Journal of Charisma Studies

Consuming America:

Ron Popeil and the Art

Product Hucksterism

Taso G. Lagos

Article contents adopted from secondary sources. All rights reserved. © 2021

Ron Popeil was the product of a broken home who found solace and success in selling kitchen and home products to television audiences through innovative commercials. He represents that particularly American ethos of entrepreneurialism that finds expression and financial gain through adept marketing. Much of his success relied on scratching the frustrations of the average consumer while using hucksterism’s clever manipulations to entice consumers to purchase his many products. Over a five decades-long career that saw him rise from young upstart to cultural icon, Popeil displayed equal parts outstanding salesmanship and accounting naivete that blessed and cursed his rise to fame. Yet, he remains today as a symbol of hucksterism with a conscience, one that placed the ease and comfort of consumers at the heart of his money-making mission.

§ § §

A consistent focus of this Journal is the link between dysfunctional childhood upbringing and the almost pathological quest for the limelight as an ultimately unsatisfactory substitute for the lack of compassion and love by parental figures. Few charismatics fit this scenario better than Ron Popeil. He never hid his upbringing’s savagery, the deeply unstable, even disturbing domestic life as a child nor his painful, emotional schism from his biological parents. These tragic experiences seared in Popeil the foundational yearnings for fame that undergird the charismatic personality, but which cannot make-up nor entirely replace childhood dysfunction. Unlike other charismatics, Popeil openly discussed his rough boyhood and the visceral distaste he felt for his family. These sad facts were revealed on the index page of his company’s website, his autobiography, and his numerous interviews.^[1]

         “Through sales I could escape from poverty and the miserable existence I had with my grandparents,” starts his biography.^[2] Marketing became his route out of the suffering and one to which he clung with ferocious determination. Yet, he was a product of a famous huckster clan, “the first family of the American kitchen.”^[3] His father’s Pocket Fisherman reputedly “sold 35,000,000 units worldwide.”^[4] Sales provided the young Popeil a lifeline to a warmer reality, one that provided a modicum of respect and adulation, however superficial.  Pitching products on the air involved, for him, an air of narcissism, but it never appeared a guiding principle to his life’s mandate. He cared about the products he produced (despite being labeled, “overhyped schlock,” by critics^[5]), sought to create conveniences for consumers, accepted defeat when it happened, and fought the war against overwork on behalf of hassled homemakers. Over four decades beginning in 1958, he became a staple on late-night TV, and he achieved cult status; “some viewers bought products from him just because he made them.”^[6] According to journalist Bill Geist, he was the “greatest salesman in history.”^[7]  His reach stretched across the North Atlantic. It’s odd to consider a TV pitchman a figure of mass renown, yet Popeil had followers. And by the time of his death in Los Angeles on July 28, 2021, at the age of 86, he had achieved serene equanimity and exalted status in his profession. He may be the “happy” charismatic; he had fewer of the neuroses that plague such personalities.

§ § §

Ron Popeil was born in the Bronx on May 3, 1935, to Julia (Schwartz) and Samuel Popeil. He was neglected from the start; his family’s marriage ended when he was just three.^[8] “Neither of them wanted me,” he claimed in his biography, instead he was packed off to an upstate New York boarding school. “Instead of having us adopted or something like that, they just got rid of the responsibility” of parenting him and his brother by parking him in the school and later with his paternal grandparents. “’I never had a birthday party,’” he told a reporter.^[9]  He remembers cooking a potato on the curb to eat out of hunger.^[10]

        While in school the year round, neither parent ever visited, including on holidays. One weekend, he stood looking down a long straight road, hoping for a “miracle” and a car that would deliver his family to him. Finally, crushed by their absence, he sat down on the road and wept. “’That’s all I remember about boarding school.’”^[11]

        A stable force in his life was his older brother by 17 months, Jerry, who he later discovered was in fact a half-brother (from his mother’s side). Funny and seemingly undaunted by life, Jerry kept Ron entertained as an escape from their mutual misery. Not exactly a substitute for genuine parental love, but nevertheless a salve for the meager joy it brought the younger boy. Jerry helped Ron hawk kitchen products later in life, but he was too much of a free spirit and petty-minded rebel to stay focused too long at any one thing. “He passed away in his mid-forties from obesity and alcoholism.”^[12]

