The ten years between 1927 and 1937 were a decade of destiny for the paper cup industry. It was exciting to watch the business grow. But if I had known the disillusionment that was waiting for me, I might have gone into some other line of work.
When I returned to selling paper cups, I vowed that this was going to be my only job. I was going to make my living at it and to hell with moonlighting of any kind. When I played the piano, it would be for pleasure only. I intended to devote every ounce of my energy to selling, and that’s exactly what I did.
My boss was a shrewd operator named John Clark, a man who could recognize sales talent when he saw it. I didn’t see his true colors for several years, after he made a bargain with me that the devil himself would have been proud of. Clark was president of Sanitary Cup and Service Corporation, whose biggest stockholders were a pair of bachelor brothers in New York by the name of Coue. This corporation was the exclusive Midwest distributor for Lily brand cups, which were manufactured by Public Service Cup Company. They made cups in several different sizes, from one ounce on up to sixteen ounces. These were rather primitive containers by today’s standards. The larger ones had to be pleated and then coated with paraffin wax to make them rigid enough to hold liquids, and they had rims that were limp and floppy.
I peddled these cups all over Chicago. I sold lots of the smaller sizes to Italian pushcart vendors who filled them with flavored ice and sold one ounce for a penny, two ounces for two cents, and five ounces for a nickel. They called them “squeeze cups” because you would squeeze the bottom and force the ice up to lick it. I sold soft drink cups to concessions at Lincoln Park and Brookfield zoos, to beaches, racetracks, and, of course, to the baseball parks. I used to needle my friend Bill Veeck up in Wrigley Field, trying to get him to stock more cups for Cub games. Bill wasn’t very promotion minded in those days. He became a much different guy when he owned the baseball teams himself. I was always on the lookout for new markets, and I found them in some strange places. Italian pastry shops, for example, could be sold “squat-size” cups for pastry and spumoni. They would buy a lot of them for big picnics, weddings, and religious festivals. I also learned that Polish places in the old Lawndale neighborhood would buy the same cups to serve “Povidla,” which was a prune butter. Those folks ate an awful lot of prune butter.
America had become an ice cream society in the last years of the twenties, thanks in large part to Prohibition. Bars and fine lounges in hotels sold ice cream, because they could no longer sell liquor, and dairy bars began to crop up all over the country. It was an incredible era. The straitlaced Cal Coolidge, who assured the nation that his fiscal probity had brought prosperity here to stay, moved the White House to the Black Hills of South Dakota for the summer and celebrated the Fourth of July by parading around in a cowboy costume. Babe Ruth signed a three-year contract with the Yankees for the stupefying figure of $70,000 a year. Lindbergh flew nonstop from New York to Paris. Al Jolson sang in the first talking pictures. And—wonder of wonders—in 1929 the Chicago Cubs won the National League pennant!
Big things were happening in the paper container industry. A paper milk bottle called the Sealcone was introduced by a New York dairy. Sealcone had no closure, the housewife had to snip off the top with a scissors, so it didn’t drive glass bottles from the nation’s doorsteps as predicted. But the same technology that produced the Sealcone, using paraffined spruce fiber, was utilized by the makers of Tulip cups. When that firm merged with Lily Cup in 1929, it gave me a “straight-sided” cup that was much more rigid and adaptable to other container uses. It allowed me to go after sales to coffee vendors and cottage cheese packers. The merger of Lily and Tulip was wonderful, a big step forward. The year’s most notorious event, however, took the entire country several giant steps backward. It was the stock market crash, which ushered in the Great Depression.
My father was one of the large losers in the economic collapse. After he had given up his position in New York in 1923 and returned to Chicago, taking a demotion to please my mother, he began working out his frustrations by speculating in real estate. That was probably the fastest-building bubble in the whole inflation-bloated country. Newspapers and magazines in the late twenties were full of advertisements for correspondence courses that were guaranteed to help you get rich quick in real estate. My father didn’t need to take any of those courses. He owned property scattered all over northeastern Illinois. I remember that he bought a corner lot on Madison Street in Oak Park one month and sold it to an automobile dealership the following month at a handsome profit. The real astonisher, however, was a lot he bought in Berwyn for $6,000 and sold a short time later for $18,000!
