People · 2026-08-26

Cloid H. Smith

Founded American Pop Corn Company in Sioux City in April 1914 (basement at 2727 Nebraska Street) with son Howard; shelled, cleaned, graded, and packed popping corn as Jolly Time
With American Can Company in Chicago, introduced a vacuum-sealed Jolly Time tin in 1925-26 printed "Guaranteed to Pop" / "It's guaranteed to pop!"
Built storage cribs and a Leeds plant for aging corn on the cob; company remains family-owned in Sioux City (oldest surviving packaged-kernel popcorn company in the U.S.)

Cloid H. Smith put a consistent, ready-to-pop consumer package of popcorn on the grocery shelf. When he started in 1914, a grocer who wanted popcorn bought it in bulk or on the cob. Customers shucked and washed it themselves. Many kernels were duds. Moisture walked out of the hull in transit.

Charles Cretors held a Chicago peddler's license on 2 December 1885 and demonstrated a steam-powered oil popper at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. F. W. Rueckheim and his brother Louis opened a candy and popcorn shop in Chicago in 1872 and began selling caramel-coated corn under the Cracker Jack name in 1896. Smith's change was industrial, not folkloric. From the basement at 2727 Nebraska Street, Sioux City, he and his son Howard shelled, cleaned, graded, and packed. In 1925 and 1926, working with the American Can Company in Chicago, the firm put those kernels in a vacuum tin and printed a guarantee. That is the start of popping corn as a standard grocery SKU. The origin essay on the guarantee covers the package in the larger sequence. American Pop Corn Company is still family-held in Sioux City. It is the oldest surviving packaged-kernel company in the United States. Company pages that call Jolly Time the "first ever branded popcorn" are doing marketing. Cracker Jack was a brand two decades earlier. The honest claim is narrower: first lasting grocery package of unpopped kernels sold under a house brand that still exists.

Pennsylvania, Odebolt, other trades

Cloid H. Smith was born 14 August 1871 in Eschcall, Perry County, Pennsylvania. The date and that spelling are his grandson Chesley C. Smith's, written for the Odebolt history pages. Parent obituaries in The Odebolt Chronicle use Eschol and Eschall for the same place. Martin W. Smith and Deantha Work married there on 10 January 1870. The 1939 Chronicle notice of Cloid's death says the family came to Iowa the next year and farmed until he was eleven, then to Sac County in 1876. Deantha's 1936 obituary puts the Iowa arrival in Poweshiek County in 1872, Tama County in 1873, and Sac County in 1876. They left the farm for Odebolt in 1882. That is the migration. There is no sourced childhood color beyond it.

He graduated from Odebolt High School in 1889. Chesley writes that a University of Michigan scholarship went unused because the household needed his earnings. Treat that as family memory. The trades are enough. While finishing school he clerked in a drugstore and took a correspondence course in pharmacy. Chesley has him, in the summer of 1890, the youngest registered druggist in Iowa, after which the state raised the gold-seal age to twenty-one. In the fall of 1891, at twenty, he and John H. Bieser opened Smith & Bieser on a $4,000 note Bieser's father endorsed. The Chronicle of 28 August 1902, announcing the sale to J. A. Engstrom and O. E. Huglin, confirms the 1891 start and Bieser's 1894 exit. Chesley says Smith kept the store until 1903. The 1939 obituary's "Sept. 2, 1892" sale date is a later mix-up. Use 1902.

The store was a platform. With Bieser and a veterinarian, Dr. Kirk, he made stock foods and liniments as the National Veterinary Company, then sold his interest. He also bottled Huskers Lotion under the Union Specialty Company, from a formula James Hassell had worked out in the store where Smith had clerked. The 1939 obituary dates wholesale shipments to November 1898. In 1901 he and two friends went to Beaumont, Texas, after the Lucas gusher at Spindletop, as Sac Oil and Pipe Line Company. Chesley is blunt. They struck oil, then salt water. Capital and profit went with the wells.

