ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 13, 1997 TAG: 9704140120
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WEST CHESTER, PA.
SOURCE: TED ANTHONY ASSOCIATED PRESS
After five decades, you would you think this master pitchman would have run out of ideas. But wait - there's more!|
For once, he is not on TV when he says it, that line usually belted out long after midnight on upper cable channels. It is, really, Ron Popeil's mantra. ``LOOK at this!'' he resonates. ``Isn't this aMAZing?!''
He's in a sweatsuit backstage at QVC, the cable home-shopping network, prepping for a 12-minute spot to unveil his newest innovation. But his mind is fixated momentarily on a previous Popeil product: GLH-9, better known as hair in a can.
Simply discussing it doesn't do. He backs up, pate advancing upon a visitor's nose, creating a one-person audience. And though his bald spot has been showcased repeatedly on the airwaves in recent years, the hovering head appears highly hirsute.
``See?'' Ron Popeil says, grinning maniacally. ``See?!!''
That face. That voice. Those cacophonous consonants. Everybody recognizes them, but it usually takes one product to trigger name recognition. Veg-O-Matic, perhaps, or Mr. Microphone. Food dehydrator. Smokeless ashtray. Or the most Popeilian of all: Pocket Fisherman.
For much of five decades, this caffeinated amalgam of Edison, Barnum and Horatio Alger - and the company he christened after himself, Ronco - has made the arenas of TV and sales more interesting places to visit.
Today, at the intersection of ingenuity, hucksterism and celebrity, Ronald M. Popeil, 62, is still directing the traffic.
He's a barker (``Buy two or three - they REally DO make GREAT gifts.''). An inventor (an ``innovator,'' he says). A consummate businessman (he clawed back from bankruptcy and is now selling his company for $25 million). Even a pop song (``Mr. Popeil,'' 1985, by Weird Al Yankovic). And he slaps his own name on every product.
But wait - there's more.
His food dehydrator introduced beef jerky to the Zeitgeist. He has gotten generations of couch potatoes to buy everything from tapeless tape measures to bottle and jar cutters to rhinestone and stud setters. And he's back with his pasta maker, except now it makes sausage as well.
Never veering from the basic, homespun product demonstrations he honed in Chicago flea markets and dime stores in the 1950s, Popeil today is nothing less than the strand connecting an American archetype, the 19th-century county fair salesman, with direct-response TV advertising and the infomercial itself.
His split personality helps him pull this off.
One is a dedicated, even obsessive, inventor and tinkerer. ``I never let up,'' that one says. ``I'm always trying to make it better. And I can't put my name on something I don't believe in.''
The other, of course, is a salesman. ``People,'' that one says, ``always want a bargain.''
Before he ever stood before a camera, Ron Popeil did what he does best - in person. He won over crowds in the open-air markets of Chicago's Maxwell Street and later at Woolworth's and on the county-fair circuit.
He'd rise before dawn, procure bushels of cabbages, potatoes, radishes and carrots and set up his table. Barking from atop a crate, he diced and sliced vegetables and nipped and tucked his routine. And people bought; some weeks he made $500.
Then he took to TV to sell, first, the Ronco Spray Gun - an invention of his late father, Sam Popeil, a distant man but a near-genius as well. Some of the son's greatest sales successes - the Chop-O-Matic and the Pocket Fisherman among them - would come from his father's inspirations.
Though they were never close - ``He never told me he loved me,'' Popeil says coldly - their mutual affection for making money and marketing ingenuity kept them intertwined. Father's products and son's slick shtick were perfect together.
``The only tears you'll shed are tears of joy,'' Popeil spieled in the early 1960s about the Veg-O-Matic's onion-cutting proclivities.
Through the 1960s, Popeil evolved from salesman into innovator and, in 1969, Ronco went public.
The 1970s, the peak of Ronco Teleproducts Inc., brought Popeil to the apex of minor gadgetry. By this time, he was innovating or finding ways to improve most items himself. Every day, it seemed, he was filling needs that didn't exist.
The commercials were as memorable as the products.
The cordless Mr. Microphone featured a curly-haired Willie Aames lookalike in a convertible booming his pickup line: ``Hey, good looking, we'll be back to pick YOU up later!''
There was the odd misstep. Cellutrol didn't really get rid of cellulite; the outside part of the Inside-Outside Window Washer tended to plummet to the ground. But somehow, Popeil saw then - and still sees today - all pieces of the cultural collage.
Popeil knows his approach can be perceived as kitschy. To him, it's simply more publicity; he loved Dan Aykroyd's ``Bass-O-Matic'' parody on ``Saturday Night Live'' in 1976 and allows filmmakers to use Ronco advertising however they see fit.
And really, when you've sold more than $1 billion worth of product in your career, who's getting the last laugh?
LENGTH: Medium: 100 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Ron Popeil demonstrates his food dehydrator on QVC,by CNBthe home-shopping cable channel. With him is the show host, Jill
Bauer. color.