Father seemed to have a Midas touch when it came to picking property. He was so busy pyramiding his landholdings, though, that he somehow failed to see—as we all failed to see—whatever warnings there might have been of the impending crash. When the market collapsed, he was crushed beneath a pile of deeds he could not sell. The land they described was worth less than he owed. This was an unbearable situation for a man of my father’s principled conservatism. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1930. He had worried himself to death. On his desk the day he died were two pieces of paper—his last paycheck from the telegraph company and a garnishment notice for the entire amount of his wages.
Another piece of paper discovered among my father’s effects was a yellowed document dated 1906. It was a phrenologist’s report of a reading he had done on the bumps of the head of Raymond A. Kroc, aged four. He had predicted that I would become a chef or work in some branch of food service. I was amazed at the prognostication; after all I was in a food service–related business and felt a real affinity for kitchens. Little did I know how much more accurate that old boy’s prophesy would eventually prove to be.
In 1930 I made a sale that not only gave Lily Tulip Cup Company a big boost in volume but also gave me an insight into a new direction for paper cup distribution. I was selling our little pleated “souffle” cups to the Walgreen Drug Company, a Chicago firm that was just starting a period of tremendous expansion. They used these cups for serving sauces at their soda fountains. Observing the traffic at these soda fountains at noon, I perceived what I considered to be a golden opportunity. If they had our new Lily Tulip cups, they could sell malts and soft drinks “to go” to the overflow crowds. The Walgreen headquarters was at Forty-third Street and Bowen Avenue at that time, and there was a company drugstore just down the street. I presented my pitch to the food service man, a chap named McNamarra. He shook his head and threw up his hands at my suggestion.
“You’re crazy, or else you think I am,” he protested. “I get the same fifteen cents for a malted if it’s drunk at the counter, so why the hell should I pay a cent and a half for your cup and earn less?”
“You would increase your volume,” I argued. “You could have a special area at the counter where you would sell these things, put covers on them, and take them and the same vanilla wafers or crackers you serve with them at the fountain and drop them in a bag to take out.”
Mac’s face got redder than usual at that and he rolled his eyes toward heaven as if pleading to be delivered from this madman. “Listen, how can I possibly make a profit if I go to this extra expense? Then you want me to waste my clerk’s time putting covers on drinks and stuffing them in bags? You are dreaming.”
One day I said, “Mac, the only way in this world that you can increase your soda fountain volume is to sell to people who don’t take up a stool. Look, I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I will give you 200 or 300 containers with covers, however many you need to try this for a month in your store down the street. Now most of your takeout customers will be Walgreen employees from headquarters here, and you can conduct your own marketing survey on them and see how they like it. You get the cups free, so it’s not going to cost you anything to try it.”
Finally he agreed. I brought him the cups, and we set the thing up at one end of the soda fountain. It was a big success from the first day. It wasn’t long before McNamarra was more excited about the idea of takeouts than I was. We went in to see Fred Stoll, the Walgreen purchasing agent, and set up what was to be a highly satisfactory arrangement for both of us. The best part of it for me personally was that every time I saw a new Walgreen’s store going up it meant new business. This sort of multiplication was clearly the way to go. I spent less and less time chasing pushcart vendors around the West Side and more time cultivating large accounts where big turnover would automatically winch in sales in the thousands and hundreds of thousands. I went after Beatrice Creamery, Swift, Armour, and big plants with in-factory food service systems such as U.S. Steel. I sold them all, and my success brought me more territory to cover and more possibilities.
One day an order was sent down from Lily Tulip’s headquarters in New York that because of the depression everyone was obliged to take a ten percent pay cut. In addition, because prices had dropped on gas, oil, and tires, all car allowances would be cut from fifty dollars a month to thirty dollars.
I was then sales manager and John Clark called me into his office to give me the news.
“Close the door, Ray, I want to talk privately with you,” he said. Then he told me how much he appreciated my hard work, how well the company thought of my production, but I would have to take a salary and expense cut. It applied to everyone, across the board.
This was a real blow. It wasn’t the reduction in salary that bothered me, but the affront to my ego. How could they treat the best salesman they had in this arbitrary fashion? I knew how much money I was making for them, depression or not, and I felt cold fury rising in me. I looked at him for a long minute, and then I said, very quietly, “Well, I’m sorry, but I can’t accept that.”
“Ray, you have no alternative.”
Now, when I get excited or agitated, my voice goes up in register and in volume. I was really agitated now.
“The hell I don’t have an alternative,” I yelled. “I’m quittin’. I’m giving two weeks’ notice right now, and if you want me to leave today, I’ll leave today.”
