Word: lateraling
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Postum was founded in 1895 by a health-food fan named Charles William Post, who invented Postum and Grape Nuts, one of the first cold cereals, built a thriving business in Battle Creek, Mich, before he died in 1914. Later, under President Colby Chester and Chairman E. F. Hutton (who married Post's daughter Marjorie), the company diversified so fast by buying up other companies that the big shopping bag was renamed General Foods. As it continued to grow under Austin Igleheart, who had joined Postum in 1926 when it purchased his family-run company (Swans Down cake flour...
...Stevens Institute, but left before graduation. He became a baking-powder salesman for R. B. Davis Co., was made head of sales at 22. His next stop was the Madison Avenue advertising agency of George Batten Co., where he worked on the Sanka account, pulled his weight alongside such later advertising stars as Ted Bates, William Benton (former Senator from Connecticut) and Chester Bowles. When Batten was sold to the agency that later became Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborne, Mortimer went over to Postum, got a job as an assistant ad manager for Sanka and Calumet. Not long after, he confided...
West Point Esthete. "I do not choose to be born at Lowell," said Massachusetts' James Whistler in later life, but he was, on July 10, 1834. The boy's father, a West Point engineer, shortly obliged him with a surrogate birthplace (St. Petersburg) by accepting Czar Nicholas I's commission to build a Moscow-to-St. Petersburg railroad. When the elder Whistler died in a cholera epidemic, James was old enough to enter West Point. In a chemistry exam, Cadet Whistler identified silicon as a gas, and West Point decided to do without him. "If silicon...
...home and set down The Builder's Creed: "I believe in a happy Eternal Life ... in a Christ that smiles and loves you and me, [in] an immense Endowment Care Fund ... to care for and perpetuate this Garden of Memory." The Creed, combined with a pay-now-die-later arrangement soothingly described as a Before Need Plan, boosted plot sales by 250% in the first year...
Selling Immortality. Next came "shock tactics," a series of suave radio commercials about what Eaton later called "the one purchase everybody has to make." Next, the builder boosted sales by offering waterproof, fireproof, wormproof and even quakeproof vaults. Every morning he called his salesmen together and started the day with a prayer and a pep talk. They must always remember, he told them, that they were selling immortality...