THE NAME’S FAMILIAR

You know the names. Here’s a look at the people behind them.

POP WARNER

In early 1929, a factory in a seedy section of Philadelphia enlisted Joseph J. Tomlin to do something about the teen vandalism it was experiencing. Within its first month of operation, 100 of its windows had been broken by juvenile delinquents who hung out in an adjacent lot and threw rocks for fun. Other factories in Philadelphia had the same problem, so Tomlin decided to get the owners together to fund a youth football league, hoping to keep those kids occupied (as well as provide them a place to channel all that aggressive energy). It worked. By fall 1929, the four-team Junior Football Conference hit the gridiron, and by 1933 it had expanded to 16 teams. That same year, veteran college football coach Glenn “Pop” Warner moved to Philadelphia to take a job as head coach at Temple University. Tomlin met Warner and asked him to speak at a JFC training clinic. On the day of the clinic, in April 1934, a nasty storm hit Philadelphia, and out of the dozen or so coaches that Tomlin had asked to speak, only Warner showed up. He lectured the 800 young football players who attended (and answered all their questions) for two hours. At the end of the night, Tomlin—following a vote by the players—renamed the league, changing it from the Junior Football Conference to the Pop Warner Conference. By the end of the decade, more than 150 teams were competing in the Pop Warner league, and it soon spread across the country as the “Little League” of football.

THOMAS AND NORMAN HALL

Brothers Thomas and Norman Hall were born in the 1870s to a Lancashire, England, milling family, but they went into business for themselves in 1893, manufacturing and selling jam under the name State Confectionery Works, and later just “Hall Brothers.” They were cooking so much of the fruit and sticky-sweet concoctions that by the turn of the century they’d added a line of “boiled sweets”—fruit-and-spice flavored candies made from slow-cooking sugary syrups in copper pots and letting them cool until they hardened. By 1924 those had became profitable, and they dropped jam altogether to focus on hard candies. Two years later, Thomas Hall retired, leaving Norman Hall in charge of the company, and almost immediately he developed a “medicated sweet” to soothe dry and sore throats and coughs, a hard candy flavored with a blend he called “Mentho-lyptus,” which combined menthol and eucalyptus extract. These “cough drops,” as they were called, remained a regional favorite in Lancashire until the mid-1960s, when pharmaceutical company Warner-Lambert acquired Hall Brothers solely to set up a medicated sweets division. By 1975 about half of all cough drops sold worldwide were Halls Cough Drops. Today, the Halls line of products accounts for 20 percent of the worldwide medicated sweets market, which technically makes it the biggest candy manufacturer in the world.

Must have taken forever: J. R. R. Tolkien typed The Lord of the Rings with two fingers.

J. D. POWER

After graduating from the prestigious Wharton Business School in the 1950s, James David Power worked for the Ford Motor Company and various advertising agencies before he decided to strike out on his own. And in 1968, he formed a market research company called J.D. Power and Associates at his kitchen table. (The only other “associates” at the time: his wife, Julie, and their three kids.) Power had important connections from his previous careers, and within two years, had signed on Toyota and Carnation as clients. What did he do? He conducted surveys about brand recognition, company perception, and customer satisfaction. He provided those services for all kinds of companies, but found a niche in 1981 with his exhaustive U.S. Automotive Customer Satisfaction Index Study. Car companies signed up (and paid) to be a part of it, both to learn about how consumers felt about their products…and because they could boast about it if they got high marks. In 1984 Subaru ran a Super Bowl commercial that highlighted its stellar performance in the J.D. Power rankings…the first of more than 300,000 car ads to do so.

FRANCESCO BERTOLLI

In 1865 Francesco Bertolli and his wife, Caterina, noticed a storefront open on the ground floor of their apartment building in the Tuscan city of Lucca, Italy. They opened a little grocery shop (today it would be called a “gourmet foods store”) selling local staples, mostly cheese, wine, olives, and, most of all, extra virgin olive oil, which Bertolli acquired from local farmers and bottled himself. Bertolli’s operation grew to be very successful, even as scores of Tuscans moved away in the explosive boom of emigration to the United States in the late 19th century. In the predominantly Italian neighborhoods that developed in major East Coast cities, particularly New York, Tuscans asked the operators of local Italian markets and delis to see if they could import Bertolli’s oil…because they couldn’t find any decent stuff (vital to traditional Italian cooking) in America. Bertolli soon shifted his business from retail olive oil sales in Italy to exporting olive oil to the United States. Bertolli’s children took over the family business in the 1890s, and “Bertolli” became synonymous with olive oil, because for decades, it was the only major brand available in the United States.

The venom from a Japanese giant hornet can dissolve human flesh.