Mr. Clark was shaken by my outburst, but he managed to keep his voice fairly steady. “Come on now, Ray. Calm down. You’re not going to leave and you know it. This is too big a part of your life. It is your life. You belong here with your company and your men.”
I tried to control my temper. “I know it’s my life…” I started; then my voice went up again, “But goddammit, I’m not going to hold still for this. When times were good I got little enough in the way of rewards.…” Now I was shouting again. “Unacceptable. This is unacceptable, that I be put on the same basis with some of the people who are cost problems to the corporation. Those people—you know who they are—they’re part of the overhead in this company. I’m part of the creative. I bring in the money, and I’m not gonna put myself in the same category with them!”
“Ray, listen a minute. I’m taking a cut myself.”
“Take it. That’s your prerogative. Take it, brother, but I won’t accept it. I will not!”
I knew he must have been squirming inside, imagining the sound of our voices carrying through the walls to the horrified secretaries and clerks in the outer office. But I didn’t give a damn, and the more he tried to soothe me and assure me that the policy was designed to provide the greatest good for the greatest number, to protect all our jobs while times were bad, the madder I got. The capper was when he said that after I thought it over I would understand that it was the only fair way to handle it.
“I can understand it, perfectly,” I said as I stood up to walk out of the office. “But I refuse to accept it. This company has already squeezed me out of pennies. Now, the minute things get a little tough, I’m supposed to sacrifice dollars. Well, I’m not doing it. You can have your damned job with its ten percent pay cut. I’m quittin’ and that’s that.”
When I left the office that day, I took my sample case with me. I said nothing to my wife about what had occurred. I knew how upset she would be if she learned I had quit my job. To her, what I had done would be indefensible. I’m hotheaded and proud, and I felt my action was justified. I was a little frightened about my future, but I concealed it and acted as though nothing had happened.
Each morning I left home at the usual time, carrying my sample case. I would ride the elevated train to a corner in the Loop where there was an automat I used as a headquarters for reading through want ads over a cup of coffee. Then I’d set out on the day’s round of job interviews.
I was looking for work that offered something more than money, something I could really get involved in. But there were no jobs of any kind, it seemed. There were a dozen or more men for every opportunity, if one can stretch that word to cover the most mundane tasks. I felt some of the starch begin to seep out of me after three or four days, but I was determined that I would never go back to Lily Tulip hat in hand. After about the fourth day of this, when I went home, my wife greeted me with a look that would have withered crabgrass.
“Where have you been?” she demanded.
“What do you mean, where have I been?”
“Mr. Clark called here. He wants to know where you are.”
“Where am I?”
“Ray, don’t be funny. Something’s fishy here. I told him you are going in every morning, but he said he hasn’t seen you for the last four days. Don’t you go into the office every morning? What are you doing? What’s going on?”
I hemmed and hawed about taking some “future orders,” but I wasn’t very convincing.
“Well, Mr. Clark said he wants to see you first thing in the morning,” she said. “You will be there, won’t you?”
I felt trapped. I hated being put on the defensive. I walked away, but she kept after me like the determined Scot she was, telling me to answer her. So I whirled around and let her have it.
“I can’t take those cheapskates down there any more,” I blurted. “I’m quittin’!”
Zingo! Her jaw dropped. Her eyes widened. Then she really lit into me. I was betraying her and our daughter. My pride was jeopardizing our existence. She stormed on about my foolishness, how desperate times were, how difficult it was for anyone to find a job (I knew that!). But I had taken my stand. I wasn’t going to back down, regardless. I couldn’t. Everything in me resisted it.
“Ethel, honey,” I said soothingly, “don’t worry. I’ll find something. We’ll get by. I’ll go back to playing the piano if I have to.”
That was the wrong thing to say. She had spent too many nights alone while I was off playing piano someplace. I was afraid she was going to go into hysterics, so I agreed to go in and see John Clark the next morning.
When I walked into his office, Clark looked at me with alarm and shouted, “Where have you been?”
“I’ve been out looking for another job. I told you, I am not going to stay here.”
“Oh, come on, Ray. Close the door. Sit down. You can’t leave here. This is where you belong. Admit it. You love your work and you know it.”
“Yes, I do know it. But I can’t put up with the kind of treatment I’m getting. I simply will not stand for it.”
“This is only a temporary thing, Ray, just until times get better. Can you afford to be so independent?”
“According to my wife, I can’t. But I am. I take the cut as an insult, and I’m not going to be insulted.”