        At eight, without forewarning, Ron’s grandparents whisked the two boys from boarding school to their home in Miami.^[13]  “They never explained to us why our parents had stuck us in boarding school for five years,” Ron wrote, “or why we were going to live with them. We just went.”^[14] Even discussion about his parents was avoided in the grandparents’ home, Ron claimed, except to criticize his mother for “breaking up the marriage.” In one breath, however, he expressed his poignant indignation of the sorry circumstances in his life, yet in another, he was aware that his father was single and “lived in a hotel” at the time as the main reason why the two brothers could not share space with him.^[15] “We needed a family,” Popeil explained in his biography, even if it was a cruel one.^[16] His father never visited them. “I didn’t know him personally.”^[17]  Yet when asked in one interview who was his inspiration, he named his father.^[18]

        At his grandparents’ place, reality got crueler.  “As with boarding school, I have blocked almost all of the memories of my miserable life with my grandparents.”^[19] If his parents were hardly role-models for a functional domestic life, his grandparents were worse.  They constantly fought yet refused to separate – as if stubborn pride or Jewish tradition prevented them from doing so. A Polish immigrant, the grandfather was a pathetic, “mean, unhappy man” who trusted no one, never told a joke, “or laughed at one.”^[20]  Popeil remembers his grandfather tying him down in bed because the younger boy had a habit of tossing and turning while asleep.^[21]

His grandfather “never had a name as far as I was concerned.”^[22] When young Ron begged him to adopt a dog, the grandfather refused. He could hardly imagine that one day there would be a series of lectures about his creations, “’The Appeal of Popeil’” taking place at the Chicago Historical Society.^[23] Nor that he absorbed from his clan’s history lessons about selling a product.^[24]

        Ron’s only respite from an unbearable home life came from his beloved “Grandma.” She ran a busy kitchen where he fondly remembers her cooking and preparing food.  He spent much time in her kitchen, absorbing lessons in cutting onions (to come in handy when he led department stores cooking demonstrations) and getting “into the nitty-gritty of vegetables and fruits.”^[25] He credits his time in her kitchen as inspiring him with a lifelong interest and fascination with kitchen products.  Unbeknownst to him at the time, his move into this grandparents’ home laid the flagpole for his later astounding business success as a producer of inventive kitchen products. He did his best thinking in the kitchen; this was his lab and security blanket.

        At 13, his grandparents moved to Chicago. The shift meant he saw his father for the first time in many years, albeit in a relationship Ron called “distant.”^[26] Their interactions were “all business.”^[27] It also meant working with his grandparents in the “cold, dark, and dingy” Popeil Brothers factory owned by his father and uncle that produced the “Spiral Slicer” and the “Slice-A-Way” that respectively made a “potato that looked like a necklace” and sliced food easily.^[28] While other kids played on the weekend, Ron labored at the factory that his grandfather now ran. If he expected to be paid for his labor and to spend time with his father, he was gravely disappointed. His father refused to work on weekends.

        Like his time in his grandmother’s kitchen, the hours he spent at the factory were, in hindsight, stepping-stones towards his own development as a kitchen product inventor and salesman. Even as he bitterly described these bleak years, he failed to recognize the undertow of learning that was taking place. Like other charismatic personalities driven by an internal thrust to change their life’s circumstances, Popeil used the knowledge he gained in his grandmother’s kitchen and his wretched time in his family’s factory to create his own empire. But he also needed his own sanctuary, one that gave him freedom and lacked stress, but more importantly, fired up his imagination. He found in an unlikely place in Chicago.

§ § §

Maxwell Street in the Windy City has been gentrified to fit a new generation of smart shops and upscale residents. But it has a storied past. The Original Maxwell Street Market as it became known developed in the late 19th century with arriving Jewish immigrants who settled in the area, no doubt inspired by such markets in Europe. It attracted “fledgling entrepreneurs” who found willing customers and “was an economic hub for enterprising people looking to get ahead.”^[29] One such fledgling entrepreneur was Ron Popeil. The Market thrived as a multicultural setting, becoming known as the “Ellis Island of the Midwest.”^[30]

        In 1951 when Popeil stumbled upon the street, it was a glorified “flea market”: “a filthy, smelly street in a bad neighborhood.”^[31] Here capitalism was practiced in an open, shouting, buzzing manner: a veritable cornucopia of “stuff” hawks and sold – from “clothes and produce to cars and appliances.”^[32] Including stolen items (“hubcaps, steering wheels, radios,” etc.).^[33]  Customers ranged from locals to tourists, the latter coming more out of curiosity than to shop, but still they often walked away with bargains that they took home. For Ron Popeil, the Maxwell Market was heaven.

