princeton, and Valparaiso, as well as innumerable youth activities in all three communities. When not otherwise inspired, she sometimes wrote poetry. She was active in the Girl Scouts, the Y-Teens group, and continued her work as a 4-H leader when the Redenbachers moved to Valparaiso. She was also active in the Toastmistress Club, where she learned to become an excellent public speaker. She was a past president of the Valparaiso Women’s Club, a member of the Indiana Garden Club, the Indiana Parent-Teacher Association, the Women’s Society of Christian Service of her church, and the Republican Women’s Club. Corinne also loved social life— bridge groups and dinner parties. She was a “country club wife” and enjoyed being a member at clubs in both Princeton and Valparaiso. Orville’s daughters always felt the power of the love, affection, and caring between their parents—a power that, of course, they beamed to them. The spats occasionally endured in all marriages were rare, or rarely witnessed. Corinne and Orville had a unique partnership; when there was an argument, they used it to strengthen their tie. Corinne loved her family and the togetherness she and Orville generated. She brought the same demonstrative love to her own family that she had experienced as a child in her parents’ home in West Lafayette. She lived for her daughters and her grandchildren. She was a “jack of all trades,” her daughter Gail remembers. She was an avid craftsperson; she sewed, she worked with plants and flowers, she cooked, she decorated, she painted in oils, worked in ceramics, and loved poetry. She wanted a “party home” for her children and grandchildren, and she made holidays special ones for all of her offspring. “Coolwood” became synonymous with “fun.” The game of Bingo became a holiday tradition, one the family carried on at family reunions. If ever there is a need to personify the word vivacity, surely Corinne Strate Redenbacher will be a leading candidate. The tragedy of her death on May 25, 1971, in a Valparaiso hospital at the age of sixty-one was her helplessness; she was not at all one to lie quietly and be pitied. Finally, internal hemorrhaging brought merciful death. It was a dreadfully sad time in the Redenbacher saga. Gail was with Orville, who lay abed in the same hospital with an ulcer resulting from overwork, at the time Corinne drifted into her final sleep, several doors down the hall. Mournfully, Orville returned her remains to West Lafayette to be buried alongside those of her mother and father in Grand View Cemetery. Still, Corinne lives on brightly in the fond and vivid memories of her children and grandchildren and left her family a bright, continuing legacy where, as Gail put it, “family togetherness and not popcorn is the focus.” Orville’s granddaughter, Purdue graduate Julie Ann, now Mrs. Dennis J. Gallant of Harrison, Ohio, and Gail, Julie’s mother, originated the idea of a biennial family reunion, the first held in 1991 at Scottsdale, Arizona, twenty years after Corinne’s death. All of the twelve grandchildren and the grandchildren’s children attended, compliments of Orville. Afterward, the family published a booklet of pictures of the family having fun. A dedicatory at the beginning of the book reads: “For Corinne Rosemond Redenbacher, who wanted her family to enjoy being together.” Corinne would have been pleased. She would have been further pleased to know that reunions were held again in 1993 at Santa Cruz, California, and at Disney World at Orlando, Florida, in 1995. Sadly missed at the 1995 reunion were Dewey and Sue Gourley. Dewey died in November, 1991, of a liver ailment, and Orville’s daughter Sue, died unexpectedly in October, 1992, possibly of complications resulting from her childhood case of rheumatic fever. But the relish for life in the Redenbacher clan never seemed diminished in spite of the devastating loss of loved ones.

Memories from Coolwood Drive Passage of time does not dim the memories of Orville’s progeny. How could they forget the trips in summer or the holiday jaunts to 959 Coolwood? Who could forget the homemade ice cream Orville cranked, or, after the cranking, licking the cool bits from the paddle pulled from the freezer as Grandpa “packed” it to harden for after-supper dessert? And how many times did Grandma use the ice pick to punch air holes in the lids of old mayonnaise jars the kids all used to imprison fireflies? Or rather “lightning bugs?” Or how about Grandma’s and Grandpa’s big, four-foot leaf rakes the kids used every fall in the big yard? And the mountains of leaves they piled up just to jump in? You could make forts and huts and tunnels. Time stood still–at least until Grandma called you in to wash up for supper. Eric Jones, Gail’s youngest, and the youngest of the twelve Redenbacher grandchildren, remembers the fun he and Grandma had when she would time him with her watch as he raced his bike around the block. When she made breakfast pancakes she always put his initials or a “happy” face on them. Grandpa had a rickshaw-like vehicle and the children pulled each other around the block. On rainy days, they would look at, but couldn’t touch, Grandpa’s coin collection. Or you could go to the attic where the “big” kids played, or to the huge walk-out basement with ping-pong and pool tables and all sorts of board games. And—oh my!—remember the time grandson Kyle hit the billiard ball with the pool stick, and it smashed into his brother Kevin’s face—he was too close to the table—and it chipped his tooth? Kevin, the eldest Redenbacher grandchild and later a high school teacher, remembers Coolwood well, especially the time he challenged his grandfather to a game of pool. Grandpa humored the lad by agreeing to play, then proceeded to purposely miss several times, giving his grandson a better chance, but finally defeating the lad by sending the last ball, the eight ball, into a pocket. Julie, Gail’s eldest daughter, remembers Grandpa’s big, blue glass container full of candy orange slices that sat prominently on a shelf. But you never took one until you asked Grandpa first. And you never took two. It seemed like Grandpa always made breakfast. Well, maybe he did, but the memories are more vivid of Grandma’s pancakes and the funny faces she put on them with raisins and fruit for her grandchildren. Once in awhile there was a trip to a Valparaiso department store. Eric, Gail’s youngest child, remembers that Grandma always held him by the hand during these trips. Once, she let go of his hand and to his surprise there was a ten-dollar bill in it for him to spend in any way he wanted. All the grandchildren remember Orville’s Easter custom. After the traditional Easter egg hunt, Orville climbed a stepladder in the middle of the living room and let dollar bills flutter to the floor while the children scrambled for them. Because Gail lived nearby, her young daughter Julie became close to Grandma Corinne. She helped her in the gardens, trimming the peonies so that later they would get bushier with more blooms. In Grandma’s sewing room, Julie had a drawer full of dolls and things granddaughters liked. In Orville’s and Corinne’s travels, she always brought home native costumes from the countries they visited; and the grandchildren, especially the four granddaughters, would dress in them. Grandma also had a potter’s wheel and gave lessons in “throwing” to her friends and the grandchildren if they seemed interested. Krista, Sue’s daughter and a software developer with a degree from Purdue, also remembers her grandmother’s multiple talents, including making dolls and her love for memorizing poetry. Corinne started Krista’s doll collection, and wrote frequent letters to her grandchildren. The backyard at 959 Coolwood was an adventurous marvel for the Redenbacher grandchildren. Orville had the landscaping done by a professional who bought many of his supplies from Chester. A waterfall, an arched bridge, a series of three ponds, and lots of vegetation provided an inviting scene where child fantasies abounded (“Let’s play like …”) It was the venue of fun as well as of several minor crises—such as the time one-year-old Noel Fish, one of Billie Ann’s boys, fell in one of the ponds and

had to be rescued by his Aunt Sue, who found him nonchalantly floating on his back. Sue, her sisters, Orville, Corinne, and Corinne’s mother were all bridge players and were engrossed around the card table when Noel toddled out of the door toward a pond unnoticed. The repeated retrospective on that episode: “Well, it’s just a good thing Sue went out to check on him.” Orville and Corinne bought a portable pool for the backyard where in hot weather the cousins spent most of the day, leaving the water only to eat or to answer Nature’s calls. Often, one of the grandsons admitted, such calls were answered straightforwardly in the pool. To most small children that doesn’t seem to matter much if no one knows, or you don’t get caught. On the other hand, the invention and application of liquid chlorine has to be counted among mankind’s shining moments. Noel, who became a real estate appraiser, remembers the special attention of his grandmother, taking turns in or on the rickshaw with his cousins, and especially the homemade ice cream. He is the only one of the twelve grandchildren who remembers that Grandpa’s churn held exactly two-and-a-half gallons. More vivid than the churn, perhaps, was the terror of the tornado he and his grandparents experienced but escaped on a 1964 trip to the Chester Inc., popcorn plot at Homestead, Florida. Another of Billie Ann’s sons, Kyle, remembers “the greatest times of my [young] life were with Grandpa.” He remembers playing tennis with Grandpa—the one who got me started in that sport,” says Kyle, who earned a degree in recreation. He may have been the most fervent of all of Orville’s fans. Gary Fish is probably most widely known of all of the grandchildren because of his appearances on Orville’s famous TV commercials and advertisements as Orville’s grandson. The idea of using the grandson in the commercials was picked from several considered by Ketchum Advertising of San Francisco, retained by Hunt-Wesson. Using a grandson was a stroke of advertising genius—except that Orville had eight grandsons. Bummer. Whom do you choose? The agency conducted a series of interviews and did testing before choosing Gary Fish (who subsequently changed his name to Gary Fish Redenbacher). Orville always firmly denied he had anything to do with choosing Gary for the grandson role in his commercials. He was always assiduous in his equal treatment of his three daughters’ collective twelve grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren, as well as his stepdaughters and their children. Gary, a West Coast lawyer, summed up his impression of his famous grandfather, calling him “the consummate gentleman.” His recollections of summers in Valparaiso are much like those of the other grandchildren. He remembers his grandparents as kind, gentle, and caring, “but there was too much spoiling—buying toys for us and the like. And it was more Grandma than Grandpa. When we [the cousins] were small Grandpa took us out to the farms, or we liked to play around the ponds in the backyard or in the huge basement.” Often Orville set up his projector for the grandchildren and had a slide show of the many countries he’d visited in the People-to-People program. Noel, also a lawyer, writes of the reminiscences of a five-year-old’s first encounter with death, that of his great-grandmother, Anna Strate, Corinne’s widowed mother, who died of a stroke a day before her eightieth birthday: The earliest memory I have is being five-years-old with my maternal great-grandmother baby-sitting my three brothers and me. I recall the warm smile and comforting aura of my elderly great-grandmother. We always called her “Granny.” She was quite the adoring one with her four great grandsons from New York. A cold drink, a tasty cookie, or a band-aid for a scraped knee—Granny always had the right stuff. Our parents had decided to take a vacation at Banff, Canada, and left us at my grandparents [in Valparaiso] where Granny now lived. Grandpa and Grandma had gone off for the day and Granny was always happy to look after us. We four boys played on the living room floor with our trucks and toys and games while Granny read in her rocking chair. We saw nothing unusual about Granny setting her book down and closing her eyes. At her age, taking a short nap in her rocking chair could be expected. But after a few moments she began to moan softly, her chair still rocking. My brothers and I all crawled on the couch and watched, dumbfounded and scared, with no idea her life was ending. Suddenly, the doorbell rang, breaking the spell of our unknowing death vigil. We ran to the door and excitedly explained to the man delivering the drycleaning [Jack Whitton] that something was horribly wrong with our beloved Granny. He rushed in, took one look at Granny and called for help. Granny’s life force drained away; Death had visited one of my loved ones, my first such encounter, the first mystifying hint that tried to tell me that dying is every bit a part of living.