Chesley dates a tuberculosis warning to the fall of 1898. The doctor told him to leave the closed store. A friend, William Drury of Early, Iowa, suggested telephones. Odebolt voters granted a franchise on 30 March 1899. Local service began 5 June 1899 with about seventy telephones (Chesley) or seventy-five subscribers (the 1939 obituary), the switchboard on a balcony at the rear of the drugstore. In 1900 the exchange consolidated with Jefferson as New State Telephone and Telegraph Company. Elizabeth Wrede, whom Smith had married on 5 October 1892, died 22 March 1925 at Rochester after an operation. Her Odebolt notice says the home was in Odebolt until October 1905. That is the Sioux City move this record uses. The 1939 obituary's "spring of 1903" and the Sioux City Public Museum's "moved to Sioux City in 1912" date the same life to the wrong hinge. 1912 is the year Bell Telephone bought New State. Chesley has Smith remaining as general manager under Bell until he resigned to enter popcorn with Howard. The International Directory of Company Histories, as Encyclopedia.com and FundingUniverse reprint it, dates that resignation to 1915. Chesley dates it to 1914. The company starts in 1914 either way.

Popcorn country, a price, a basement

The land he bought with telephone proceeds was already popcorn country. Chesley has him putting part of the Bell money into a quarter section north of Odebolt, originally Cook Ranch, prairie bought in 1872 at five dollars an acre. George G. Colton had lived on that ranch and later on a farm north of town. Colton is context, not a second founder. The Odebolt Chronicle of 25 August 1938, writing "Fifty Years of Progress," says the Odebolt Reporter had him in June 1885 with 175 acres of popcorn, already several years into the crop. Chesley, writing later, gives Colton 155 acres in 1885. The acreage disagrees. The fact does not. Odebolt was shipping popcorn before Smith packed a carton.

B. F. Bowen's 1914 History of Sac County, Iowa already called the town "the most famous popcorn center of the entire world" and treated a fifteen-mile radius as the successful locality in the belt. Reuber & Bruce had been in the trade since about 1893. Albert Dickinson of Minneapolis handled corn there. "The 'Cracker-jack' and the 'Checker-package' people" came to buy. The 1938 Chronicle still listed J. L. Bruce, Dickinson, and F. W. Rueckheim & Bro. as national firms doing a large Odebolt business. Smith entered a district that already existed.

The entry is a quarrel over price. In 1913, Chesley writes, the tenant on the Odebolt farm raised popcorn and sold it to a local buyer. Smith learned that a similar lot, delivered the same day, had brought a different figure. He asked why. The buyer told him that if he did not like the way the business was done, he had better go into it himself. "He said he was told to go into it so he decided he would." The International Directory tells the same challenge. Steve Huisenga, speaking in 2025 as the company's first non-family president, recast the other party as a Sioux City street vendor. The grandson's version is the one written closest to the family papers. The industrial decision is the same in both: stop selling a raw crop into someone else's grade and start selling a package.

April 1914 is the inception Chesley and the Directory both use. The first season ran through November. The address is 2727 Nebraska. The Sioux City Public Museum: the family shelled, cleaned, and graded in the house. The Directory has Smith and Howard shucking, washing, and packing: 100-pound and 150-pound burlap sacks to vendors, one-pound cardboard cartons to grocers. The name Jolly Time, the Directory says, "just happened to pop up." Consumer cartons printed it in bright green over three children on the floor with a bowl. Huisenga, in 2025, remembered an advertising man and a conversation about a happy product. Print both origins. Do not pick a cute one.

The first-year figure is more than 75,000 pounds. The museum, the Directory, the University of Iowa's 2015 honor note, and a State Historical Society of Iowa classroom sheet all repeat it. It is company and museum tradition, not an audited USDA number.

Within months the work left the basement for the backyard garage. In the fall of 1914 a storage crib went up at Leeds, Iowa, capacity stated at 500,000 pounds. In 1915 a shelling and washing building stood next to it. The museum and the Directory agree on the point Smith already knew from the district: corn dried on the cob for months, then a year, popped better than new corn. The 1915 building was built to ventilate. A kernel pops when hull moisture turns to steam and cannot escape. Too dry, it is a dud. An open grocery sack becomes the second kind. Aging in a crib, then closing a package, is the business.

Howard finished high school in 1916 and came on full time. In 1920 Smith hired Stanley Thatcher to sell carnival, circus, corner, and theater vendors the corn plus oil, salt, cartons, and glassine bags. Jolly Time Booster ran from 1924 to 1941. Brokers already had the grocery side. The early firm sold to people who popped in public and to grocers who sold the unpopped household package. The second channel is the one that lasts on this wall.