        The first 16 years of his life were desultory, brutish, and bleak. But here was a different world, one of low-rent commerce to be sure, but one where the ability to sell became the sole measure of success. And he had to join this cantankerous, smelly, joyous chorus. “The first time I went there,” he noted in his biography, The Salesman of the Century, “the proverbial light bulb when on over my head.” He saw the hucksters selling and his “mind went racing.”^[34] 

        The epiphany that Popeil experienced on Maxwell Street is to be expected. If a nasty, dysfunctional upbringing sets the charismatic personality apart from others, it is also the fertile ground from which the charismatic seeks desperate escape towards a world that offers more psychic rewards than his grim reality offers. There is a driven quality to this escape, and it is often found in fields where the charismatic experiences greater agency, or where the personal creative juices can flow. It is also a place that offers audience approval. The charismatic needs social attention; positively thrives on it as a substitute for the love never received as a youngster, but to which careers and lives are built. The popular appeal cannot ultimately replace the love never experienced growing up, but it does psychically feed the charismatic with a second-best alternative. For many charismatics, this alternative proves ultimately unsatisfactory, but for others like Popeil, it was enough. Hence the “happy charismatic” that captures an essential essence in Ron – the satisfaction that with his two hands (and throat!) he rose out of the gutter of life to achieve wealth and fame. He amassed a fortune, according to one source, “worth $200,000,000.”^[35]

        Popeil could not have known what lay ahead.  All he knew at 16 when he encountered the Maxwell Street Market was that he had to be a part of it. He had to join the other hawkers in the entertaining display. “I can do what they’re doing,” he told himself. “But I can do it better than they can.”^[36] Where did this sudden confidence come from?  From his own imagination, yet also from a relentless urge to lift him out of his misery. It’s a powerful drive; once undertaken, it is difficult to stop.  He himself summed it up well: “I had lived for sixteen years in homes without love, and now I had finally found a form of affection, and a human connection, through sales.”^[37]  Once he found the Market, his life’s path unfolded before him.  The ‘silver-tongued orator’ could show his dad that, “I didn’t need him. And that maybe he needed me.”^[38]

        He recalled the love he experienced in his grandmother’s kitchen, and he brought that quality to his dealings on Maxwell. And he had a ready source of product to hawk: from his own father’s factory. Popeil turned his distant father into his supplier, who sold him products wholesale which allowed Ron to pocket the profits. He tried it for the first time on a Sunday. “I pushed. I yelled. I hawked.”^[39] It worked, even if it meant “hurt lungs from shouting.”^[40] The psychic adulation was the mainstay, but the money pocketed was also a nice reward. He had found his calling. He would go on to the big sell the rest of his life. It says something about American capitalism that such characters find their lifelong pursuits in such a culture but are positively and financially rewarded for it.

        Everything else in Ron’s life suddenly seemed secondary. In school, he was an anonymous boy soldier in an authoritarian regime; on the weekends on Maxwell, he was a star attraction, earning more cash money than most teenagers could dream. Education could never compete with that.

        In an interview with the University of Illinois Alumni Association, Popeil described his brief time in college. He joined a fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi, where he met his future business partner, Mel Korey. He hated schoolwork. He claimed it took him “10 times longer” to read a book than his friends; reading was “a physical strain on me.”^[41] In an English class, he turned in a paper that Mel had written. His cheating did not go unnoticed, but the experience cemented his friendship with Mel that led to their business partnership in Ronco.^[42]  “Not finishing at the University,” he told his interviewer, “I regret it every day.  Every day.”^[43]  It sounds disingenuous on the surface, but the second thoughts stem from his belief that he could have been more financially successful had he stuck to college. “I would have been a great deal more successful than I am today.”^[44]

        Popeil had found his life’s mission on Maxwell, but this did not mean the work was easy. In fact, it was brutal. Other teenagers pursued less lofty activities like going to the movies and hanging out with friends; Popeil was a cog in the gear-shaft of commerce. He arrived at his stand at 5 am, set up shop with a table borrowed from a fish store (with the attending smell), and chop “fifty pounds each of onions, cabbages, carrots, and a hundred pounds of potatoes a day” until 4pm.^[45]  There were few restroom breaks and he carried all this cash on him, which presented an inviting target for thieves.^[46]  Through hot summers, freezing winters, bleak rain – Ron sold as if tomorrow would never come. He loathed the work, until he counted the proceeds at the end of the day, and the sourness vanished.