The Fish brothers had been born and lived the first several years of their young lives in Baldwinsville in upstate New York and eventually moved to California because of their dad’s new job with Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. As lads, they could not get enough of Coolwood. Now two thousand or more miles away in Indiana, Grandpa and Grandma were too often only voices at the other end of a very long telephone line. J. Kent Gourley (with the “J” not standing for any name), a Purdue graduate and alumnus through-and-through like his grandfather, is the oldest of Sue and Dewey Gourley’s four children and remembers the hot, hard work he did as a teenager at Grandpa’s Chester, Inc. He learned to run the corn-cleaning equipment in the company’s plant, detasseled corn in the fields, and ran the farm tractors. He was only thirteen when he was the first of the grandchildren to accompany his grandparents on one of Orville’s frequent People-to-People tours, going with them to Western Europe, the Scandinavian countries, and the Soviet Union in 1967. Kent grew especially close to his grandmother. On their return to the United States after the 1967 trip, Orville had to return to the Midwest on business while Corinne and Kent stayed in New York for several days where the two saw the sights and developed a special friendship. So strong was the bond that later, when Corinne was deathly ill, she called for Kent, who was promptly flown via chartered aircraft to her bedside. Greg, who followed his older brother Kent’s footsteps as a Purdue graduate, was a member of Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity and a Boilermaker wrestler. He calls his grandfather “the most caring, fair, and generous man I know” and has a fond remembrance of the times as a youngster of piling into the Gourley station wagon in December and heading north to Valparaiso and Coolwood Acres for Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa. “These were always great times,” Greg says. “Our family continues to grow and spread across the country, but Grandpa made it possible for all of us to remain a close group by his caring and generosity, bringing us together every two years for our reunion.” When their grandmother died in May 1971, the twelve young grandchildren were all left to cope with a loss that made no sense to them. Corinne’s death left her family devastated; and Orville, always a strong and self-sufficient individual, now found himself adrift, feeling the strange emptiness of being widowed. How perceptive the sage who said that of all human fears—the fear of death, the fear of hunger and poverty, the fear of pain, the fear of disease or disability—the harshest is the fear of loneliness, the one fear Orville could not ignore. Orville and Nina Reder, old friends and neighbors from Terre Haute days, were married October 27, 1971. It was a simple family ceremony; Charlie Bowman and his wife, Mary, “stood up” for the newlyweds and Orville’s daughter Gail and her family, also of Valparaiso, were present. Nina was born Nina Mills in Clay City, Indiana, a tiny town of about nine hundred in southern Clay County, not far from Orville’s boyhood home. Nina was the handsome, auburn-haired wife of Paul Reder, a Terre Haute haberdasher. The couple lived a few doors down the street from the Redenbachers, and the foursome socialized with two other Terre Haute couples. After Orville became manager of Princeton Farms, the four couples remained in contact and visited frequently. Nina was deeply involved in the art of sewing and developed a reputation as one of the best seamstresses in the Terre Haute area. She was also one of that city’s best woman golfers and one year won the women’s city championship. Nina, seven years older than Orville, was widowed when her husband died unexpectedly in 1969. Two years she later she was in Valparaiso to comfort Orville when Corinne died. Like Orville, she was a parent, grandparent, and great-grandparent; from that and other standpoints—golf excluded—the two had much in common. The eventual marriage of these two sensitive and compassionate people was not unexpected; Nina became the most important person in Orville’s life, and he in hers. For the next twenty years, Nina and Orville were virtually inseparable; together they traveled the hectic, busy, bright, and fabulous life that world fame rolled out before them like a seemingly endless plush, red carpet. Still, Orville remained essentially the same hard-working, friendly farm kid from Clay County who had learned very early how to toot his own horn and run his own races.

Notes *Leslie was the popular Purdue football player who had been pronounced dead at the scene of the 1903 train wreck on the outskirts of Indianapolis in which seventeen died. The train was carrying the Purdue football team, band, and fans to the Indiana football game in Indianapolis’s Washington Park. Later, in a makeshift morgue, someone noticed Leslie’s arm move. He was rushed to a local hospital to be revived and to recover. Later, Leslie served briefly as executive secretary of the Purdue Alumni Association and won, inexplicably, the nickname “Skillet.” He served as Indiana governor from 1929 to 1933.

Amazing Maize

From Inca Tombs to “My Gourmet Popping Corn” God made popping corn. Then along came Orville C. Redenbacher who spent forty years (an appropriate biblical time period, incidentally) improving it. No doubt, He and Orville had an inspired partnership, but (to paraphrase an old gardening joke) you should have tried to eat it when He was growing it by Himself. It has been called popcorn for so long that the proper, somewhat stilted term for it, “popping corn,” will never catch on. Orville used the term rather consistently; and though he made millions in popping corn, the battle he most certainly lost was convincing a majority of the English-speaking, popping corn-eating world to accept and use its proper name. The Aztecs, on the other hand, used popping corn to honor their god who watched over fishermen, scattering before his image at fiestas a parched version they called momochitl. The Aztec god of war got similar treatment at his celebrations where virgins wore garlands of popping corn over their heads they called mumuchitl. (But don’t ask for either one at your local theater refreshment stand; the counter person may reply, “No, but we do have jujubees.”) Dr. Paul C. Mangelsdorf, a professor of botany and head of the Harvard University botanical museum, firmly believes that the original corn—both wild corn and cultivated corn—was popping corn, and that aboriginal man made the first use of it by popping. By the time the white man arrived in what he called the New World (he also erroneously claims he “discovered” it), popping corn was known among almost all of the various tribes on both the North and South American continents, save those who lived at the extreme north and south ends respectively of those continents. Some of those tribes used it more than others for food and decoration. There are many recorded instances of popping corn, B. O. (Before Orville): • Columbus not only “found” the New World, his true “find” in the West Indies was popping corn; the natives wore it and sold it as corsage-like decorations. Later explorers found that the Mayas in Central America and the Yucatan peninsula popped, ate, or wore popping corn. • Cortes in 1519 got his first sight of popping corn when he arrived in Mexico without an invitation and came into contact with the Aztecs. Popping corn was an important food to the Aztecs, who also used it to decorate ceremonial head-dresses, or as necklaces, the latter not unlike contemporary man who, in a way, continues the custom by persistently staining his neckties with his soup. As the Aztecs ornamented statues of their gods with popping corn, the custom of decorating Christmas trees with garlands of strung popping corn (often interspersed on the string with cranberries) is a custom still alive in some quarters of Christendom. • Peruvian natives, a Spanish writer of the mid-sixteenth century observed, “toast a certain kind of corn until it bursts; they call is pisancalla, and they use it as a confection.” • From Paraguay in the middle of the eighteenth century, another Spanish writer told of a different kind of popping corn with kernels on the tassel, which, when boiled in cooking fat or oil, burst without becoming detached, resulting in a bouquet “fit to adorn a lady’s hair at night without anyone knowing what it was….” • Early French explorers in the Great Lakes region early in the seventeenth century found that Iroquois plains tribes popped corn in a pottery vessel with heated sand and ate it (the popping corn) in many forms, including soup. • The English colonists at Plymouth, Massachusetts, were introduced to popping corn at the first Thanksgiving feast when Quadaquina, brother of the Iroquois chief, Massasoit, brought a deerskin bag of popped corn to the dinner as a gift. The Indians also brought popping corn to peace negotiations with the English colonists as a gesture of goodwill. • Colonial housewives quickly put popping corn to practical mealtime use, serving it with sugar and cream for breakfast, the first—but by far not the last —“puffed” breakfast cereal. The early colonials liked popping corn so well they worked on various utensils and implements to improve on the native methods of popping it. Some were made of pierced sheet iron and suggested a development of the often-used warming pan of early settlers. A rarer form of an Early American corn popper was a perforated cylinder of thin, iron sheets resembling a squirrel cage that revolved on an axle in front of the fireplace, evidence that the idea of heating the kernels as evenly as possible by tumbling them to prevent their burning already had some acceptance.

However crude the popping methods developed by the colonists may seem today, they were a giant step forward compared to the earliest and easiest way to pop corn: Throw a handful on an open fire or into hot ashes and let it pop out on the ground. Another method was to place it in hot sand where the heat to individual kernels was more evenly distributed. It may have popped well, though it sounds uncomfortably gritty. Clay and/or metal pots were used to pop corn on both the northern and southern American continents. Some of these ancient poppers are still in use in the Guatemalan and Peruvian highlands. One such device is a roughly spherical clay pot with a large hole in one side, a large handle around its top, and tripod legs. Such popping vessels were used with, sometimes without, cooking fat or oil. Some members of the Papago tribe in Arizona today still pop corn in a shallow clay vessel—some are up to eight feet wide— over an open fire. That method is no doubt a custom handed down from the Mexican and South American natives who appeared to have the most advanced popping corn poppers, some developed as early as 500 A.D. So far as anyone knows, all were pottery; iron sheet metal poppers apparently originated in colonial America. A Winnebago chief, a contemporary with the imposing name of Whirling Thunder, tells how members of his tribe, for as long as anyone remembers, popped corn right on the cob by inserting a sharp stick through the cob and holding it over the fire. Not unlike a Boy Scout wiener roast, the method worked though most of the popped kernels probably flew off the cob. For all of the ways popping corn was introduced and as impressive as its early uses may be, it pre-dates even the Columbian introduction. Between 1948 and 1950, Herbert W. Dick, first while on the staff of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum and later as director of the State Museum at Trinidad, Colorado, found what are believed to be the oldest ears of popping corn extant during his expeditions to Bat Cave in central western New Mexico. The ears range in size from smaller than a penny to about two inches long. Originally, Dick thought the ears were about four thousand years old; radio-carbon dating tests identify Bat Cave corn to be about fifty-six thousand years old, upsetting the generally held theory that popping corn originated in Peru

about 1000 B.C. All sorts of exploratory evidence exists today that corn—undoubtedly popping corn—played an important role in the ancient, but highly civilized, societies of the southwestern United States and Central and South America: • Eighty-thousand-year-old corn fossil pollen was found in excavations 200 feet below Mexico City. It was barely distinguishable from modern corn pollen. • A 1950 expedition in another west central New Mexico location found ancient corn that still popped after more than one thousand years. Ditto for popping corn found in Peruvian Inca tombs as well as in a cave in southwestern Utah. • In northwestern New Mexico, a Canadian anthropologist found a popcorn ear about four thousand years old. It was additional proof that popping corn may have a North American rather than a South American source. • Historians and plant geneticists today agree that popping corn is the father of all other corn varieties, including sweet corn-on-the-cob; dent corn, which is primarily fed to several varieties of livestock; pod corn, which is prettier than it is useful since each kernel is covered by a separate husk; and flint corn, or Indian corn, the varicolored stuff no longer used for food but as a popular autumn harvest decoration.