He walked to the window and looked out, hands shoved into his pockets, and was silent for several minutes. Finally, he turned to me and said, “Okay. Give me a couple of days to see what I can work out. Do your job as though nothing had happened. I’ll let you know in two or three days.”
“That’s fine with me. Two or three days.”
Late in the afternoon of the third day, he called me in again.
“Close the door and sit down,” he said. “Now, Ray, this is absolutely confidential. Here’s what we’ll do. I’ve made arrangements for you to get a special expense account that will make up for the ten percent salary cut. It will include the payment balance on your car of $20 a month. Now … will you stay?”
“Thank you very much,” I said. “On that basis I’ll stay.”
I felt several inches taller when I left that office. I’d won! This was going to be a fine prize to lay at Ethel’s feet.
Of course, the implication of the whole affair was that I would have to work harder than ever and produce more sales for the company. I did it gladly. Clark never told me so, but I knew as time went on that he was well aware that he had made a good deal. We had other run-ins from time to time, usually because of my insistence on protecting my customers. Most of these people trusted me enough that when I went into their stores, they’d simply wave and smile and go on waiting on customers. I would go to their stockrooms and see what their supply of paper cups was like. If they needed more, I’d order them. For the big-volume customers, I made certain they didn’t lose by dealing with me instead of a competitor.
I’d tell them, “Look, I think you’d better stock up on paper cups. I believe there’s going to be a price increase. I have nothing official, of course, or I wouldn’t be able to tell you about it. But there’s something in the wind, and I think your prices are going to be going up.”
When Clark found out about that, he was madder than a hornet. But it didn’t cost Lily Tulip anything. They had warehouses full of cups made at the existing prices, and it certainly built goodwill among my customers.
I had about fifteen salesmen working for me then, and we had a fine spirit of enthusiasm percolating among us. After work we would get together and talk shop, batting around ideas about how to sell more paper cups. That was fun. I loved to see one of these young fellows catch hold and grow in his job. It was the most rewarding thing I’d ever experienced. I wasn’t much older than any of them, and some were older than me. But I felt like a father to them.
It got to the point in the office that I was generating too much business, too much paperwork, to be handled by the clerical pool, so Mr. Clark told me I should hire a secretary.
“I suppose you’re right,” I said. “But I want a male secretary.”
“You what?”
“I want a man. He might cost a little more at first, but if he’s any good at all, I’ll have him doing a lot of sales work in addition to administrative things. I have nothing against having a pretty girl around, but the job I have in mind would be much better handled by a man.”
That set off another series of arguments and closed-door sessions. But finally I won my point. A young fellow named Marshall Reed came in off the street one day looking for a job. He’d gone to business school in California and had come to Chicago hoping to get work at a newspaper. That didn’t pan out, so he wandered into our office, and he was sent to me because the people out front knew that I was getting ready to place a classified ad for a male secretary. I liked Reed because he was honest and leveled with me from the start.
“I can type 60 words a minute and take shorthand at 120 words a minute,” he told me solemnly, “but this is my first experience outside of school. I don’t know anything about your business.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I’ll explain what I’m doing as we go along. If you have any questions, just ask me.”
It wasn’t long before he was a real working member of my team. My decision to hire a male secretary paid off when I was hospitalized for a gall bladder operation and later for a goiter operation. Marshall worked between our office and my hospital room, and we kept things humming as briskly as when I was in the office every morning.
We were doing well despite the depression. I had bought a Buick automobile, which I got secondhand for about the same price I would have had to pay for a new Model-A Ford, and I shined it up until it looked like it had just rolled out of the factory. Ethel’s Scotch thrift and my Bohemian prudence meshed well, and our savings grew steadily. We were able to afford a live-in maid now, a girl we hired for $4 a week plus room and board. We treated her like part of the family.
I took care not to be ostentatious (I detest snobs), but my style kind of dazzled my staff at the office. They were eager to follow my examples. I stressed the importance of making a good appearance, wearing a nicely pressed suit, well-polished shoes, hair combed, and nails cleaned. “Look sharp and act sharp,” I told them. “The first thing you have to sell is yourself. When you do that, it will be easy to sell paper cups.” I also counseled them on handling money, encouraging them to spend wisely and save some for a rainy day.
One morning as I was sending the boys out for a day of selling, I got a call that I was to report to Mr. Clark’s office. When I walked in he looked at me darkly, ignoring my friendly greeting.