        He claimed that selling came naturally to him, a claim that could be said by many charismatics. Popeil's formative time on the old Maxwell Market was both an education and a business start. He knew he would not remain there for long; he craved to build on the sales techniques he learned from watching others on the Market, but also through his own trials and errors.  The taste he received on Maxwell Street only whetted his appetite for more. He narcissistically yearned to become “the greatest salesman of them all.”^[47] He expanded his operation to take in country and state fairs. The practice was the same, the location different.

§ § §

The competitive landscape of the United States produces great hucksters. Self-help books on how to get ahead in business had already become a staple in the 19th century, yet it was in the 20th that they entered cultural supremacy. By the 1930s, this philosophy had become an artform. Armed with armchair coaches like Dale Carnegie and the less than reputable Napoleon Hill, sales as a foundation to success sparked religious devotion to many.^[48]  Another famous self-helper, Og Mandino, writing a generation later, reputedly stated that “sales offer more opportunities to rise from poverty to wealth than any other profession.”^[49] Popeil’s own ambitions thus had cultural context; they did not arise in a vacuum.  Quite the opposite, culturally such desires were encouraged and even promoted in a market-oriented, ultra-capitalist society.

        Armed with cash and the confidence that came with it, Popeil struck out on his own life.  An argument with his grandfather that resulted in the older man slapping him led to Popeil moving out of the home. He was seventeen. He rented a studio apartment in Chicago, continued hawking at the Maxwell Market and enrolled at the University of Illinois for a year.^[50] He also moved from the street Market to Woolworth’s department store at State and Washington streets in downtown Chicago. Popeil was an independent contractor with the store, giving the company 20% of all his sales. He continued his selling prowess there, but now to a considerably more upmarket clientele.  “I was raking in $1,000 a week,” he claimed, “when the average monthly salary was about $500.”^[51]

        He savvily picked up information to boost sales.  Popeil realized, for example, that the best location for his demonstration at Woolworth’s was next to cosmetics where women congregated, his main target audience.  At country and state fairs, it was next to the women’s toilets.  Other tricks he learned:  speak to those onlookers who seemed most interested and rather than sell to those who wish to buy his products in one fell swoop, he always slowed the sale to the last few to attract a new cohort of curious shoppers. He enjoyed the rapport with customers as much as the sale; love and money in equal measure.

        With partner Mel Korey in tow, Popeil enjoyed the crowds he amassed at Woolworths and the various fairs, but he yearned for more. Why not bigger crowds? Why not a stadium full of prospective buyers, a Super Bowl of gadgetry?  All the slicing and dicing at demonstrations had taken their toll on him. Like everyone else in the 1950s, he had discovered television and its addictive hold on the American public. It was but a small step to hawk his wares via TV commercials. His first cost $550 and he flew down to a Tampa, Florida TV station to shoot the ad for the Ronco Spray Gun to wash cars and home windows. It never occurred to Popeil to use any other on-screen talent other than himself. “I knew how to announce,” he reasoned.^[52]  Besides, he was not the star, but the product.

        It was 1958 and for the next forty years, Popeil became a fixture on television advertising. He flooded a specific market, his TV ads shown 90 times and up to 240 times per week.^[53] Television lay at the heart of his cult status.  In all, he single-handedly sold $2 billion in products.^[54] Millions of American homes had or still have a Ronco product. His success became the butt of jokes and satirized on Saturday Night Live. It was not always a rosy garden of success; overexpansion in the early 1980’s led to his company bankruptcy. “’We deviated from our  normal pattern of coming up with unique merchandise,’” Popeil claimed.^[55]

        Like all hawkers, his charming flair attracted audiences, particularly women whom he targeted. He bent the stereotype of the kitchen wife, which brought solace to long-suffering women burdened by the role.  His very “masculine” presence suggested some form of equality, even though that was clearly never his intention nor one he cared about. He regarded the kitchen space for commercial exploitation.