Wherever or whatever the origin of popping corn, the evidence is convincing that it is among Man’s oldest food source—unless you wish to count the forbidden fruit of a certain tree in the oldest garden in the world. Once eaten, that fruit got us all into a lot of trouble; popping corn is fun—and without the slightest moral compunction. Nevertheless, contemporary research science has taken corn-popping far beyond the realm of circuses, carnivals, and movie theaters; the unpopped kernel has become the exception rather than the rule it once was. We now know popping corn to be one of mankind’s oldest and most significant foods and, therefore, vastly important in social history. Until the late nineteenth century, in a predominantly rural America, popping corn remained primarily an at-home and homegrown treat. The advent and popularity of circuses and county and/or state fairs took popping corn out of the parlor and kitchen and put it into colorful popcorn wagons; the aromas emanating from them were like magnets that drew throngs and made it a popular entertainment staple. At most sporting events, popping corn leads all snacks, though at major league baseball parks, roasted peanuts vie with it for crowd popularity. When Orville was an Indiana farm kid, his Dad raised popping corn in the same family garden patch as the carrots, radishes, green beans, rutabagas, lettuce, beets, melons, and other vegetables. The stuff of the garden had been long picked and either consumed at the table or preserved for winter before the popping corn was ready to harvest; that came along about midOctober when leaves turned color and fell and late afternoon shadows began to lengthen. A happy crispness in the air let you take an intoxicating deep breath and smell winter. On Orville’s way to evening chores, he watched the remnant of the late afternoon sun peek shyly from behind the trees; and he thought: There just isn’t any place better than Indiana in the fall. Later he and his dad and his brother picked the ears of popping corn by hand and put them into a gunnysack.* On chilly evenings, Orville’s dad, sometimes his mother, would pop up a large pan of corn, using the rectangular screen-wire basket with the long handle to shake a batch over the hot coals of the fireplace. He never forgot those family evenings around the fireplace where, probably, his dream of “someday” producing a perfect popcorn was born. About one year after Orville entered Purdue, the electric popping corn popper came on the market, a boon for popcorn sales in theaters. By the time he graduated from high school and headed for college, motion pictures—the movies—began to burgeon; and the movie theater industry flourished. By the early 1930s, movies had become central to American entertainment. Even earlier, when Orville was a lad, on-the-street popping corn vendors competed: one adding salt, the next adding salt and butter, another moving his stand as close to the movie theater as the law allowed. Patrons bought popcorn outside the nickel theaters showing silent films, then purchased their tickets at the box office, and ate their popcorn while they watched the movies. It did not take an enterprising theater manager long to rent lobby space to a vendor—and, presto!—the theater refreshment stand was born. Business has been good; until 1950 two-thirds of American popping corn consumption was inside movie theaters. Today, Americans consume 18.5 billion quarts of popped corn annually—seventy-three quarts for every man, woman, and child in the land—eaten mostly at home. The advent and growth of television in the early 1950s also had an impressive impact on the consumption of popping corn. As home television grew, movie theaters waned. Most popping corn—70 percent—is still eaten at home; the peak 65 percent of popcorn consumed in theaters and elsewhere has dropped to little more than 30 percent. The American love affair with the combination of movies and popping corn is sixty-five years old, its fervency growing unabated, whether in theaters or at home. As technology races forward, and VCRs are in two-thirds of American homes, microwave popping corn and videos have become an unbeatable combination. Today it is possible to buy Orville Redenbacher microwave popping corn (labeled “Reden Budders”), not to mention a host of other brands (of course not!), at almost any grocery store and now, significantly, at many local video stores as well. Microwave popping corn: As bold and lofty a dream as Orville Redenbacher had, not even in his most extravagant flight of fancy could he have come up with that one. But today microwave popping corn accounts for at least a quarter of the unpopped popping corn sold in the United States—and that amounts to nearly 145,000 tons a year! The Chicago-based Popcorn Institute* (Orville was one of the founders) calculates the 1993 sale of unpopped popping corn at 1,158,000,000 pounds, a twenty-three-year increase from 1970 when the popping corn industry sold a paltry 353,000,000 pounds. Nine states are considered the major producers of popcorn. The top-producing state each year seems to alternate between Indiana and Nebraska. Orville’s home state harvested 69,600 acres of popping corn in 1993, compared to Nebraska’s 62,900 acres the same year. In 1993, Indiana’s per acre yield was only a trifle more than Nebraska’s: 2,935 pounds per acre to 2,924 pounds per acre respectively. The other high producers are Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio. When it comes to popping corn, or any of the other varieties of corn, terminology can get complicated. Popping corn and its cousins are members of the family of grasses; specifically they are grasses that produce cereal grains. In a sense then, when you are eating popping corn do you really have a mouthful of toasted and buttered grass seed? Don’t think about it. What we call “corn” the British—Irish and Scots, too—call “maize.” “Corn” is a British generic term applied to all cereal grains: wheat, oats, barley, rye, maize, rice, and so on. Or you would be technically safe to use the Latin scientific name for popping corn, zea mays everta. Great conversation-stopper; you may not get invited to any more parties. If you ask for “popcorn” at a London restaurant or snack bar, there’s no telling what you are likely to get, although popping corn has significant growing followings in England, the Scandinavian countries, and Japan. Germany eats a little popping corn, but the populace as a whole remains largely unconvinced that corn has any edibility beyond the feeding of swine. Yet, the world market for popping corn grows; the United States exports it to more than seventy other nations and the international market increases steadily. The wonder of wonders is that the multi-million-dollar-a-year popping corn industry depends solely upon the growth and maturity of an extremely vulnerable, bisexual, single-stalk vegetable. Likely, one of its tiny pollen grains will detach from its tassel and free-fall, drifting on the breeze, toward its own or a nearby stalk’s “silk.” Corn “silks” are myriads of microscopic tubes, each one of which one pollen grain must find and slide through to the nascent kernel to which the tube is attached, then fertilize it so that the kernel grows to maturity on the cob. Such miracles occur an infinite number of times every growing season. But even before the unlikely completion of that event, the growth to maturity of the corn plant itself from a seed or kernel is similarly miraculous: germination and flowering of each corn plant so that it forms a male tassel and a female flower, the ear, between a leaf and the stalk, all requiring the right amount of moisture and hospitable temperature. That the process withstands capricious climate is also a wonder. A second major miracle is that popping corn pops. Without its special mechanics, popping corn might not have become a food for human beings at all because of its pericarp, the botanists’ name for the hard, outer covering, or hull. As such, unpopped, it would not be food—a source of dental problems, perhaps, but not food. On the other hand, without the hard surface, popping

corn kernels would not explode. What makes it pop? Early natives believed a little demon inside each kernel got mad and blew up when things inside got too hot. Actually, the moisture inside the kernel is its most important component. The popcorn kernel is composed of carbohydrate (principally starch), protein, a trace of fat, and water. The water is stored in the endosperm, the name for the small glob of soft starch in each kernel. As it is heated, the moisture—ideally 14.5 percent— turns to steam, creating tremendous pressure because of the pericarp. Finally, because it can no longer resist the steam pressure, the kernel explodes, literally turning inside out, exposing the soft starch. Once popped, popping corn has two basic shapes: snowflake, resembling a fluffy cumulus cloud, or mushroom, resembling a round ball with a roughened surface. Neither shape affects taste. Popcorn comes in a great variety of strains, no two alike. Orville’s Gourmet Popping Corn is the result of crossing more than eighty varieties. Unpopped kernels are off-white or light gold, sometimes black or red or many colors in between. ORGPC (for Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn) is a uniformly light gold color. The third miracle is the mind and heart and curiosity of those who worked to discover how to manipulate these seemingly unlikely and chancy, though natural, growth functions and to improve and increase the fruits of their labor—minds and hearts and curiosity of men like Orville Redenbacher, Charlie Bowman, and Carl Hartman. Orville further believed that proper technique and care in harvesting the corn are as important to its quality as its hybridization and growth. In an article he authored not long after his Gourmet Popping Corn began its meteoric rise in national popularity, Orville wrote, in part: [In] October, the moisture content of the popcorn kernels concentrates down to about nineteen percent. That’s the point when the harvest begins, because the proper moisture content is vital to corn that will pop to your satisfaction. Modern corn-harvesting combine machinery would bruise some of my kernels. Bruised kernels will not pop with quality, so I use only special harvesting equipment that harvests the corn on the ear. This is more expensive but it insures top quality. Next the shucked ears are held in bins where I can keep an eye on them while the moisture level is slowly reduced to about fifteen percent. Then we shell the kernels off the cob the old fashioned way with a corn-sheller that rubs the ears together. Ordinary shelling equipment has rough metal burrs that would bruise the kernels and you know how I feel about that. So we make sure our shellers have the rough edges removed before we start shelling. Now we slowly condition the corn, drying it just enough so the moisture level in each kernel is at the exact point where it will pop its maximum. All of this may seem very exacting, but as someone has said, “Trifles make perfection but perfection is no trifle.” We’re also particularly fussy about sorting and cleaning our corn. First we sift out all our kernels that are a little too big or a little too small. Then a gravity separator rejects any kernels that are too dry and light, and any bits of cob that sneaked past. The acceptable kernels go into the polisher which rubs away any dust along with the little “bees wings” that attached the kernels to the cob. A stream of clean air leaves the shining, polished kernels ready to package. [There] would be no use [in] my taking these troubles to make you perfect popping corn if the package was not going to keep it in perfect condition until you use it. So I rejected the idea of bags or boxes. They let the moisture escape. And once you open a tin can [of popping corn] the rest of the corn could dry out and be less poppable than the first batch. That is why my Gourmet Popping is sold only in jars with air-tight, screw-on lids. We put it up in two sizes, fifteen ounces and thirty ounces. If you put the lid on tightly after each use, the last batch in the jar will pop up as well as the first. To make absolutely certain nothing has gone awry, we check random samples of the corn many times each day as it is packed. I want to be positive that … every kernel you get will be in prime popping condition—that it will pop up big, crisp, and tasty. That is what you get when you buy a jar of Gourmet Popping Corn with my name on it.

Popping corn has been a traditional snack food because it’s fun to pop and fun to eat. But a new diet and fitness-conscious America has discovered popping corn to be a nutritionally sound, healthy alternative to many indulgent snacks. Nutritionists say that gram-for-gram popping corn: • Provides more protein and fiber than enriched white bread and whole-wheat toast. • Contains fewer calories than two chocolate-chip cookies. • Contains more protein, phosphorus, iron, and fiber than potato chips, ice cream cones, pretzels, and soda crackers. • Air-popped and unbuttered, a cup has fewer than twenty-seven calories. • Three cups of air-popped, unbuttered popping corn has fewer calories than a medium-sized apple.

