People · 2026-08-26

Charles F. Bowman

Bought the George F. Chester and Son seed-corn plant with Orville Redenbacher in 1951 at Boone Grove, Indiana, and renamed it Chester Hybrids.
Served as president of Chester, Inc. from that purchase until he retired in 2006 at 87, the operator while Hartman bred the gourmet hybrid and Redenbacher later sold it on camera.
Stayed on after the 1976 Hunt-Wesson sale and spent about half his working time for three years teaching the buyer how to produce, process, condition, and store popcorn seed and popping corn.

Lowell, Purdue, a seed desk

The funeral-home biography reprinted on Find a Grave memorial 35697410 gives the birth as 3 May 1919 in Lowell, Indiana, to Charles W. and Hattie (Smith) Bowman. Astro-Databank notes an Indiana birth certificate for the same day. He graduated from Lowell High School in 1937. The same funeral-home text records a B.S. in agriculture education from Purdue University in 1941. Purdue's own retrieved pages call him a fellow alum and print no degree year, so 1941 stands here as the funeral notice's figure rather than a registrar's.

On 23 September 1944, in Lafayette, he married Mary E. Mohler. She outlived him. MLive, writing 64 years later, still names her first among survivors. Their daughters are Judy Anthrop, June Bowman, and Connie Bowman.

Before the popcorn years he worked the certification side of the Indiana seed trade. Chester, Inc.'s own seventieth-anniversary copy, posted on GreatNews.Life on 1 August 2017, places him at the moment of the Chester deal as manager of the Purdue Ag Alumni Seed Improvement Association in Lafayette, and formerly as manager of the Indiana Crop Improvement Association Seed Certification Service. Ag Alumni Seed, founded in 1938, is the public seed house at the center of The hybrid and the belt. Kevin Fish, writing in Farm Progress on 6 January 2018 as Redenbacher's eldest grandchild, dates his grandfather's Princeton Farms job from 1940 to 1951. Two Purdue-trained men sat at two desks in the same Indiana hybrid trade, one certifying seed and one growing it, before either owned a plant.

That trade was young enough to still be replacing itself. A 2021 Purdue page, quoting Jay Hulbert of Ag Alumni Seed, traces most commercial popcorn genetics to Bruce Ashman, who led Purdue's hybrid popcorn breeding program from the 1960s. A 2020 Purdue food-science page names the same program. The men who certified and sold that seed in Indiana in the 1940s were handling a product the belt had adopted within living memory, and the certification desk is where a buyer learned which lots were clean.

1951 at Boone Grove, and three other years

In 1951 Bowman and Orville Redenbacher bought the George F. Chester and Son seed-corn plant. MLive dates the purchase to 1951 and places it at Boone Grove, Indiana. Indiana Humanities, in a 2010 sketch, agrees and adds the rename to Chester Hybrids, near Valparaiso. Purdue's 2019 agriculture timeline is blunt about it: "1951 | Orville Redenbacher (BA '28, HDR '88) started his popcorn business with partner Charlie Bowman." The funeral-home notice also says 1951 and Boone Grove. The decoded body of the NWI Times anniversary piece puts the Chester family farm in Morgan Township, Porter County, which is the same county as Valparaiso.

Three competing years sit next to that one. The company's current site, its seventy-fifth anniversary essays, and Joseph S. Pete's NWI Times lede all say the two men started Chester, Inc. in 1947, after purchasing George F. Chester and Son. Redenbacher's 1975 Hunt-Wesson book, and the Los Angeles Times obituary of 20 September 1995 after it, date the move into business together to 1952. Encyclopedia.com compresses Redenbacher's 1940 Princeton Farms appointment and the Chester purchase into a single 1940 partnership, a reading no other retrieved source supports. This atlas uses 1951 for the seed-plant purchase, prints 1947 as the founding year the company still recites, and footnotes 1952 as the year Redenbacher himself later gave.

What they bought was a seed plant with a fertilizer and supply history behind it. Valparaiso Magazine, in Spring 2023, citing the Porter County Public Library genealogy department, has George F. Chester selling fertilizers, insecticides, and accessories from 1937 to 1951 before the sale to Bowman and Redenbacher.

The firm did not stay a single-product seed house. The decoded NWI Times body dates irrigation and grain-handling sales to 1952, under the new leadership, which is the year after the purchase and the first evidence of a president widening the revenue base. Popcorn seed was one line inside a farm-supply business in Porter County, and it stayed that way through the fifteen years it took the gourmet hybrid to reach a grocery shelf.

The president's job

MLive states the division of labor in one sentence: "Bowman served as company president while Redenbacher developed the hybrids that produced the popcorn." Stephen Miller's Wall Street Journal obituary of 18 April 2009 carries the same idea in its headline, "Orville Redenbacher's Popcorn Partner Shared the Wealth, if Not the Celebrity." This essay did not retrieve the Journal body; the headline is quoted as Wikipedia prints it, and it belongs in the record as a source line about how the trade press read the partnership.

The breeding chair belonged to a third man. Carl Hartman joined Chester in 1959 as plant breeder, named in Redenbacher's 1975 book and in Fish's Farm Progress piece, and credited in Robert W. Topping's acknowledgments as the breeder who "developed the 'gourmet' hybrid that made Orville famous." Fish dates the breakthrough to 1965. The partners first marketed the corn as Red-Bow, a blend of the two surnames, and the trade declined it because the kernel cost more than what it replaced.