        Television adores bright faces, and Popeil’s radiated sincerity and determination. He always knew he was “selling himself” in his commercials.^[56] The blue eyes; the wide, salt-of-the-earth cheeks and the big toothy grin became his emblems and magnets used adeptly and dexterously to prime sales (“smooth baritone, cool blue eyes and wide, magnetic mouth” the New York Times described him^[57]).  He lacked true familial love, but did he receive great dental care in its place? In an image-conscious society like America, a great set of teeth are more socially and professionally advantageous than a functional family.

        There is no doubt that his success lay also in the time of his entry into television advertising. By 1959 television had already established itself into most American homes. Movies and theater were brought into family kitchens and living rooms, and the nation could never be the same again. The commercial nature of American TV meant that advertising undergirded it both structurally but also culturally. It’s impossible to think of TV programming without the commercials that go with it; the two are usually synonymous. One only must think of the Super Bowl and its tradition of glossy ads to appreciate this blending. Even in the 1950s it became evident that some TV ads were superior to the programming they interrupted. More thought, talent, creativity, insight and sometimes even budgets went into the advertising than the TV shows themselves.  Ron’s father had pioneered hawking his wares on television.^[58]

        It is not clear whether Popeil was aware of this cultural landscape involving television, but it is obvious that he exploited it to his economic advantage. Not just in the U.S., but in Canada and the United Kingdom.^[59] His ads were at once both an extension of the demonstrations he had put on at the Maxwell Market, at Woolworths, and at county and state fairs, only compacted to intensify their efforts. At the beginning, before the 28 minute and 30 second infomercial developed in the 1980s, he only had a minute to do his bidding: state the problem, offer the gadget that solved it, and the other benefits it provided, along with the price. The drama ended there; and it should not be mistaken that it was indeed dramatic. For those weary souls who needed to “save… precious few seconds,” his commercials became holy acts of physical redemption.^[60] The products were meant to do things in the kitchen, and around the house, faster, better and with less effort than previously imagined. “’My products are not fads,’” he insisted.^[61] 

        Popeil’s fortune was that he started out in television when it was still new and rules were being set, not cemented. “Popeil essentially invented the popular image of the American television pitchman.”^[62]  He was, as he was quick to attribute, “at the right place at the right time.”^[63]  Had he begun later in the rise of television, it is unlikely he would have become the cultural figure that he was known for. Yet, he understood he penetrated the lives of his viewers.  It was impossible to avoid him. “I was part of their lives in their bedroom, living room, anywhere they had a TV set,” he wrote.^[64] This privileged access may lay at the core of his success; he knew his audience and spoke to them in clear, succinct, direct ways they understood and even appreciated. Other marketers marketed, he spoke to his people in the populist language of his craft. He turned direct marketing into an artform.^[65]

        From his early start as a TV huckster, he understood the unique power of television to grab the viewer’s attention. It helped, too, that he was “part barker, part street corner salesman, part vaudeville entertainer.”^[66] In his biography, he related the example of newspaper versus television advertising. If he took out a newspaper ad in every major American city as against TV in the same places, “more people would see the print ad, but they might not stop and look at it. And if they did, would they stop and read the details? I don’t think so.”^[67]  Television offers a different outcome. “If you make an entertaining commercial or infomercial, people will stop flipping channels and listen to what you have to say.”^[68]  It was on this intimate knowledge of the medium that his retail empire was based.

        In an odd, unintended way, Popeil sold consumers the American dream with a lower-case “d.” No need to hype or overpromise; just present the facts as best as he knew them in a lively but unhysterical manner. The products were not always superior or even decent – “overhyped schlock” or “sham” were two common descriptives – but the American economy is riddled with similar products.^[69] His may not be different, but he provided enough compelling gadgets that the schlock could be forgiven.^[70]  In 1971, the Veg-O-Matic he sold (manufactured at his father’s factory) was handed a consent order for making false claims.^[71] Yet, today many of his gadgets rest in the Smithsonian.^[72]  His Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ, according to one observer, was “dollar for dollar, the finest kitchen appliance ever made.”^[73]  The Popeil Automatic Pasta and Sausage Maker’s thrust bearing device shared material with bulletproof glass.^[74]  He was driven by a need to invent and innovate.  “I can’t help myself,” he told an interviewer.^[75] He claimed that every year he tests 5,000 new products and ideas, before choosing the few he will market.^[76] “They are amazing technological breakthroughs,” journalist Geist claims, adding that “Our Scientific Community might be coming up with [them] if they weren’t creating bureaucracies and holding conferences. Edison. Ford. Orville and Wright. Ron. They don’t do paperwork.”^[77]