“Close the door, Ray, I have a very serious matter to discuss with you.”
When I was seated, he leaned back in his chair and glared at me over tented fingertips.
“I hear that you’ve been telling your salesmen how to make money on their expense accounts.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I have.”
“Get out!” he exploded. “Get out of here and stay out!”
I nodded and walked carefully to the door. I put my hand on the knob and turned slowly to face him. It was deathly still, and I think he was feeling shocked at his own abruptness.
Our eyes locked and I said, “May I say something?”
He nodded grimly.
“Here is exactly what I told my men: Each of you gets a certain amount per diem for your expenses on the road. You get so much for a room, so much for travel, and so much for food. Instead of staying in a room with a bath, take a walk down the hall. You’ll be just as clean, and you’ll save some money. When you take the train, get an upper berth, you’ll sleep just as well as in a lower and it will cost you less. Don’t eat breakfast in the fancy hotel restaurant, go to the YMCA cafeteria. Have prunes and oatmeal; it’s filling and it’s good for you; it keeps you being a regular guy.”
By this time, Mr. Clark was grinning in embarrassed relief. He couldn’t say anything. He just turned his palms up and waved me out. I walked away feeling tall again, although I had half a notion to quit over his unjust accusation.
My battles with the boss were beginning to get me down, and I might have told him to go to hell once and for all if I hadn’t been having so much fun selling. There were interesting developments popping up all over. An engineer from Sterling, Illinois, named Earl Prince had a coal and ice business he was phasing out, and he was building little castles in towns all around Illinois in partnership with a boyhood buddy of his named Walter Fredenhagen. They called them Prince Castle ice cream parlors, and they sold cones and bulk ice cream and a few sundaes, for which they bought paper cups from me. I kept my eye on them, I thought their operation had a lot of promise.
Over in Battle Creek, Michigan, I had a customer named Ralph Sullivan who had put a dairy bar up in front of his creamery, and he had invented a drink that was pulling in an astounding business. Ralph had come up with the idea of reducing the butterfat content in a milk shake by making it with frozen milk. The traditional method of making a shake was to put eight ounces of milk into a metal container, drop in two small scoops of ice cream, add flavoring, and put the concoction onto a spindle mixer. Ralph’s formula was to take regular milk, add a stabilizer, sugar, cornstarch, and a bit of vanilla flavoring and freeze it. The result was ice milk. He would put four ounces of milk in a metal container, drop in four scoops of this ice milk, and finish it off in the traditional way. The result was a much colder, much more viscous drink, and people loved it. The lines around his store in the summertime were nothing less than amazing. This ice-milk shake had a lot of advantages over regular milk shakes. Instead of being a thin, semicool drink, it was thick and very cold. Since it had substantially less butterfat, it would be digested more easily, or as we say in the food service business, it wore better: People didn’t go around belching and burping for half an hour after drinking one. I was selling Ralph Sullivan a lot of paper cups. This started in about 1932, and it kept growing and growing until I was selling him 100,000 sixteen-ounce cups at a time.
Walter Fredenhagen was running the Prince Castles in my area from his office in Naperville. I’d never met Earl Prince. But I started working on Walter, trying to talk him into looking at Ralph Sullivan’s operation.
“Ray, you are a nice guy, and I like you. But I do not want to get into the milk shake racket,” he said. “We do a nice clean ice cream trade here, and the last thing I want is a big clutter of milk bottles to handle. It’s too messy.”
“Walter, I am amazed that a forward-looking guy like you who keeps himself informed about the dairy business can be ignorant of the latest developments,” I said. “Now they are making a milk dispenser that takes a five-gallon can and keeps it refrigerated. You draw the milk from a spigot just like draught beer. You can make the ice milk in your plant right here in Naperville. It’s cheaper than making ice cream, and you’ll see profits you never dreamed possible.”
At last, one day, Walter talked it over with Earl Prince, and they agreed to drive into Chicago and meet me. Then I’d drive them over to Battle Creek. We would return that same evening. I liked Earl immediately. He was a very plain-spoken, straight-forward guy. In later years the girls in my office would laugh about his frugality. Here was this highly successful, wealthy man who wore a musty old hat and somewhat seedy looking clothes. He could afford to take the entire staff out to lunch at the Pump Room, but he steadfastly refused to pay the prices at any Chicago restaurant. Instead, he’d send out for a peanut butter sandwich. I never knocked his frugality, of course; I respected it although he may have carried it to extremes.