Once thought of nearly universally as a “junk food,” popping corn may now claim its rightful place as a nutritious food. Still, true aficionados lament what they feel is the corruption of popping corn in the growing number of specialty shops wherein is sold a variety of flavored popping corn concoctions. You can find such flavors as watermelon, black walnut, jalapeño, pesto, licorice, most of the popular fruit flavors, cheddar cheese, sour cream and chives, mesquite, and, alas, bubble gum. But the favorite flavor of most people still remains good, old butter-and-salt, which accounts for more than 90 percent of the “flavored” popping corn business. The off-the-wall flavors seem to be waning in popularity—except caramel and similar sweet-tooth or popcorn-ball recipes. Caramel is, for example, the stuff that quite literally holds together the nation’s 240 Karmelkorn Shoppes (now owned by International Dairy Queen). One of the oldest franchises in America, Karmelkorn has been vending its product since 1929. Today, you can get several sweet-tooth caramel popping corn products, not the least, of course, being Cracker Jack. Each has a different recipe, but all have registered trade labels and are available at most American supermarkets. Most popping corn brands, incidentally, consciously try to get shelf space in the stores as close as possible to Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn and Reden Budders Microwave Popping Corn. In fact, one popping corn brand’s marketing chief once privately admitted his strategy was to try to bribe supermarket managers into putting his brand next to Orville’s, then undercut the price. Popping corn poppers? Another volume could be written, going back further in time than the Aztecs, through the introduction by Charles Cretors of the steam-powered popper at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, to the first electric poppers in the mid1920s, and to a plethora of different makes, models, and types on the market today for both home and commercial use, not to mention microwave popcorn, which nearly dominates today’s unpopped corn market. What does the history and uses of popping corn have to do with Orville Redenbacher beyond the obvious? Popping corn may be fifty-six hundred years or more old, but it has undergone a revolutionary demand for it in the last thirty years. That demand continues to rise, making it a tremendously important cash crop exported internationally. Still one of the best loved snack foods, popping corn is also now considered an important nutritional source. If we have become a popping corn-conscious nation, Orville made us that way. He did more than improve the quality of popping corn; certainly, he was after more volume in the pop, better taste, bigger flakes, and fewer UPKs (for unpopped kernels). He achieved those qualities in popping corn in 1965 when one of the hybrids he developed with his plant breeder Carl Hartman produced the forty-four-to-one popping volume he so vigorously sought for so long. But Orville’s indomitable belief that consumers would not only accept his concept of “gourmet” popping corn, but would also willingly pay more for it too, flew in the face of every then-accepted marketing principle. Characteristically tenacious, Orville ignored his detractors and refused to be disappointed by the counsel that his idea would not work. Orville did not fear failure; he simply allowed no room for it. He continued his campaign, winning acceptance of his higher-priced “gourmet popping corn” slowly yet surely. Eventually, his upbeat, though often cornball television commercials, warmed the heart of a nation. Orville’s refusal to give up arguably revitalized if not revolutionized the popping corn industry. Because of his resolute faith in what he was doing, an entire nation now looks on popping corn as something more than just—well, popcorn.

Notes

*Oh, you can call it a “potato bag” or anything else if you choose, but in Indiana it is a gunnysack. Gunny is the anglicized name from the Hindi gani, the coarse, heavy jute or hemp fabric of which the sacks are made. Incidentally, Indiana farms do not have pails. Only buckets—into which, sometimes, you can pour the contents of gunnysacks. *The author herewith credits and gratefully thanks The Popcorn Institute for almost all of the facts, figures, and history contained in this section—but asks (with mock naïveté) why it is not, indeed, The Popping Corn Institute.

To Market! To Market!

The “Gourmet” Story: How the “King” Was Crowned Before 1965, Orville and Charlie’s company, consistently demonstrating remarkable business flexibility, wisely sold its dent hybrid seed corn business to Cargill, Inc., and dropped the word “Hybrid” from the company name, symbolizing its new and broadened agricultural interests. These included, besides the liquid fertilizer business, which had made the partners millionaires, the production of popcorn seed, agricultural chemicals, John Deere garden tractors, Butler grain bins and corn dryers, commercial buildings, farm irrigation systems, IBM computers, and snowmobiles—even snowmobile attire. Diversification and hard work made Chester, Inc., among the most prosperous agribusiness firms in the Midwest, one that eventually got into commercial and industrial development and construction. Still, improved popcorn was Orville’s obsessive interest. Chester, Inc., had become the world’s largest producer of hybrid popping corn seed, sold as the RedBow brand, even before the 1965 hybridization “breakthrough” that was the birth of Orville’s “gourmet popping corn.” Of the one million pounds of popcorn seed raised commercially in the nation each year, Chester produced and sold between 550,000 and 600,000 pounds of it. But if the new hybrid was Orville’s “better mousetrap,” the popcorn processors were not beating a path to his door to buy it. His persistent efforts to sell the new and more expensive seed to processors met closed-mind resistance. Popcorn, the processors told him, was popcorn, you sold it by the pound, and that’s all retail popcorn buyers cared about. Whoever had the lowest price won, right? Orville didn’t believe it; instead, he put resolute faith in his idea that most consumers would be willing to pay more for a superior popcorn that popped bigger with fewer “old maids,” had a fluffy texture, and tasted better. The trade-off for the higher quality product was that it cost more to produce because its yield, averaging only 1,180 pounds per acre, was far less than other commercially grown popcorn seed. Farmers required Chester to pay them a $50 per ton premium for raising it, and Chester insisted they harvest it with an ear-corn picker rather than a combine to avoid bruising the kernels. The per-acre average yield has gone from less than a ton per acre in 1965 to 2.1 tons per acre, some fields producing as much as 3 tons per acre, thanks to continued refinement of the hybrid, which now permits combining the corn without bruising the kernels. Orville and Charlie worked four years trying to sell popcorn producers not only the new and more expensive hybrid popcorn seed but also their then unorthodox marketing concept as well: Customers will be willing to buy a high-quality popcorn and pay a premium price for it. Orville traveled the countryside, trying to sell any and all popcorn processors, including Jolly Time, National Oats, PopWeaver, Cracker Jack, and all of his other hybrid popcorn seed customers. They were unanimous in rejecting Chester’s new, more expensive hybrid as well as Orville’s idea that customers would pay more for it. One day in 1970, Orville and Charlie decided to end the production of hybrid popcorn seed for the industry and come out with their own brand to prove the processors wrong. When they tried to sell it as the RedBow brand, they still got little or no positive response except for a few popcorn lovers who regularly traveled U.S. 30 and would stop at the Chester plant to pick up a standard five-pound sack. Business was discouraging. Frustrated almost to anger, Charlie told his business partner one day, “Orville, you’ve got to go into Chicago and hire someone to help us develop a brand-name and a package.” Orville made a couple of telephone calls and a day or so later jumped into his pickup truck and drove west toward the Chicago Loop, less than two hours away, to meet with Gerson, Howe & Johnson, a widely known Chicago marketing and advertising firm based in the Wrigley Building. The contact made with the firm was a fortunate one that resulted in a successful promotional/marketing campaign involving Marshall Field’s (later Macy’s). Prior to launching the promotional demonstration of the product, Orville took action. “Well, some days before the start of the demonstration, I got all the names of the officers and department managers of the store—all forty-two of them—and packaged personalized jars of popcorn for each one and had them on each of their desks when they reported to work the morning of the first demonstration.” The demonstration and autographing session at Marshall Field’s was a media event in the Chicagoland area. The affair was advertised widely, and the local television outlets covered it, one of them with a six-minute segment on its following newscasts. It may have been one of Marshall Field’s most successful promotions; it certainly was one of Orville’s. Orville was first to use the word “gourmet” with popcorn in the brand name, thereby starting an industry trend. That may have been generated by an advertising mind, but it speaks to Orville’s own set of beliefs about popcorn. He knew when it was “good,” and when it was “bad.” His was “good,” and was worth more money than other brands. He was not afraid of the appeal of exclusivity; as a connoisseur of popcorn, he believed none even came close to his. At the outset—following the Marshall Field’s premiere—Orville did all of the selling and marketing himself, using his own considerable personal wit-and-hustle resources. Chester’s best advertising was, by and large, word-of-mouth. Orville and Charlie believed they had to limit their sales to gourmet stores, fancy food shops, and high-quality grocery stores. Doing “all of the selling and marketing” meant Orville also drove the truck and made most of the earliest deliveries. Those early customers included, besides Marshall Field’s, the Churchill Stores in Toledo, Byerley’s in Minneapolis, and Midwestern gourmet grocery shops and supermarkets. The Churchill Stores in Toledo very early became a retail outlet for Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn. Gen. Lauris Norstad, the retired commander of NATO and board chairman of Owens-Corning Glass, Inc., headquartered in Toledo, made several trips to Valparaiso to inspect the site of a new facility being developed by Chester, Inc. Given some Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn, Norstad found it so tasty he asked his staff to bring it back to Toledo in quantity. Norstad induced a military colleague, retired Marine Corps Gen. Walter Churchill, who headed the Churchill Stores, to stock Orville’s popping corn. General Norstad also introduced Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn to the Kroger Company, which became the first national chain store buyer. Jewel Tea Company soon followed. Orville’s Gourmet Popping Corn began to build a growing following among popcorn gourmets; the product had gained a substantial foothold in the Midwest. Orville must have been doing something right; certainly, his nearly obsessive work habits

and his persistence had begun to pay off. Still, there was a long way yet to go; at the time, Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn was the new kid—and the most expensive—on the shelf among eighty-two brands of popcorn found in U.S. grocery markets. Still, many thousands of people could not get it; and some, having tasted it, wrote Orville many letters desperately trying to buy more: Dear Sir, I am writing to you in desperation. We have used the last of our jars of your Gourmet Popping Corn and the Kroger store where I shop no longer has it in stock. I have searched everywhere for it, to no avail perhaps you can tell me where in my area it can be purchased. It truly is the best of popcorn….

Dear Sir, Some time ago I purchased the thirty-ounce size container of your popping corn. And I am unable to locate more of the same. I was so happy to find a popping corn of good quality and, even though expensive, it is well worth it. Is there a way I can purchase this corn through you? … If I waited for a grocery store to obtain the corn, it would take forever….