        His television commercials were not one-off events, but he regarded them as important elements of his business. Popeil and late-night advertising were interchangeable entities; one fed into the other. He refused to put out anything less than a "perfect” TV spot, even at the expense of antagonizing folks around him. In one session described by New York Times reporter Patrick McGeehan, Popeil chastised a producer for “cutting him short and not taking the all-important call from satisfied customers.”^[78]  He ordered others, in prima-donna fashion, around. In turn, they called him “God,” as in “’Where is God right now?’”^[79]  Television was his medium and he ruled it like a rooster. This is how he “pioneered” the nearly half-hour infomercial.^[80] He knew the terrain all too well, having grown up as television grew and soon dominated the country’s entire social sphere. This mastery he used to his advantage when many academics had barely begun to understand the full implications of the medium.  He was doing while others barely thought.  “’I’m a self-created celebrity,’” he once told a reporter.^[81]

        But there’s another aspect to his success and it involves anxiety.

        There was a time in America when you learned about a new device from a trusted neighbor, friend, or local institution (a store, a church, a mechanic’s shop, etc.). The practice allowed innovations to spread in the culture, but more than merely spreading a product, it “taught” the use of a mechanical device by a trusted figure. We call this “knowledge transfer.” Since human beings are anxious about confronting new ideas, the trusted figure helped guide the neophyte to adopt the technology and in doing so, reduced anxiety.^[82] This transfer has been part of human society for hundreds of thousands of years.

        When the United States increasingly became an industrialized society, particularly by the end of the 19th century, this practice was seriously upset.  Families were split apart as husbands moved off the farm and into wage labor in factories. The system of knowledge transfer was severely altered, and as more and more products avalanched consumers, the capacity to understand (and thus adopt) new technology was reduced. Owner’s manuals often offer little help in helping consumers learn a new product.  

        It is to Popeil’s credit that he neither understood this anxiety, or at least was aware that new products can be “disruptive.”^[83] “You have to explain the invention to customers,” he told an interviewer, “not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist each time.”^[84]  Popeil took on the role of the “educator” to the American public, one starved of such instruction, who readily opened their wallets to him while refusing to do so to others. “You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works,” he continued, “and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and, finally, sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use.”^[85]

§ § §

These are Popeil’s lights, what of the dark side?  In his biography, he spends just a few pages on his personal life. It is a tragedy to our critical understanding of our cultural stars that much that could be written by family members, former spouses, or girlfriends, or others who worked closely with them never sees the light of day. Nondisclosure agreements and familial omerta usually provide the justification.  Our understanding of figures like Popeil thus remain deliberately opaque, although a contextual understanding of his biography provides compelling clues.

        His familial role models would more likely enter discussion in a psychiatric convention than in the pages of Good Housekeeping.  In a telling incident, he saw his mother only once after her divorce to her father, and that was late in life. He was in his twenties by now, a self-declared success and living in New York when they met for lunch. Nothing emerged about the topics of their discussion, although he claimed in his biography, he never asked her why she “abandoned” him and his brother. He spent a total of one hour with her, then as they were leaving, he offered her some cash because he thought “she needed it,” the last time they met.^[86] The coldness of the event says as much about the trauma that brewed under his skin as it does about a remarkably lack of inquisitiveness of the past that borders on pathology. He simply either no longer cared or had little stomach to explore a taboo subject that may have at least given him some closure. He never regarded life that deeply.  It was not a necessity in his profession. On the phone, he called all the females he spoke to, “babe.”^[87]

        His own personal life reflected this aloof disregard, which he freely admitted. His first wife (she had a first name, Marilyn, but no last name in his biography^[88]), he met while in college. They dated together. His only real reason for tying the knot with her was to get out of New York and return to Chicago. “I knew I didn’t marry for the right reason,” he confessed.^[89]  Two daughters followed (as they aged, he called them “sisters”), but within seven years the marriage ceased.^[90] He called Marilyn a “really good person” and took responsibility for the divorce. “The relationship did not work out because I was too busy doing my own thing.”^[91]  And worked desperately to be liked.

