ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, August 21, 1996 TAG: 9608210010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
Most of the time, Wheaties is merely an upright rectangular box. Just as cardboard as its counterparts, all stiffly filling grocery-store shelves like cereal soldiers.
But then come the Olympics. And after them, speculation: Will new faces grace the familiar orange box?
When the answer is yes, as it was last week, Wheaties wins a battle of the boxes, spoons down. So believe such folks as Ron Schwinnen, a used-Volvo salesman in Chicago. He doesn't particularly care for the flavor of the cereal, but he collects the boxes. Because the new ones will be distributed this week, he's preparing for his own athletic event: hitting six stores in 45 minutes.
``Not every store will have every box,'' says Schwinnen, 59. ``Of those five that are coming out, what do I have to do to get them?''
He owns upward of 400 sports-related cereal boxes. Most are Wheaties; some are rival Kellogg's Frosted Flakes and Corn Flakes, which began featuring athletes several years ago.
``To my knowledge, there are none I don't have,'' Schwinnen says. ``If there was a box I didn't have, yes, I'd pay through the nose for it.''
What gives? Why is a cold cereal so hot? What makes athletes yearn to smile at the world from the cereal aisle? Why do they encourage their agents to put in a good word at General Mills?
Not just the boxes' oranger-than-sunset color. Not the flakes inside, either; many a true collector painstakingly pulls them out by their plastic casing and hot-glues the flap shut.
Being on a box ``is glamorous and becomes more and more glamorous,'' says Bill Melton. The sports announcer and Dallas County treasurer owns several Wheaties boxes that he doesn't keep in his pantry.
``There's a mystery that goes with it. The Houston Rockets won two championships and were never on a Wheaties box,'' he says.
These days, Melton prefers other breakfast foods to cereal. But as a child, he remembers eating Wheaties while looking at the likeness of Olympic gold medalist Bob Richards. Richards, who twice won the gold in the pole vault during the 1950s, was the first athlete on the front of the Wheaties box. But he might not be the best person to ask about its glamour.
``When I signed with Wheaties, I didn't care anything about the box,'' says Richards, who now lives in Waco, Texas. ``I cared about the cause - getting kids into sports and living clean.''
In the 1930s and early '40s, Wheaties symbolized sports, sponsoring radio spots during athletic events. But when sports became televised, the company couldn't afford sponsoring the play-by-plays. Eventually, Wheaties abandoned sports to concentrate on the children's cereal market. It began associating itself with the Mickey Mouse Club and the Lone Ranger.
But for many, Wheaties would always be the Breakfast of Champions - real champs, not fictional. So in 1956 it chose Richards from 500 candidates to re-establish an affiliation with athletics. He served as director of the Wheaties Sports Foundation, working with the President's Council on Youth Fitness and the U.S. Olympic Committee. Being on the box was only part of his contract.
``I think now it's much more important,'' says Richards, who stopped pole vaulting only a year ago. ``I'm stunned, when you go back and think Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were on the box. All along there has been this aura. ... I miss the obvious sometimes - I never quite saw it as that big a thing.''
Four years ago, Richards was named to the New York Sports Hall of Fame. As the recipients' names were called, he remembers turning to Frank Gifford and saying, ``If I ever felt like I didn't belong to a group, this was it.''
``Now I'm beginning to feel the same way about Wheaties,'' he says. ``Look at the roll call there. It's amazing. Whether or not it's commercial, they've really got something that's an image in America.''
That roll call includes Bruce Jenner, Mary Lou Retton, Pete Rose, Walter Payton, Chris Evert Lloyd, Michael Jordan, Joe Montana, Dan Marino and Cal Ripken. Wheaties has honored sports stars and national championship teams on regionally marketed packages. But until last week, only these nine and Richards have graced the front of Wheaties' nationally distributed boxes.
Now they're joined by these gold medalists: swimmers Tom Dolan and Amy Van Dyken, sprinter Michael Johnson, decathlete Dan O'Brien and the women's gymnastics team.
``They were smart to capitalize on those athletes, especially Michael Johnson,'' says Dennis Waller, a Dallas collector. ``But there's the dark side: I'm glad to see it happen, but oh, jeez. Here we go with the ordeal of buying boxes.''
That's not really a complaint. A year from now, collectors will be clamoring for the 70 boxes he plans to buy this week. He has been collecting and selling cereal boxes since 1992. Only in the past two years has the business ``exploded,'' he says.
``There's an aura, the childhood excitement of collecting,'' says Waller, who paints upscale houses when he's not wheeling and dealing for cereal boxes. ``It's one of the collections out there for the satisfaction and fun of it. My customer base is more of someone buying it to keep, not, `What am I going to make off it in three years?'''
Still, there is money to be made. Some boxes go for $50 or $100. The most Waller has spent on one was $400. Reminiscent of the ``Dewey Defeats Truman'' newspaper headline from 1948, it features the Cincinnati Bengals winning a Super Bowl that, in reality, they lost.
Oops. That box probably should have been destroyed, says Pam Becker, a spokeswoman for General Mills Inc. It was printed before Super Bowl XVI (which the San Francisco 49ers won), something that the company very rarely does anymore, she says.
``We've gotten better at our turnaround time,'' she says. ``We don't like to do it because of security.''
LENGTH: Long : 104 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: KRT. Dennis Waller has been collecting the cereal boxesby CNBsince 1992. color.