Orville was always heartened by the hundreds of similar letters he received (and always answered) mostly from housewives who made most of the family decisions in the supermarket. Perhaps the most heartening came from an old friend in West Lafayette: March 21, 1971 Dear Orville, When we returned last week from Florida we found a winter flood of mail, including your Christmas present of gourmet popping corn. We appreciate the gift and especially cherish the memories of the old friendship it brings back. 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…. Sincerely, Arthur M. Brunson

Brunson’s may have been the most encouraging letter Orville received at a time when doubts began to rise and energy lagged. Hearing from his old mentor, the man who had put him on the popping corn wagon many years earlier, renewed his vigor and whetted his taste for the popcorn battles. Still, the new venture was a tough job; Orville’s daily distresses and frustrations were not unlike the kind of misery he had experienced as an Indiana farm lad milking cows bare-handed on freezing mornings. The marketing, the selling, the delivering, the driving a truck throughout the Midwest took its toll. At the plant just east of the Chester complex, Orville even spent hours on the packaging line, screwing on lids or gluing on the labels. Then sixty-four years old, an age when most individuals think of easing into retirement, Orville was still bearing down—until early spring of 1971 when the grueling job of peddling his new product finally sent him into the Valparaiso hospital with ulcers. To make a sad situation tragic, Corinne died of an incurable bleeding ulcer about the same time in the same hospital. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to Orville, a small New Orleans firm, Blue Plate Foods, Inc., discovered Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn and began market testing it in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The company was a food sales and distribution firm in the south and southeastern sectors of the country; and it was a wholly owned food-processing subsidiary of Hunt-Wesson Foods, Inc., headquartered in Fullerton, California. Blue Plate Foods selected 300 households in the Dallas region and gave each of 150 of them his Gourmet Popping Corn and each of the other 150 Jolly Time Popcorn. The following week they reversed the brands for the two groups and the third week passed out a questionnaire that asked, among other things, “Would you be willing to pay twice as much for the Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn?” Blue Plate Foods got an overwhelming number of “yes” answers, a seminal finding that reinforced Orville’s long-held, though generally pooh-poohed, theory that people would pay more for superior popcorn. The popcorn industry was about to be—no pun intended—set on its ear. “I was ill and needed help,” Orville explained. “I had none of the marketing, advertising, or sales training or even the financial resources to expand the sales except at my very slow, one-man pace.” Thus, he and Charlie agreed to license Blue Plate Foods to sell their Gourmet Popping Corn, under his label, in their south and southeastern sales area. At nearly the same time, parent Hunt-Wesson Foods began to do some of its own marketing tests with Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn and became convinced it could become a national brand. The upshot was its decision to have its subsidiary Blue Plate Foods sell Orville’s popping corn, offering marketing and sales talents and resources far beyond anything Orville ever envisioned. Blue Plate set out to make Orville Redenbacher a household name. But when company staff first brought up the name, food brokers thought they were kidding—until they themselves tried the popcorn. Late in 1971, Blue Plate Foods and Chester, Inc., finally signed an agreement wherein Chester raised, processed, and packaged the gourmet popcorn; Blue Plate would market and sell it through Hunt-Wesson’s marketing department and national sales force. Chester, through its contracts with Indiana and Illinois farmers, would raise between 7,000 and 10,000 acres of gourmet popping corn, acreages that rise annually. Blue Plate Foods premiered its new product tie by honoring Orville at Chicago’s Gaslight Club. As of this writing, Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn is raised annually on between 45,000 and 50,000 acres, mostly in Indiana. Up to 150 million pounds of gourmet variety popcorn is dried in 120 huge bins on a 450-acre White County farm bordering Indiana 43 north of Brookston, Indiana. At Brookston, it is dried to a moisture content of between 13.5 and 14 percent, then is shipped as needed to the jar and microwave lines at the Hunt-Wesson Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn plant on U.S. 30, east of the Valparaiso Chester, Inc. complex, the since-expanded site of the modest processing and packaging plant Orville and Charlie began in 1971. It also is shipped to a new plant at Rensselaer, forty miles northwest in Jasper County, that Hunt-Wesson opened in 1995 and, as of this writing is, preparing to expand. While the principal products are the various microwave popcorn lines, one remaining canning line—one that Orville built— uses, instead of the glass jars Orville began with, plastic jars of the same original thirty-ounce size but slightly different shape than that introduced about the time Chester signed with Blue Plate Foods. Hunt-Wesson has continued to improve Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn quality; it spends thousands of dollars annually on research and development and today markets an array of gourmet popping corn, microwave products and snacks, and Orville Redenbacher Buttery Flavored Popping Corn Oil, which also became the number one selling popping corn oil in the country. Orville’s recuperation from his 1971 case of ulcers was speeded by a new challenge. He agreed to help Blue Plate Foods begin a national promotional campaign by spending six months traveling throughout the United States to all major U.S. cities, his new wife, Nina, at his side, to be interviewed by newspapers and on radio and television on behalf of Gourmet Popping Corn. It was an ambitious, elaborate public relations program engineered by the Chicago-based firm of Daniel J. Edelman Public Relations Worldwide hired by Hunt-Wesson. Its operation was a textbook public relations coup. Between September 17, 1972, and April 17, 1973, the Redenbachers traveled and talked about popping corn six days a week for six months, excepting the Christmas holidays when they took time for a Mediterranean cruise they had scheduled much earlier. A physically and emotionally draining schedule, it started in Oakland, California, on October 20, 1972, thence to San

Francisco, to Fresno, to Sacramento, to Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, to Spokane, to Denver, to Phoenix, to Omaha, to Minneapolis-St. Paul, to Coronado, California, for the week end, to Cleveland, to Memphis, to Pittsburgh, to Buffalo, to Indianapolis, to Detroit, to Des Moines, to Kansas City, to Miami, to St. Louis, to Houston, to Atlanta, to Jacksonville, to TampaSt. Petersburgh, to Louisville, to Milwaukee, to Green Bay, Wisconsin, to Madison, to New York, to Boston, to Portland, Maine, to New Haven, and, finally, back to Chicago. A typical stop was in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota, (where more popcorn is consumed than in any other place in the United States). Orville and Nina spent two and a half days there while Orville was interviewed on five TV shows, five radio programs, plus four newspaper or magazine interviews. Everywhere he went, he was a crusading evangelist for quality popping corn. (The trade journal AdWeek once described Orville as “a wry caricature sprung from ‘American Gothic,’ an owlish codger with the deportment of a lifelong prom chaperone….” and called him the “Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn spokescodger.” He loved it.) After an exhausting day of personal appearances, he and Nina often returned to their hotel quarters, kicked off their shoes, plugged in an electric popper, and popped up a batch or two of ORGPC for themselves. Blue Plate Foods, that is, Hunt-Wesson, had a new and expensive product, albeit an arguably superior one, on its hands competing with eighty-two other, lower-priced brands. But it also had one major advantage: Orville Redenbacher’s name and personality. C. James McCarthy III, then president of Blue Plate Foods, saw Orville as a spokesman who, he says, “was a great person who devoted his life to one thing—making the best popcorn in the world.” Jim Myers, a former Hunt-Wesson vice president, once called Orville “a natural; I don’t think we could find a man more likable or memorable than Orville.” McCarthy recalled one promotional trip to Atlanta where he met Orville for a day of TV and media interviews. About six a.m. Myers’s hotel room telephone rang. It was Orville calling from another room in the same hotel: “Jim, do you have a razor I can borrow? … I forgot mine. I always do when I pack my own bag.” Later in the morning, Orville, then not widely known, appeared on two local television programs. That afternoon, a woman stopped him to ask, “Aren’t you Orville Redenbacher?” “That,” says McCarthy, “was the supreme moment I knew we had something [very important] by identifying Orville’s persona with his popcorn.” Orville’s day-in, day-out public appearances were an adman’s dream. Orville was totally noncontroversial; nothing he said or did could be construed as offensive to anyone; and so far as anyone can remember, he received only one caveat respecting public appearances. That came from the Blue Plate Foods marketing people who cautioned Orville to avoid any reference to coconut oil since it was a highly saturated fat and not to use the term “seasonings” because it implied salt and pepper to a populace becoming increasingly health and diet conscious. In 1974, Hunt-Wesson decided to sell Blue Plate Foods while retaining the Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn agreement with Chester. A year later, Orville and Charlie had a long talk and finally agreed, “Maybe we ought to sell the whole [popcorn] works” and pursue other interests. They went to the Hunt-Wesson hierarchy and asked if the firm wanted to purchase their popcorn business. It did. Negotiations began that fall under the direction of Don Rhody, Hunt-Wesson marketing manager, who later was elevated to the firm’s senior vice presidency. On July 1, 1976, the Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn business operations and property were transferred from Chester, Inc., to Hunt-Wesson for a reported $4 million; Hunt-Wesson agreed to use the brand name of Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn in perpetuity. By then Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn, starting at zero, had reaped in five years the largest share of the U.S. popping corn sales, though its retail price was about twice that of the competition. In a second, separate contract, under which he literally sold his name, Orville agreed to work for the rest of his life as the persona and chief booster and promoter of “his” gourmet popping corn. Orville once said in retrospect that he and Charlie may have sold their popcorn business too cheaply. He once reflected on the sale, saying, “I’m sure if my partner and I had been fifteen years younger, we would never have sold it. We knew we could get to the place they [Hunt-Wesson] were, but it would have taken us fifteen years to do what they did in five.” In the early 1970s, because mass reach was the key to popularizing the product, television was to be the principal medium. Botsford Ketchum, San Francisco advertising agency, went to work on the ad campaign. In 1975 Orville had made the first of many national television commercials that eventually charmed an entire nation with his innocent, friendly, straightforward, down-home believability, a style then rarely seen or heard in network commercialdom: Hello. I’m Orville Redenbacher from Valparaiso, Indiana, and this is four ounces of my gourmet popping corn [pours popping corn into popper] and this is four ounces of your ordinary popping corn [pours popping corn into second popper]. That’s doing okay, but look at mine! It’s popping the top right off the popper! [Pours gourmet popping corn into bowl.] Pops up lighter and fluffier. See any old maids? [Eats handful of popping corn] Eats better, too. Nearly one-hundred percent pop. Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn. Try it.