        Did he learn his lessons from the first failed marriage?  Apparently not since he continued his cavalier ways. Shirly Dupre (now there’s a second name attached) was a flight attendant and “another terrific girl,” but he “screwed up this one, too.”^[92]  “Wife number three” also had a first and last name, produced a daughter named Lauren but that marriage would also dissolve. His fourth and last wife, Robin Angers (“a former Frederick’s of Hollywood model”^[93]), married him in 1995 and lasted until his death in 2021.

        Ron’s personal experience in marriage pales in comparison with that of his father. Pere Popeil also remarried, to a woman named Eloise. In 1974, Eloise tried to hire two men to kill her husband. She was convicted and spent 19 months in jail. They divorced but remarkably, remarried again. If his mother meant little to him, Ron’s father meant much more. He accepted that the man was incapable of love, but after he became successful, Ron realized his father at least was “proud” of him.^[94] “I also believe he loved me in his own way,” Ron related, “he just wasn’t the sort of person who would say such things out loud.”^[95]

        Ron Popeil died of a brain hemorrhage, surrounded by family members he loved and cherished. In a press release, it was noted he passed “’suddenly and peacefully.’”^[96] He fulfilled Popeil-biographer Tim Samuelsons’s notion: “’Success comes to those who hustle wisely.’”^[97]

§ § §

Here are the key products and their taglines that Ron Popeil sold over his many decades as America’s foremost huckster on television.^[98] 

• The Ronco Spray Gun 

“The gun that washes and waxes your car in less than five minutes”

• The Chop-O-Matic

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m going to show you the greatest kitchen appliance ever made!”

• The Dial-O-Matic

“You slice a tomato so thin, you can read a newspaper through it”

• The Veg-O-Matic

“Slices and dices and juliennes to perfection”

• The Mince-O-Matic

“With powerful vacuum grip!”

• The Feather Touch Knife

“So sharp it could shave the eyebrows off a New Jersey mosquito!

• London Aire Hosiery

“Guaranteed to never run”

• The Buttoneer

“Use the new Buttoneer, the new automatic button fastener that attaches any kind of button”

• The Ronco Smokeless Ashtray

“Does cigarette and cigar smoke offend you?  You need the new Smokeless Ashtray by Ronco”

• The Ronco Cleanaire Machine

“The Antipollution Machine”

• Mr. Microphone

“Hey, good lookin’, I’ll be back to pick you up later”

• The Inside the Outside Window Washer

“Washes the outside the same time you wash the inside”

• The Prescolator

“Brews your favorite fresh coffee instantly”

• The Trim-Comb

“Now anyone can trim hair and eliminate costly haircuts”

• The Ronco Bottle and Jar Cutter

“An exciting new way to recycle throwaway bottles and jars into decorative glassware, centerpieces, thousands of things”

• The Ronco Rhinestone and Stud Setter

“It changes everyday clothing into exciting fashions”

• Twenty Tops Hits by the Original Stars
• Miracle Broom

“Cordless electric”

• Miracle Brush

“The magic lint remover that removes lint from velvets, wools, and flannels in seconds”

• The Ronco Rollermeasure

“It does jobs a tape measure can’t!”

• Popeil Pocket Fisherman

“Want to make a boy happy? Give him the Pocket Fisherman”

• The Ronco Auto-cup

“How would you like to drink a hot cup of coffee on your way to work?”

• The Popeil Bagel Cutter
• Mr. Dentist

“The easy way – for healthier gums and teeth”

• Cellutrol

“The beauty aid for buttocks, hips, and thighs”

• Back Relief

“Bye-bye, Backache!”

• The Ronco Glass Froster

“Enjoy refreshing frosted drinks anywhere”

• The Ronco Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler

“Outperforms a fork or whisk in every way”

• Drainbuster

“Strong power for blockage of drains”

• The Doorsaver

“Dents and dings on your expensive car can cost you an awful lot of money”

• The Popeil Gripper