Famous popcorn figures
The farmers, inventors, and operators who brought popcorn into our lives.
The names below start when popcorn became a US business with a shop, a patent, or a tin. The plant is older: unnamed Indigenous cultivators selected a hard kernel thousands of years before Chicago. That record is in The kernel that already existed.
- Charles Cretors (1852-1934)
Invented the steam-powered machine that made popcorn a commercial street product.
He added a steam-powered clown, the Tosty Rosty Man, to turn heads on the sidewalk. C. Cretors & Company is still family-owned in the Chicago area.
- Frederick William Rueckheim (1846-1934)
Built the first nationally branded popcorn product: molasses-coated popped corn and peanuts, with a name, a slogan, and a box that could leave Chicago without going stale.
Sailor Jack on the Cracker Jack box was modeled on his grandson Robert Rueckheim, born 1913.
- Louis Rueckheim (1849-1927)
Invented the 1896 mixing method that dried a molasses coat so popcorn and peanuts could be boxed and shipped.
Period directories say he reached Chicago on 9 October 1871, the day of the Great Fire.
- Henry Gottlieb Eckstein (1860-1935)
Invented the moisture-proof package that made an individual Cracker Jack box, a national grocery run, and a prize inside possible.
Before popcorn he was a soap-industry inventor (filter-press steaming, cottonseed oil). Collectors still argue whether Bingo the dog was a stray named Russell that Eckstein adopted.
- Cloid H. Smith (1871-1939)
Packed a graded popping kernel a grocer could be held to, then put it in a vacuum tin that could print "Guaranteed to Pop."
He ran a telephone company before popcorn. He died of a heart attack at his Sioux City desk on 12 October 1939.
- Charles T. Manley
Built the electric theater popper that let popcorn move from the curb into the lobby.
Born in Butte, Montana, of Irish parents, he came to Kansas City as an electrical engineer after the First World War and joined Julian Burch's machine shop.
- Julia May Braden (1862-1950)
The best-documented early operator selling popcorn at the movies, with Golden Flake stands in Kansas City.
After her husband died she told the Kansas City Star she wanted something steady; she chose popcorn because the stands looked clean.
- Ira E. Weaver (1884-1974)
Built a grower-processor from a 1928 Indiana wagon route.
Company pages still call him Reverend Ira Weaver. The house motto: "No sale is complete if the customer isn't satisfied."
- Welcome Weaver (1914-2003)
The chemist who turned that family wagon route into a professionalized grower-processor.
He held a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh (1943) and joined the mill in 1945.
- W. Hoover Brown and Ava King Brown (Hoover 1894-1979, Ava 1899-1972)
In May 1936 Hoover planted 100 acres of popcorn on a Wyandot County farm that needed a cash crop. Ava encouraged the plant.
That cash crop became Wyandot, later a Marion, Ohio snack house. In 1948 Hoover added a ready-to-eat bag sold to theaters.
- Orville Redenbacher (1907-1995)
With Charles F. Bowman, commercialized a high-expansion kernel and put Redenbacher's face on a 30-ounce gourmet jar.
Purdue agronomy, class of 1928. He played in the All-American Marching Band. The bow tie was the brand.
- Charles F. Bowman (1919-2009)
Purdue-trained president who ran the company that commercialized the Chester hybrid Orville Redenbacher's face later wore.
Obituaries remembered that he shared the wealth, not the celebrity. He was married to Mary E. Mohler for 64 years.
- Carl Hartman
Named plant breeder on the Chester hybrid later sold as Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet Popping Corn.
Hired in 1959. Redenbacher's 1975 book calls him "Carl Hartman from Iowa State." The breeding breakthrough is dated 1965.
- Frederick C. Mennen (1928-1991)
Put a disposable foil pan on the stove that was also the cooker, and built Jiffy Pop into a grocery name.
He won a 1945 National Gilbert Chemical Research Contest as a La Porte High School student. The unfolding spiral top was worked out in a friend's kitchen.
- James D. Watkins
Founded Golden Valley Microwave Foods, put Act I in the freezer case, and put shelf-stable Act II on the grocery shelf.
He is the named inventor on U.S. Patent 4,450,180, the 1980 bag that increased the volumetric yield of microwave popcorn.
- Gladys Otto Garrett (d. 1982)
Built the popcorn shop as a destination: kettles in public, CaramelCrisp and CheeseCorn.
She started in a Milwaukee kitchen and opened in Chicago; customers, not the company, named the half-and-half mix.
- Angie Bastian
With Dan Bastian, started a garage kettle in Mankato, Minnesota, in 2001 as a college fund, then built Angie's BOOMCHICKAPOP into a national grocery bag.
She was a nurse; Dan was a teacher. The first customers were festival crowds and a Vikings stadium.
- Andy Friedman and Pam Netzky
Founded SkinnyPop: popcorn, sunflower oil, and salt, sold as a ready-to-eat grocery bag.
They opened a Chicago shop, Wells Street Popcorn, in 2007, then launched SkinnyPop in Skokie in 2010. An SEC prospectus names them, not later private-equity operators, as the founders.
- Mike Weaver
Scaled the family mill, as president from 1980, into the trade's large bulk popcorn house.
Northwestern basketball forward, drafted by the Chicago Bulls in 1968; he took an MBA and joined the mill in 1972 instead.
- Charles Coristine
Bought LesserEvil in 2011 and scaled it into a national better-for-you snack brand.
CNBC reviewed documents putting the purchase at $250,000 from savings, plus a later $100,000, when the company was losing money and under $1 million in sales.
- Richard Kelty and Gene Mealhow (Kelty 1936-2015)
Two Iowa farm families, in sequence, kept an open-pollinated popcorn in commerce. Richard Kelty rescued the seed. Gene Mealhow still grows it.
The kernel is a multi-ear Iowa heirloom whose hull is so thin it fails in the mouth. Tiny But Mighty is still packed from a farm north of Shellsburg.