Orville was never paid for that first TV commercial but in subsequent ones received union scale for such work. He was always quick to point out that a thirty-second commercial required at least eight hours in front of the cameras. Meanwhile, Hunt-Wesson’s sales force of more than four hundred had put ORGPC into wide national distribution. Orville’s growing fame never bothered his business partner, Charlie. He was shrewd enough to realize the Orville Redenbacher name was just quaint enough to gain popular appeal–something a popcorn named “Charlie Bowman’s” might lack. “Orville was a brass buttons and blue ribbons man; he loved the spotlight and the public attention. I’m just the opposite. I don’t,” Bowman has repeated on several occasions when the question arises. One of the compelling reasons for selling their popping corn business to Hunt-Wesson was the fact that neither Charlie nor Orville had sons and none of their daughters, three each, seemed interested in the popcorn business, possibly from the remembered rigors of detasseling as youngsters, or helping plant corn in Chester’s breeding plots in Indiana and Florida. Not long after the 1976 sale, Orville and Nina moved to their comfortable, $350,000 (now much higher priced) seventh floor condominium in Coronado, California, across the bay from San Diego. From his living room, the breathtaking view up and down the sandy Pacific shore and out to Point Loma and the friendliness of his chosen community prompted him to firmly declare Coronado the “best place in the world to live”—without intentionally excluding Clay Prairie, Purdue University, Fontanet, Terre Haute, Princeton, or Coolwood Acres. In 1978, Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn grossed $30 million in sales; by the mid-1980s, it was racking up estimated sales of $400 million annually and had captured 20 percent of national retail sales. Hunt-Wesson introduced its first microwave popping corn in 1983. Earlier, the firm signed an agreement with the Walt Disney organization to become the exclusive bulk provider of all of the popcorn, unpopped, used at Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California–a whopping popping of one-half-million pounds a year at the two gargantuan amusement centers. At either place, Orville and Nina always got the red-carpet, celebrity treatment. By then, Orville Clarence Redenbacher had become a nationally famous, publicly adulated celebrity. A nation adored him for his brief, humorous, but respectful, visits in their home via TV. He and Nina traveled widely to countless grand openings, county fairs, dedications, parades, and similar events. He was also called on for a seemingly infinite number of speeches and traveled around town in a chauffeur-driven limousine on special occasions. Several Indiana congressmen distributed packages of Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn to all 435 congressmen and 100 senators. That got him into the Congressional Record. He became “crowned” by mass media hyperbole as the “King of Popcorn.” Orville’s grandson, Gary, joined him in his television commercials, playing the real role of his grandson, but also the tacit role of “king apparent.” Orville succinctly confirmed the “coronation,” the years of fame and fortune of “the funny-looking farmer with the funnysounding name” (his words), being constantly in the public eye, being constantly sought after, being labeled “the King of Popcorn,” this way: “It’s fun.”

Aside from the years of hard work and his exasperating persistence, and the genius of the advertising executives who advised him to use his own name for a brand, luck and timing played a big part in Orville’s—and Hunt-Wesson’s—successes. Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn and the subsequent “extension” microwave products labeled “Reden Budders” came along at the serendipitous confluence of the microwave oven, the videocassette recorder, and the health-food trend—all things that helped make Orville the humble but proud patriarch of popping corn. Orville and his grandson Gary agreed, “We were very lucky.” Orville loved the public attention, and he delighted in being asked for his autograph. He had small stickers printed that read, “I met Orville Redenbacher, The Popcorn King.” He signed these “Orville.” “Golly,” he would explain, “it would take me all day to write the whole thing.” Still, fame and public adulation did not distort Orville’s perspective. Though his official ties to Hunt-Wesson were those of business, he treated his company colleagues and other business associates more as intimate friends than as corporate acquaintances. “Becoming a millionaire was the farthest thing from my mind,” Orville said in one of his 1980s speeches. “Popcorn was one of my favorite foods and I just wanted to come up with the best-tasting popcorn in the world. Even as a youngster I tried to make our local 4-H Club’s popcorn better. I suppose that my persistence and stubbornness were somehow responsible for what success I’ve had. I had been told I was looking for a will-o’-the-wisp, to leave well enough alone. What the world needed was anything but a better popcorn. I didn’t listen; usually when someone says something like that to me, that something can’t be done, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. “Very simply, ours is a brand you can trust. That’s why my picture is on every box and jar …. Popcorn is fun. You never see anyone in a bad mood eating popcorn. “I’ve always tried to follow some of the classic, homespun ideals. Never say die. Never be satisfied. Be stubborn. Be persistent. Integrity above all else. Anything worth having is worth striving for with all of your effort. Does it sound corny? Honestly, that’s all there was to it. I didn’t have any magic formulas.”

“‘Reddy’ Is As Old Shoe As They Come.” In southern Indiana, saying that someone is “old shoe,” has to do only indirectly with footwear; in fact, it’s a Hoosier compliment paid to those relaxed, laid-back folk who do not allow their lives to be controlled or otherwise affected by whatever the degree of fame or fortune that comes their way, however much merited. As a vernacular, its derivation had a lot to do with footwear; in an earlier time, a new pair of farmwork brogans were stiff and unyielding, podiatric torture chambers before walking and time made them fit to wear. When they got old and worn and experienced, they were downright comfortable. Hence, one who was “old shoe” was a comfortable person to be around, someone universally liked for himself alone. That appropriate description of Orville was made by Ezra Beach, now of Clearwater, Florida, the president of the Valparaiso Kiwanis Club when Orville moved to that city in 1952. Orville and Ezra became close friends; later Orville urged Beach and his wife Bernice to build a home near the Redenbachers in Coolwood Acres, which they did in 1959. Beach has several Orville stories to tell: • After Bethlehem Steel Company built a new mill along the Lake Michigan shore in Porter County, the firm had serious landscaping trouble with blowing sand and were unable to establish grass on the shifting dunes. Several northern Indiana landscapers simply dismissed it as an impossibility. Orville took on the job, using copious amounts of fertilizer and traveling irrigation sprinklers much like those still used today, and got grass well established in a relatively short time. “Needless to say, when other companies built plants along the lake shore, they all asked Chester and Orville to plant the grass on their grounds,” Beach remembers. • Ezra and Bernice visited Orville in Coronado three years or so after Nina’s death, and the three made a short trip up the coast to Escondido to visit Lawrence Welk’s Mobile Home Park. “On the way back,” Beach recalls, “we stopped at a fast-food restaurant for a sandwich. When we walked in, Orville was immediately recognized. Many flocked to our table, including employees, to meet him. He was always gracious when people approached him. Once at the Tampa airport, a bus full of high school band kids was parked at the Marriott Hotel just as we entered for dinner. One of the teachers recognized ‘Reddy’ and asked him if he would mind stepping onto the bus to greet the kids. He obliged, of course; and before he left the bus, he shook hands with every student…. Orville often reacted on the spur-of-the-moment when it came to greeting the people. Is it any wonder he was so popular?” • One year the Israeli government asked Orville to visit the nation and tell them why their popcorn crop did not pop well. He decided to make the trip provided Israel give him a complete tour of the country. Orville tested the popcorn and found the problem: The moisture content was too low for the corn to pop well—and he got an “insider’s” look at Israel.

One of Orville’s favorite programs was the People-To-People program established by President Eisenhower in 1956. Eventually he became one of its directors. People-To-People was not a commercial sightseeing trip, but rather a program to promote understanding between the people of the world’s nations. In Orville’s case, he often led agricultural groups to study the agricultural conditions and farming practices of other countries. In 1962 he led his first trip to the Soviet Union via the Scandinavian countries and Poland. Before his death, Orville had not only visited all fifty of the United States but more than one hundred-thirty countries worldwide as well. Beach and Herbert Steinbach, retired editor of the daily Valparaiso Vidette-Messenger, both remember Orville’s work on that program: Beach: “Orville was quite a camera bug and took scads of pictures everywhere he went. He bought a new $1,000 Germanmade camera before he left for China, but didn’t have a chance to test it before he left. When he arrived in China, his new camera would not work.” Steinbach: “‘Reddy’ guided thirty-six men and women … on the prestigious 1967 Indiana Agricultural Group Goodwill delegation to Ireland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland; and at the conclusion of that portion of the trip, he took some of the delegates to Poland and Russia. Most of the delegates were farmers. Some were not associated with agriculture, but all were friends of the Redenbachers…. ‘Reddy,’ always thoughtful [of the interests] of his guests went out of his way to arrange for special tours for his nonagriculture guests; and I was privileged to visit the Associated Press Bureau in Stockholm. I also will not forget the soccer match in Helsinki that Orville took his twelve-year-old grandson Kent and me to see. But despite the careful arrangements that he had made, there were times when minor snags arose. At one restaurant, we had reserved thirtysix steaks, one for each delegate. When we arrived, there were only thirty-five steaks; an employee unknowingly sold one to someone outside the delegation. At another restaurant, a member of the delegation asked for water with his meal—and was sprayed with it. Europeans normally do not serve water at the dinner table. At one small town north of the Arctic Circle, we had thirty-six beds reserved for one night—but only thirty-four were available. So the Redenbachers elected to sleep in an attic that night. ‘Reddy’ and Corinne, being super hosts, took these minor bumps in stride, calmly, and in good humor. They were the best thing that happened to us on our 1967 goodwill mission.” Charlie Bowman, Orville’s business partner: “I knew Orville loved to travel, and I knew that I could get him out of the office for extended periods by leaving travel brochures around the office where he wouldn’t miss them.” Other Orville Redenbacher reminiscences: Walter Redenbacher of Pawlet, Vermont, is the only person outside of his immediate family Orville ever met with the same surname. Walter was born in Munich, Germany, the son of a brewmeister for Löwenbrau. He came to the United States with his mother in 1929 after his parents divorced. “From my childhood, through school, the Marine Corps, and my years in business, I never came across the Redenbacher name anywhere in the United States,” he says. “I think it was back in the 1980s that I first heard about Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn. That prompted me to write to him, and he responded. We first met in San Diego in 1986 while I was participating at our company’s annual sales conference.” Orville invited Walter to his Coronado home for a visit where “[their] warm hospitality made my visit most enjoyable and memorable.”

Orville and W. Rufus Harrell, agribusinessman and farmer from Urbanna, Virginia, have been friends for twenty-seven years, having met on a fishing trip to Canada as customer-guests of Allied Chemical Corporation. “‘Reddy’ and I were teamed in a boat with a guide for three days,” Harrell remembers. “I had opened a new [liquid fertilizer] plant and recently hired a former county agent as a salesman—someone who would know the customers in the area. Problems were developing; my new salesman was selling materials below our cost. After three days of relating these problems to ‘Reddy,’ we were departing when he said, ‘Rufus, it’s been good fishing with you, but I know you’d never hire me—I’m a former county agent.”’ Harrell and Orville remained the best of friends and both have served as directors of the National Fertilizer Solutions Association and made frequent fishing and driving trips together. Once, Orville, Nina, and a few friends were on a day-long trip aboard Harrell’s yacht to Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay for lunch. The seas picked up on the return trip, and several on board got seasick. But Orville had gone to the stateroom for a nap and came out rested and well, wondering what all of the excitement was about.

Wherever Orville lived, he remained an active Kiwanian and was the oldest member in years of membership at his death. Herschel Gulley of Peru, Indiana, remembers where and when he first met Orville and Nina—Nice, France, at the Kiwanis international convention. “I noticed this couple on the street, seemingly bewildered. I went over to them and Orville asked, ‘How do you get to the Kiwanis convention?’ I told them to stay with me because that’s where I was headed,” Gulley remembers. Orville and he remained good friends. Orville later repaid his friend’s good deed in Paris by serving as grand marshal of the annual Circus Day parade in Peru.