Both Earl and Walter had their eyes opened on that trip to Battle Creek. They were sold on the frozen milk shake and wanted to start with their own version immediately. The whole trip back to Chicago was spent planning for the new operation with the shake that Earl announced he was going to call the “One-in-a-Million.” As they chattered on about it, I waited for my opportunity to put in an idea of my own.
“It sounds great,” I said at last, “but there is one thing I want you to do.”
“What is it?” asked Earl expansively.
“I want you to charge twelve cents for this drink instead of a dime.”
“Huh?” I could tell that both of them were genuinely flabbergasted.
“That’s right. Sell it for twelve cents. You’ll still be giving people a hell of a value, and it will actually increase interest and sales.”
“Ray, I respect your ability as a salesman,” Walter said gently. “But obviously you are out of touch with the retail end. People just don’t want to be bothered with extra change, counting pennies, you see? It is a big inconvenience for a cashier, too. So forget it.”
That taken care of, they were prepared to go on talking about other matters in setting up “One-in-a-Million.” But I kept insisting on the twelve-cent price, and it caused a pretty heated discussion. Finally Earl turned around to Walter and said, “Son of a bitch, I am going to teach this guy a lesson! I’m going to sell it for twelve cents in our first store and let him watch the thing fall on its face. Then, when we get it perfected, we can go into all the stores and sell it for a dime.” Walter didn’t answer. I think I’d worn them out.
The record books of Prince Castles show that they did indeed start selling the “One-in-a-Million” at twelve cents. They never reduced the price. It took off like a barn fire. Earl Prince was not unhappy that he failed to teach me a lesson, either. I sold him five million sixteen-ounce cups that first year, so by adding on the two cents as I insisted, he made an extra $100,000.
That kind of volume made Earl Prince’s creative juices start flowing. Prince Castle mixed shakes ahead and kept the sinks full of metal containers being rinsed. During busy periods, it was almost impossible to keep up with the demand for metal cans. Earl invented a collar made from the upper half of a metal shake can. The cylinder had been compressed or tapered at the bottom, and he took a sixteen-ounce paper cup and fitted the metal ring on top of it. The tapered part extended down into the paper cup like a sleeve. The upper portion sat on the rim of the cup, extending up to make the whole thing exactly the same height as a regular metal can—six and seven-eighths inches. He demonstrated it to me by putting together a “One-in-a-Million” shake in a paper cup with the metal collar and stuck it on the mixer. It worked!
I needed no further demonstration. It all fell into place in my mind. It was sensational for sure. Not many days later, we had a supply of metal sleeves at the Lily Tulip office in Chicago, and I demonstrated the idea for John Clark and the other company executives. They loved it, especially when I showed them how I intended to merchandise it to owners of dairy bars and soda fountains. I would go into a place and explain how I could save them some money with these metal sleeves for their Lily Tulip cups. I would buy ten milk shakes—ten metal cans full—and pour them out for people as I talked about how tasty and refreshing and wholesome this drink was. I’d make the waitress leave the metal cans standing on the counter while we finished off our drinks. All this time, of course, the residue was melting in the metal cans. When we finished, I’d grab a sixteen-ounce cup from my sample case and proceed to drain each metal can into it. The result was another full cup of milk shake! In practice that rarely failed to convince the owner. From then on, he used metal sleeves, and Lily Tulip cups—no more metal cans.
This new method stepped up Prince Castles’ sales volume so much that their single-spindle Hamilton Beach mixers could no longer handle it. The “One-in-a-Million” was a heavier drink to begin with, and when the mixers were run continuously they simply burned out. That situation is what inspired Earl Prince to invent the Multimixer. At first this machine had six spindles arranged around the central pedestal stand and the top could be rotated to take the drinks off. But that resulted in too many dropped drinks and other minor disasters, so the top was made stationary and the spindles reduced to five. This machine was powered by a one-third horsepower, industrial-type electric motor with direct drive. There were no carbon brushes to wear out. You could mix concrete with the damn thing if you had to. This was the invention that really made big volume milk shake production possible, and it changed the course of my life.
After Earl had the Multimixer in production, I took one of the machines down to the Lily Tulip office and held another demonstration. John Clark was knocked cold by it, and we got busy and signed a contract that made Sanitary Cup and Service Corporation the exclusive distributor of the Multimixer. I felt like Lindbergh and Admiral Perry all rolled into one—a real hero.
