“It put me in the big world.”Ī few years later, he starred in and filmed another commercial for the Chop-O-Matic - another product invented by his father. “TV made the way for me,” Popeil told Inc.com magazine in 2009. He bought whatever time he could find cheaply on local television stations and sales soared. When a friend told him that he could produce a commercial for about $500 at a Tampa, Fla., television station, Popeil made a two-minute spot in the mid-1950s for the Ronco Spray Gun, a high-pressure nozzle that was one of the few products he sold that he did not help create. He claimed he cleared $1,000 a week, a fortune in the 1950s, and did it by talking 10 to 12 hours a day, almost nonstop. “There were secretaries who would take their lunch break at Woolworth’s to watch him because he was so good-looking.”Īfter dropping out of the University of Illinois after 18 months, Popeil worked the fair circuit. “He was mesmerizing,” Mel Korey, his first business partner, told the New Yorker in 2000. “I had lived for 16 years in a home without love, and now I had finally found a form of affection and a human connection through sales.”Īs a teen out on his own, Popeil peddled wares in the flagship Woolworth’s downtown, doing as many as six demonstrations in an hour.
“Through sales I could escape from poverty and the miserable existence I had with my grandparents,” Popeil wrote in his autobiography. On Chicago’s gritty Maxwell Street, Popeil turned to selling his father’s inventions and found he had an affinity for it. He also came up with such gadgets as the original Veg-O-Matic and Pocket Fisherman. The father he barely knew was Samuel Popeil, a descendant of sidewalk hustlers and manufacturer of kitchenware. In Chicago, Popeil began discovering his family heritage while working weekends at Popeil Brothers, founded by his father and an uncle in 1939.
His grandparents fought constantly and his grandfather was mean, Popeil later said. His paternal grandparents claimed the brothers when Ron was about 7, and they lived with an aunt in Florida before moving to Chicago with their grandparents when Popeil was 13.īut his childhood remained unhappy. Popeil and his older brother spent their early years at a boarding school in upstate New York.
It wasn’t very homey,” he said more than once. When he was 3, his parents divorced and essentially abandoned him. Ronald Martin Popeil was born May 3, 1935, in the Bronx. Without Popeil, “there’d be no home shopping channels, no ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up’ Medic Alert gadgets, no Clapper,” John Mingo, editor of “The Whole Pop Catalog” told USA Today in 1993.
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