On a trip to Purdue, Orville stopped at an office in the Hovde Hall of Administration and asked a young woman at a desk in one of the offices if he could leave his briefcase with her while he attended a meeting. When he returned to pick it up, the woman had locked it up in her desk, and Orville told her that while he appreciated it, locking it up wasn’t necessary. She told him it was such a beautiful case that it should be in a safe place. “Do you really like it?” Orville asked. “Yes,” she replied. Without another word, Orville emptied the contents and gave it to her.

Orville was accused several times of not being “real,” that he was really an actor. “Huh,” he would snort, “if I were an actor, they’d get somebody much better than me up there.”

Orville never tried to isolate himself from the public and usually answered his own telephone with a strong, firm “Redenbacher!” His telephone number was listed in the Coronado telephone directory. Yet, he got few nuisance calls, save some kids who wanted to see if there was a real, live Orville Redenbacher. Calls to complain about his popcorn were virtually nonexistent, but occasionally someone would mail him a single popcorn kernel that didn’t pop taped to a sheet of paper. Orville would take a fresh kernel, tape it to a sheet of paper, and mail it back.

Visiting grade schools and talking to the children was one of Orville’s favorite tasks. One day in Toledo, Ohio, Amy, a secondgrader, rushed home after school to announce to her parents, “I have to wear my school sweatshirt and take my camera tomorrow. Horrible Redenbacher is coming to our school.” After he heard the remark, Orville’s grandson Gary told him, “Gramps, we’re never going to let you live that one down.”

On a flight to Cincinnati, Ohio, curiosity got the best of a young lady seated next to Orville. “Why,” she asked Orville, “would you—the biggest name in popcorn—fly coach when you could easily afford first class?” “When I’m flying for personal reasons [to see a new great-granddaughter] I go coach. But when I’m on business, I’m a firstclass guy,” Orville replied.

Claire Williamson, who answered a “help wanted” ad to become Orville’s secretary at Chester, Inc., remembers: “I had a lot of fun. He was wonderful to work for, a very kind man [who] was always grateful for everything you did for him. And he always remembered to bring his secretary something from every country he visited—bone china from England and a ski sweater from Norway—things like that.”

Orville once appeared on Hollywood star Florence Henderson’s nine-season “Country Kitchen” show on the Nashville Channel, and, says Florence, he was one of her most fascinating celebrity guest chefs. He demonstrated several of his favorite popcorn recipes, then he and Ms. Henderson, also a Hoosier, treated her audience with some Indiana harmony. ‘Back Home Again in Indiana’ was never sung with more fervor than when Orville and I—two dyed-in-the-wool Hoosiers—sang it on ‘Country Kitchen’,” Ms. Henderson recalled.

Not only did Orville produce the gourmet popcorn and spend more than two decades of his life selling it, he could also tell you how to pop it. His favorite method: “Use a good heavy electric popper that has 750 watts. Put in at a ratio of three parts popcorn to one part oil and put on a lid that lets the steam escape. If the steam goes up and hits the lid, condenses, and drips back on the corn, it makes it tough.” That recipe was Orville’s favorite.

A poll of schoolchildren in St. Paul, Minnesota, revealed that twice as many kids had heard of Orville Redenbacher as had heard of Walter Mondale, the former U.S. senator and Democratic presidential nominee from Minnesota. Orville, a Republican who contributed substantially to his party, could have gloated, though it was not in his character to gloat. “Folks in St. Paul must eat a lot of popcorn,” Orville correctly concluded.

Orville was invited on an infrequent two-hour luncheon cruise of the San Diego harbor aboard the Maritime Museum’s 1904 steam yacht Medea. Also on board were Astronaut Walter Schirra, ESPN’s Gary Jobson, and bagpiper William Graham. As he debarked at the end of the cruise, Orville cast a wistful glance back at the old steam yacht, sighing, “Such a shame we couldn’t rig up that steam stack to a popcorn popper.”

Orville was never at a loss for words, but Don Rhody, the retired senior vice president for technology at Hunt-Wesson, remembers at least one occasion that left Orville stunned and speechless. In 1986, Jim Frawley, the senior vice president for marketing, asked Rhody for suggestions for a gift for Orville, to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary since the original marketing agreement had been signed and the decade since Hunt-Wesson purchased the popcorn business from Chester, Inc. “I knew,” remembers Rhody, “that Orville had met Olaf Wieghorst and prized his western art. Olaf lived near San Diego and was one of the three most famous U.S. western artists. [Wieghorst died in the early 1990s.] Two of Wieghorst’s paintings are especially famous and copies have always been sold as pairs, The Navajo and the Navajo Madonna. Wieghorst made a large bronze [sculpture] of the Navajo Madonna [Navajo woman and child riding horseback]. Usually, at least one hundred copies of a bronze are made before the mold is broken, but only ten were made of this particular bronze artwork. Ray Wieghorst, Olaf’s son, agreed to sell one of the ten to Hunt-Wesson. It was quite expensive and very heavy—ninety-four pounds to be exact—and I remember when Ray and I lifted it into the trunk of my car to haul it to my home [then] in Newport Beach. The bronze Navajo Madonna was unveiled, a surprise, for Orville by Tom Kemp, president of Hunt-Wesson at my home in early 1986. “It was the only time,” Rhody concluded, “in the twenty years I have known Orville that he was actually speechless—but he recovered quickly.” The bronze Navajo Madonna stood in the entry hallway of Orville’s home in Coronado atop the solid cherry table he crafted as a youngster in high school manual training, one of the few pieces of furniture saved from the 1928 fire that destroyed the family home in Clay County. Of all his earthly treasures, Orville treasured Olaf Wieghorst’s bronze sculpture the most.

Orville made hundreds of speeches throughout his career, never failing to talk about change and adaptation and how the flexibility of Chester, Inc., made it successful. He also never failed to throw in his own personal philosophy about change: “Usually, when people talk so grandly about changing to meet the times, they generally mean the other guy changing.”

More than once, Orville, would introduce his speech by saying. “My subject tonight is sex.” He liked to hear the surprised, uneasy rumble through the audience, then would talk about the sex life of a popcorn plant and the breeding methods required to obtain hybrids. “Well, it was fun while it lasted,” he would smile.

Orville always seemed in awe of the corporate big-league in which Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn played. Orville was no stranger to big money; in the mid-1970s when Chester’s sales of liquid fertilizer doubled and redoubled, he paid $663,000 in taxes and knew that if he and Charlie used good sense, which they did, they would never again have financial worries, which they didn’t. He was able to establish a scholarship trust of nearly half a million dollars for the education of his and Nina’s grandchildren. He could travel. He owned a Cadillac. And while he didn’t mind spending money on travel, “Nina had to push me to go out to buy clothes,” he used to say. That didn’t seem to apply to bow ties of which he owned at least sixty and wore most of his life because “you aren’t likely to spill your soup on them.” That millions, even billions, were involved in corporate transactions impressed him. Orville Redenbacher Gourmet Popcorn division of Valparaiso, Indiana, is owned by Hunt-Wesson Foods, Inc., of Fullerton, California, which in turn was first owned by Norton Simon, Inc., which was swallowed up by Esmark, Inc., a Chicago-based food and consumer product conglomerate, which agreed to be sold to Beatrice Foods Co. for a reported $2.8 billion. Beatrice Foods was then absorbed by ConAgra of Omaha, Nebraska, the giant food conglomerate with net annual sales above $12.5 billion. All of that prompted Orville’s wistful observation, “We [Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popping Corn] keep becoming a smaller percentage of the total.”

He always received thank-you notes for popcorn gifts, such as this one (in part) from Columnist Erma Bombeck: Dear Orville: I do indeed remember meeting you on the Phil Donahue Show, mainly because you got more applause than I did. And I think my name is just as difficult to pronounce…. Kind regards, Erma Bombeck

In 1987, Orville reached his eightieth birthday, a celebration that turned into a national public relations triumph for both him and his company. A giant birthday greeting card comprised of 4- by 7-foot panels covering 1,800 square feet was moved 8,000 miles around the country aboard a special Orville Redenbacher birthday train into fourteen major U.S. cities and a plethora of smaller communities, and was signed by 100,000 well-wishers. The tour ended at California’s Disneyland for an Orville Redenbacher eightieth birthday event that never happened. He was ill. That damper could not stop the momentum, and Orville received birthday wishes from President and Mrs. Reagan; he appeared on the most popular talk shows: the “Today Show, “Tonight Show,” “Regis and Kathie Lee,” “The David Letterman Show,” “Entertainment Tonight,” and “The Pat Sajak Show.” Orville’s eightieth year may have been his busiest. The wire services and television news channels all carried feature stories on the new octogenarian. He received special birthday greetings from many Hollywood personalities: Happy Birthday, Orville! I send my love! Lucy [Lucille Ball]

Dear Orville: You and I have a lot in common. We’re both now in our eighties—although I’ve got you beat by a couple of years. And we’ve both been described as the “King of Corn.” However, I have always been rather pleased with that title and I’m sure you are too. Have a wonderful 80th birthday party, and every good wish for many more birthday parties to come. Very sincerely, Lawrence Welk Happy Birthday, Orville— Keep Popping! Love, Loni Anderson

From the first time I tasted your corn, I knew you were the man for me. I’m a big fan—you make me smile. Happy Birthday, Orville. Many more! Whoopi Goldberg

Attaboy, Orville. Gregory Peck

Dear Orville It was Lot who said, when his wife was turned into a pillar of salt, “Salt I got. Popcorn I need!” Red Buttons

Redenbacherism sales point: “Popcorn has made many lousy movies worth sitting through….”

Orville made certain that his wealth was shared. Besides the varied philanthropic work of the Kiwanis Club which he joined in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1930 and in which he served for sixty-five years until his death, Orville worked assiduously with the national 4-H organization since his own days as a Hoosier 4-Her back in Clay County. He also devoted his time and money as well as his famous name to the national Easter Seals programs. He and his grandson Gary were sponsors of a U.S. Olympic volleyball squad; and Orville was in numerous other local, regional, and national charitable works. He was an early member of the Purdue University President’s Council, his alma mater’s chief private support agency, as well as the Purdue Alumni Association. One of his chief benefactions has been his and Gary’s unique scholarship program started in 1989 to provide scholarships for adult students either returning to complete interrupted college careers, or nontraditional students in college for the first time. Called Orville Redenbacher’s Second Start Scholarship Program, in 1995 it provided $1,000 scholarships to twenty-five older students from 14,000 persons who applied. “It is designed specifically,” Orville once explained, “to help adults with an entrepreneurial spirit make a second start in life with a college education.” More than six million adults past the age of twenty-five attend college in the United States. Not unlike the popcorn, he improved, Orville was quick to spot another need and, right in character, did something about it.

Orville’s second favorite snack, after popcorn, was jellybeans. He kept them in small dishes throughout the house. All were the same flavor—buttered popcorn.