Strangely enough, however, the Lily Tulip headquarters in New York wanted no part of it. In fact, they complained that they had been getting calls from customers in other parts of the country wanting to know about metal milk shake cup sleeves and “Multiple Mixers” or some such thing, and they declared that they were not about to become jobbers for some mixer maker in the Midwest. They were manufacturers of paper cups, and that is what they intended to remain. I could scarcely believe it. I knew we had barely dented the potential market for Multimixers.
Earl Prince proposed that I leave Lily Tulip and go into business with him. I would market the inventions he came up with, starting with the Multimixer. I’d be the sole agent for Multimixer in the country. He’d manufacture the things, I’d handle the accounts receivable, and we’d split the profits. It sounded very tempting. I was getting more and more fed up with Lily Tulip. I was about to lose one of my biggest accounts, Walgreens, the people I had created a tremendous amount of business for and to whom I was selling five million cups a year. Fred Stoll told me in strictest confidence that a former Walgreen executive who had a lot of pull in the top offices of the company had gone into the paper cup business with a competitor of mine, and he was going to be given all of the Walgreen trade. The rationale would be that this competitor was selling for five percent under my price. I explained this to John Clark and tried to get him to go along with offering Walgreens a price break—after all, they paid their bills on time and there was promotion value in having a big company like that use your product. But all I got was a tongue lashing. He said I was no longer a salesman; my customers were selling me! I was smoldering after that.
Ethel was incredulous at the idea that I would give up my position at Lily Tulip and go off on a flyer like this. We had just moved into a fine home in a project named Scarsdale in Arlington Heights, northwest of Chicago. We were extremely comfortable there. Ethel loved it, and she felt threatened by this proposal. “You are risking your whole future if you do this, Ray,” she said. “You are thirty-five years old, and you are going to start all over again as if you were twenty? This Multimixer seems good now, but what if it turns out to be just a fad and fails?”
“You just have to trust my instincts,” I said. “I am positive this is going to be a winner. Besides, Earl will come up with a lot of other marketable ideas. This is just the beginning. I want you to help me; come down and work in the office for me and together we will make it a terrific business.”
“I will do no such thing.”
“But Ethel. I need your help. You know I can’t afford to hire someone, and it would be good for you, for both of us. Please?”
She absolutely refused to help. I’m sure she felt justified, but I felt betrayed. I just couldn’t believe she’d let me down like that. She wouldn’t even agree to work part-time or for a limited period, until I got the business going. That was when I began to understand the meaning of the word estrangement. It is a terrible feeling, and once it appears, it grows like dry rot.
My disappointment with Ethel did not deter me, though. When I have my mind made up about a business deal, that’s it. I was going to move ahead regardless. However, I had not even considered the kind of problems I would encounter with Mr. John Clark when I tried to extricate myself from Lily Tulip Cup. This time, I closed the door to his office without being told. He looked at me owlishly and said, “Yes?”
“J.A., I am going to resign. I am going to be the exclusive sales agent for the Multimixer. That’s good for you because it gets me out of your hair, and I am going to sell a hell of a lot of paper cups for you when I start putting Multimixers in stores all over the country.”
“You can’t do that, Ray,” he said, as if he were talking to a child and patiently explaining some important but obvious thing. You do not have the Multimixer contract. Sanitary Cup and Service Corporation has it.”
“Well, what the hell, you can give it up. You’ve told me repeatedly that you are not going to get into Multimixer sales yourselves. And you know that what I said is true: I am going to sell a good many million paper cups for you.”
“You don’t understand. The Coue brothers would never give it up. You don’t know how they operate.”
“Listen, they have to!” I brought this thing in here in the first place out of loyalty to you and to the Coues and the company. I didn’t have to do that. If you were using it, that would be one thing, but the company doesn’t want it. Give it back to me. You can’t put a thing like this on the shelf, it won’t sit there, it’s too big!”
I was controlling myself as well as I could, but Clark could see that I was getting ready to blow a gasket, so he said, “Well, let me talk to them and see what we can work out.”
What he worked out was a deal in which I got the Multimixer contract, and Sanitary Cup got sixty percent of my new company, which I named Prince Castle Sales. It was a satanic setup, but I didn’t see that then. It was the only way out, it seemed, and I had to take it. And, at any rate, the corporation would put up $6,000 of the $10,000 capital I needed to get started, so it didn’t seem such a big handicap. But it was soon to become an anchor chained around my neck.