A tin, a guarantee

Cardboard did not hold moisture. In 1920 the company tried glass jars. The Directory says they were costly and they broke. An engineer at American Can Company in Chicago designed an airtight metal can. The Directory dates the red, white, and blue Jolly Time can to 1925 and quotes the line as "It's guaranteed to pop!" It adds that the firm incorporated the following year, 1926. Little Village, in a 2024 Iowa centennial feature, also uses 1925 and the same slogan. The Sioux City Museum's virtual collection dates the vacuum-sealed can to 1926, names the Chicago partner, and prints the motto as "Guaranteed to Pop." This record uses 1925-26 and both wordings. A vacuum tin keeps internal moisture on a grocery shelf. A printed guarantee is only honest if the package does that work.

The first national advertising campaign arrived with the can. The Directory has Good Housekeeping and its Seal of Approval, then, in 1929, the Saturday Evening Post and other monthlies, 162 metropolitan newspapers in every state and Canada, a claimed reach of nearly nine million readers, and more than ten million pounds sold that year. In 1930 a weekly radio show went out under General Jolly Time and his Pop Corn Colonels. The theme, "A Bowl of Pop Corn, a Radio, and You," is Directory tradition. The museum and the Directory both carry a Depression offer: an electric popper and a can, shipped anywhere, for one dollar. A ten-ounce can cost ten cents. Popcorn was cheap when sugar was not. That enlarged the category. The SKU existed because the tin had already made a dud an exception the package promised not to be.

In 1931 the Sioux City crib burned and took the stock. A new plant, finished a year later, was built around a patented "Volumized" slow-dry. The late 1930s added secondary brands the Directory names: Thunderbolt, Magic-Pop, Giant Yellow South American Popcorn. Howard later pulled the consumer line back to Jolly Time and kept Little Wonder and Gold Mine for vendors. Huisenga, in 2025, remembered early names that included Jiffy and Lightning and a 1925 decision to focus on Jolly Time. Those lists do not match year for year. The founder-era brand that survived is Jolly Time.

Elizabeth was already gone. The 1939 notice names a second wife, Alvina, otherwise thin in the public file; a daughter, Dorothy Seyforth of Lanark, Illinois; and Howard, vice president and secretary. A first son had died at five months.

The morning at the desk

The Odebolt Chronicle of 19 October 1939 reported that Cloid H. Smith, 68, of Sioux City, "died Thursday morning, Oct. 12, 1939, of a heart attack while seated at this office desk." Friends said he had arrived at 7:30 a.m. "apparently in good health." Ten minutes later he "toppled over dead." Chesley's biography gives 11 October 1939. Thursday that week was the 12th. This record uses the newspaper date and footnotes the grandson's. Services were Saturday in Sioux City. Wheeler Lodge of Odebolt held the committal. Burial was in the mausoleum at Graceland Park Cemetery.

The museum and the Directory agree on a 1939 figure that is not the 1914 tradition: 75,000 cases of ten-ounce Jolly Time cans. Howard became president. The museum says that, following Cloid's wishes, the company sold only ten-ounce tins under the Jolly Time name. By 1949 the case count, in both sources, was 500,000. That is Howard's chapter. The founder's work was already finished: a graded kernel, a crib, a can, a grocery name.

The firm that outlived him

The living Smiths are continuation, not the subject. Howard C. Smith was president from 1939 to 1966. His sons Wrede H. Smith (president, 1966-2002 on the company family page; the Directory has him retiring in late 2001) and Chesley C. Smith (chairman, 1966 until his death in 1978) were the third generation. Wrede's son Garrett ("Garry") K. Smith and Chesley's son Carlton P. Smith took president and chairman in 2001. The University of Iowa's Tippie College of Business gave the family the Oscar C. Schmidt Iowa Business Leadership Award on 29 October 2015. Entrepreneur, interviewing Garry and Carlton on 12 March 2014, treated the centennial as a lesson in staying on the shelf while larger brands spent more.

On 27 February 2024 the company named Steve Huisenga, long the vice president of sales, as president, "the first non-family member to assume the President role in the company's history," effective immediately. The Smiths, the release said, would "retain complete ownership," with "all eleven cousins from the fifth generation" dedicated to the firm. The Gazette of 2 February 2025 said Huisenga had taken day-to-day operations in January 2024 after Garry and Carlton retired. Print both months. The brand was not sold. Huisenga is an operator. The cousins remain the owners. Microwave popcorn and Blast O Butter are later answers to later appliances. The founder's answer was the unpopped grocery package that American Pop Corn Company still sells from Sioux City under family ownership.