The Orville Spirit No one can ever truly know how Orville coped with the deaths of his loved ones—his mother and father, two sisters, a brother, Corinne in 1971, Nina’s granddaughter Kelly Bigler in a Sun Valley skiing accident in 1983, Nina in 1991, his daughter Sue in 1992. Death was no stranger to Orville; he mourned, but seldom if ever displayed extreme despondency. Orville always laughed with you, but he cried alone. He grieved, then moved on. He suffered spiritual blows and crushing losses but refused to let them defeat him. No one may understand quite as he did that death is really only a part of life. Death was best met, in Orville’s view, by a life well lived, measured in results and not length. Still, philosophic balm never prepares one for the death of a loved one; human finality seems always tragic. Orville lost Nina May 8, 1991, at their beloved Coronado Shores residence. She had just returned from her beautician and lay down, complaining she didn’t feel well. Orville called her doctor, and when she seemed to worsen, he called an ambulance. She was taken to Coronado Hospital and upon arrival was pronounced dead. She had suffered a heart attack. By their long agreement, no funeral services were held and her ashes were spread upon the Pacific waters. Death came again about a year and a half later when Orville’s daughter, Sue Gourley, died October 2, 1992, at her home in Evansville, Indiana, apparently in her sleep, possibly the result of a complication remaining from her case of childhood rheumatic fever. In his own case, Orville’s marvelous sense of the absurd never failed him. Gleefully, he would summarize his lifetime contract with Hunt-Wesson: “When I die, I get to quit.” At age 88, death came to Orville unexpectedly September 19, 1995. He had been suffering from back pain for several days and was unable to attend the seventeenth annual Popcorn Festival in Valparaiso on September 9. It was a disappointing time for him since he had been a central figure at sixteen other Valparaiso Popcorn events and always delighted in riding in the long parade of floats and bands that highlighted the festival. His grandson Gary took his place at Valparaiso; still, from California, Orville fretted that he couldn’t be there too. A week later, he had improved enough that he was able to fly to Indianapolis for the wedding of the daughter of his old friend Ed Copp. But still ailing, he cut the Indianapolis trip short and returned to Coronado. On the day of his death, he was up at his usual early hour, worked in his office in the morning, had lunch with his woman friend and companion, Pat Brown, who lived two floors above in Orville’s condominium building. That afternoon he worked for several hours with Nikki Hiscock, his secretary, then went to dinner with Pat and friends in the evening. Later at home, he telephoned a “goodnight” to Pat, then began his regular before-bed period, relaxing in his Jacuzzi before retiring. He apparently suffered a heart attack in the tub and was unable to get out of it. His body was discovered early the next morning by the building superintendent who went to Orville’s apartment to check on a reported water leak. Even his death was not an admission of defeat; rather, months before he died, he had done the things that made his death an act of selflessness. He had no desire to be cause for the tears and grief of family and friends. He disdained the idea of reposing, embalmed, in a casket (“the perfumed carrion,” H. L. Mencken called it) surrounded by the cut-flower artistry of the local florist. Especially would he have abhorred the thought that anyone would ever see him publicly in a manner over which he had no control, or be involved perforce in the morose dawdling involved in preparing for his burial. He paid a minimal amount for his death and made certain that others would be spared any expense or effort as a result of it, or anguish over what would be done with his remains. In death, as in his life, Orville was thoughtful of others. As were Nina’s, Orville’s ashes were dispersed over the Pacific offshore from Coronado Shores. Again, no funeral or memorial service was held because, per the instructions Orville had written many months before his death, he desired only that his friends and family—and all of those whose lives he had somehow touched—simply enjoy their memories of him as a life to be celebrated and not a death mourned. You had to know the “Catfish Kid”; he finally “got to quit.” The good and great man is gone, but the Orville Spirit will always be with us; it is everywhere. You can hear it when the corn pops right out of the popper, or smell it in the irresistible aromas that waft from every popcorn stand.

Most often you can feel the Orville Spirit when you hear the happy laughter of every kid who ever ate popcorn … every last one of us. You have only to listen carefully.

Bibliography

Most of the material for this book was gathered through interviews with Orville Redenbacher, his friends, colleagues, and members of his family. Other sources were Orville’s own papers, letters, and a vast assortment of his memorabilia that included newspaper and magazine clippings and tear sheets best measured by the pound. Several books were also perused. The reader may wish to investigate these, primarily for popcorn recipes, or possibly tastes of Orville’s homey philosophy. Aaseng, Nathan. The Rejects. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Lerner Publications Company, 1989. Andrews, Andy. Storms of Perfection. Nashville, Tennessee: Lightning Crown Publishers, 1991. Cobb, Irvin S. Indiana: Intellectually, She Rolls Her Own. New York, N.Y.: George H. Doran Company, 1924. Kraft, Virgil. Salute to America. Winona, Minnesota: Apollo Books, 1984. Kusche, Larry. Popcorn Cookery. Tucson, Arizona: H.P. Books, 1977. Neely, Joseph L. Chosen Words. Glendale Heights, Illinois: Great Quotations Publishing Company, 1994. Stewart, Jillian, ed. Orville Redenbacher’s Popcorn Cookbook. New York, N.Y.: Smithmark Publishers, Inc., 1992. Topping, Robert W. A Century and Beyond. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 1988. Woodside, Dave. What Makes Popcorn Pop? New York, N.Y.: Atheneum, 1980.

Appendix

I. Awards and Honors Honorary Doctorate, Vincennes University, 1995 George F. Hixon Fellow, Kiwanis International, 1993–1994 Distinguished Service Award, President’s Council, Purdue University, 1994 Order of Merit, Republican National Committee, 1994 “Man of the Year,” San Diego chapter, People-To-People International, 1994 Knight of the Royal Rosarians, Oregon Rose Festival, 1994 Honorary 4-H Member, Oregon 4-H Foundation, 1994 Journi Award as 1993 Entrepreneur of the Year, Executive Journal magazine, 1994 Honorary Friend of 4-H, Clay County, Indiana, 1994 “Orville Redenbacher Day,” July 16, 1994, City of Brazil, Indiana, (his 87th birthday) Lifetime Achievement Award, City of Brazil, Indiana, 1994 Grand Marshall, U.S. Open Sandcastle Parade, Imperial Beach, California, 1994 Award of Appreciation, as Beachfest sponsor, Panama City Beaches, Florida, 1994 “Most Successful San Diego Celebrity,” 1994 “Time of Your Life Expo Hall of Fame,” Pomona, California, 1992 Legion of Honor, for sixty years membership, Kiwanis International, 1992 Plaque of Recognition for significant contributions, The Maier Group, 1992 Elected to National Popcorn Hall of Fame, 1989 Honorary Doctor of Agriculture, Purdue University, 1988 Elected to Hall of Fame, Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity, 1988 National Recognition Award for Outstanding Service to 4-H, National 4-H Congress, 1988 Member, “Old Masters,” (student program), Purdue University “Orville Redenbacher Day” State of Indiana, June 12, 1987 City of Indianapolis, June 12, 1987 City of New Orleans, Louisiana, June 30, 1987 City of Memphis, Tennessee, July 2, 1987 Award of Appreciation, U.S. Naval Amphibious School, Coronado, California, 1983 Certificate of Gratitude, People-To-People International, 1983 Certificate of Distinction, Purdue Agricultural Alumni Association, 1983 Indiana State 4-H Alumni Recognition Award (first), Annual 4-H Roundup, 1982 Sagamore of the Wabash, 1982 (Gov. Robert Orr) Honorary Alumnus, Valparaiso University, 1982 National 4-H Alumni Award, National 4-H Congress, 1982 “Wit, Wisdom and Sartorial Individualism” Award, The Resolute Society of the Bow Tie, circa 1982 Elected to San Diego Hall of Success, circa 1982 “Orville Redenbacher Day(s)” State of Indiana, September 15, 1982 (first annual Popcorn Festival, Valparaiso) Coronado, California, September 15, 1982 Sagamore of the Wabash, 1979 (Gov. Otis Bowen) Honorary Order of Kentucky Colonels, Commonwealth of Kentucky, 1976 Distinguished Service Citation, Valparaiso (Indiana) Chamber of Commerce, 1965 Distinguished Purdue Agriculture Alumni, Purdue Agricultural Alumni Association, 1950 Army, Navy Distinguished Service Awards for originating Victory Farm Awards in World War II, circa mid-1940s Special Award, Indiana Crop Improvement Association, for contributions to crop improvement in Indiana, circa 1940s Elected to Epsilon Sigma Phi, agricultural extension honorary fraternity, circa 1939 Medal, individual honors in National 4-H dairy judging, Syracuse, New York, 1923

II. Gourmet Popping Corn Awards* Silver Plaque, Chicago exhibit, for best food label development Gold Medal, San Francisco World Food Show, best package, label, design, and contents Public Relations Marketing Award, Chicago “Essie Award” for best food marketing program Among “Best One Hundred TV Commercials,” 1978–79 by Advertising Age *Awards were made for commercials and marketing programs of Hunt-Wesson, Botsford-Ketchum Advertising, Inc., in which Orville played roles.

III. Career Positions Vocational agriculture high school teacher, Fontanet, Indiana, 1928–29 Vigo County (Indiana) club agent, Terre Haute, Indiana, 1929–31 Vigo County agricultural agent, Terre Haute, 1931–39 Organizer and manager, Princeton Farms, Princeton, Indiana, 1940–51 Organized Chester Hybrids, Inc., with partner Charles F. Bowman, 1952

President, 1952–71 Chairman of the Board, 1972–95

IV. Professional Activities Director, first Kiwanis-sponsored Indiana 4-H Leadership Camp, 1933 President, Terre Haute Kiwanis Club, 1939 Chairman, Indiana District Kiwanis Agricultural Committee, 1943 Member, Kiwanis International Agricultural Committee, 1944 Lieutenant Governor, Indiana District of Kiwanis, 1945 President, Indiana Professional Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers, 1947 President, Indiana Farm Management Association, 1948 President, Indiana Aberdeen Angus Breeders Association, 1949 President, Gibson County (Indiana) Farm Bureau, 1947–49 President, Indiana Crop Improvement Association, 1952 Member, board of directors, People-To-People International, 1966–95 Member, board of directors, National Fertilizer Association, 1961–64 Secretary, National Fertilizer Association, 1964 Member, board of directors, National Popcorn Institute, circa 1970s

V. Orville Redenbacher’s Family Lineage

As of 1995, Orville had thirteen great-grandchildren. *John inexplicably changed the family name to Rodenbarger; his son William changed it back to Redenbacher, as did William’s younger brother Frank. The family records show that various names were used by the clan: Redenbacher, Rodenbarger, Rodenberger, Rodenbaugh, and Rode. Some say the names Redenbaugh, Redenbarger, and Redenberger also may have been adopted, though they are not thought to be a part of the family that came to America as Redenbacher from a Bavarian area west of Nürnberg, Germany. **Gary Fish, Orville’s grandson, played that real-life part on TV popcorn commercials and changed it to Redenbacher to avoid confusion.