The fix was retail, not agronomy. In 1970 the partners paid the Chicago agency Gerson, Howe and Johnson $13,000, took the name Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet Popping Corn, and put a 30-ounce jar on the shelf. Fish dates the national push to March 1971 at Marshall Field's in Chicago. Purdue's 2023 alumni page still writes the finding of "the winning product" as something "they" did at Chester, and orville.com's story page names Redenbacher and Bowman while leaving Hartman out.

One-third of the aisle, then a sale

Indiana Humanities, in 2010: "Within a few short years, Orville Redenbacher popcorn had captured one-third of the market of unpopped popcorn." Wikipedia applies the same fraction to the mid-1970s. That is a grocery share won by three roles at once, a genotype, a face, and a firm with a president in it. Jolly Time had been selling graded kernels for half a century by then, the story told in Guaranteed to pop.

A Valparaiso seed house could not fund national distribution. Fish: in late 1971 Chester and Blue Plate Foods, a New Orleans subsidiary of Hunt-Wesson, agreed that Blue Plate would handle it. Blue Plate ran a national campaign in 1972 while Redenbacher spent six months on the road persuading grocers to give a premium jar shelf space. Hunt-Wesson divested Blue Plate in 1974 and kept the popcorn rights. In 1976 Chester sold the popcorn operation to Hunt-Wesson. FundingUniverse's reprint of the International Directory of Company Histories, Indiana Humanities, and Encyclopedia.com all use 1976. The Los Angeles Times later printed 1978 and a reported $2 million, which this record does not adopt.

Chester's seventieth-anniversary copy adds the operator sentence the obituaries skip. In that account Bowman remained president of Chester, Inc. after the sale and spent, for three years, half of his working time teaching Hunt-Wesson Foods how to produce, process, condition, and store both popcorn seed and popping corn. Treat it as company memory. It is also the clearest surviving description of what a seed-plant president knew that a food conglomerate had to be taught.

The teaching list is not filler. K. E. Ziegler, R. B. Ashman of Purdue, G. M. White, and D. S. Wysong, writing National Corn Handbook NCH-5, put it plainly: "the most important factor influencing the economic value of popcorn is popping volume," and a processor may reject a lot that misses a specified minimum. Harvest method and moisture decide whether a lot clears that bar. Combine harvesting is cheaper and bruises more kernels; ear harvest is slower and cleaner. The 1975 book describes the Chester bench in the same terms: special ear-harvest equipment, drying bins taken down to about 15 percent, a sheller that rubs ears against each other instead of against metal burrs, a gravity separator, and a polisher. A genotype that expands 40 to one in a laboratory does not reach a jar without that equipment, and the equipment was the president's side of the building.

The brand moved on without him. Norton Simon, Inc., which held Hunt-Wesson, went to Esmark in 1983; Beatrice bought Esmark in 1984; Kohlberg Kravis Roberts took Beatrice private in 1985; ConAgra bought the holding company in 1990. Hunt-Wesson dated its own microwave work to 1980 and introduced Orville Redenbacher's Microwave Popping Corn in 1983 as the first shelf-stable microwave popcorn, a claim that runs against the October 1984 introduction of Act II by James D. Watkins. Both dates belong in the chronology. Valparaiso Magazine dates Cargill's purchase of Chester's hybrid seed-corn department to 1967 and the close of the popcorn factory to 1999.

Chester, Inc. outlived the popcorn. The company still operates in Valparaiso, selling irrigation and design-build construction work, still dates itself to 1947 on its own about page, and still names Redenbacher and Bowman as its founders in its anniversary copy and in the NWI Times headline that marked its seventy-fifth year.

Valparaiso kept the president

The civic record is where a company president shows up locally. The funeral-home notice lists him as past president of the Valparaiso Rotary Club and of the Porter County United Way, a member of the Valparaiso School Board, past chairman of the inaugural Popcorn Festival, and a member of the John Purdue Club and Purdue's President's Council. Indiana Humanities dates Valparaiso's Popcorn Festival to 1979. The same notice records a Sagamore of the Wabash, a Valparaiso Chamber Distinguished Community Leader Award, and a Northwest Indiana Forum Lifetime Achievement Award.

One line in that notice does not check out. It says Bowman was "subsequently awarded the first Honorary Doctorate in Agriculture from Purdue." Purdue's 2023 alumni page and the Los Angeles Times both record Redenbacher's honorary doctorate in agriculture in 1988, and no retrieved Purdue page records one for Bowman. The same text also writes "George E. Chester," where every other retrieved source uses George F. This atlas prints the vitals from that notice and flags those two lines.

Redenbacher died on 19 September 1995 at Coronado Shores in California. Bowman was still president of the company in Valparaiso, and stayed in the chair for another eleven years.

Holland, 8 April 2009

He retired in 2006 at 87 and moved to Holland, Michigan, where MLive places him at Freedom Village. He died there on Wednesday, 8 April 2009, at 89. The Holland Sentinel ran a local notice on 14 April 2009 under the headline "Holland resident was Orville Redenbacher's business partner"; the live page returned 406 to this essay, and the retrieved extract repeats MLive's lead.

Survivors named in MLive and the funeral-home text: Mary, his wife of 64 years; daughters Judy Anthrop of Douglas, June Bowman of Grand Rapids, and Connie Bowman of Valparaiso; three grandchildren; two great-grandchildren. Chester's own seventieth-anniversary copy prints 2004 as his death year, which the obituaries and the cemetery record contradict.

Funeral services were held on 14 April 2009 at First United Methodist Church, 103 N. Franklin Street, Valparaiso, with entombment in the Graceland Cemetery mausoleum, about eight miles from the seed plant he bought in 1951.