Jay P. Greene's Blog

Undated photo of Mildred Day — for Famous Iowans column Sept. 30, 2012. (Special to the Register)

For Mildred Day profile in Sept. 30, 2012 Famous Iowans column. Photo from the 1933 Pillsbury cookbook. In that photo, Mildred is on the left. The woman in the oval photo is named in the text there (Mary Ellis Ames, I think) and was sort of a mythical Betty Crocker character. I hope you can use this photo as it shows the young, working Mildred in a kitchen. The family was kind to let us use it. (Special to the Register)

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Food is one of the most basic human experiences, so improving food has huge leverage for serving humanity. Even the act of eating, while it can be done alone, is better when done together – expressing the same basic harmony of human flourishing reflected in The Al’s commitment to the idea that one can benefit oneself and others at the same time.

The very first person ever nominated for The Al after Copeland himself was Steve Henson, inventor of ranch dressing. In the ten years since then, we’ve nominated people who invented ways to make wine more efficiently, invented ways to experience the magic of great food and great movies together, and invented ways to protect kids who sell lemonade. Yet somehow, we have never again nominated another person who invented a food item – which would seem to be a pretty basic prerequisite for all the other stuff.

Why not give The Al to the woman who invented the single greatest food of all time?

Rice Krispies were introduced in 1928. But the apotheosis of the Rice Krispie – the apotheosis of food itself – did not emerge for over ten years. Then in 1939, Mildred Day (with an assist from Kellogg’s coworker Malitta Jensen) cooked up the enchanted confection now known as Rice Krispie Treats.

Day first worked at Pillsbury under noted chef Mary Ellis Ames (in the picture of Ames’ kitchen above, Day is the woman standing on the left). Day was then employed by Kellogg’s as a recipe tester (doesn’t that sound like a nice gig?) and a traveling cooking instructor who trained chefs in Kellogg’s kitchens as well as giving demonstrations to customers. She and Jensen cooked up the idea in the mad science lab of the Kellogg’s mothership (I’m picturing lots of oddly colored liquids bubbling in cauldrons and test tubes).

Curiously, the invention of Rice Krispies was not the main contributing factor in the invention of Rice Krispies Treats. Earlier recipes for similar kinds of treat squares had used puffed rice or puffed wheat. But they had never used marshmallow, relying instead on other sticky confections such as molasses. Day’s main contribution was to realize that marshmallow would work much better.

Six months after the first treats were baked (“Live! Live, my creation!” I envision Day crying out, as a bolt of lightning activates the oven), Day got a request from a Camp Fire Girls chapter in Kansas City looking for a baking idea for a fundraiser. Day headed to Kansas City, and thus the greatest food ever known to humanity became . . . known to humanity.

Newspaper ad, 1941; newspaper recipe, 1940

Kellogg’s did not sell premade treats until the 1990s, but that doesn’t mean Kellogg’s didn’t profit hugely from Day’s invention. They hawked the dickens out of the recipe from the beginning, offering the irresistible Krispie Treats as a primary selling point for the cereal. The recipe first appeared on boxes of Rice Krispies in 1941. Back in those days, cooking the magic confections at home was part of the charm.

Well, it was for most people. Day herself never made them for her daughter Sandra; Sandra didn’t even find out about Rice Krispie Treats until she was an adult. She asked her mother why (I mean, wouldn’t you?) and Day replied: “If you’d made them for two weeks from 6:30 in the morning until 10:30 at night, you wouldn’t want to make them again, either!”

Okay, that’s fair enough. Day’s contribution can’t be contested.

Newspaper ads, 1942 & 1941

For contributing the greatest treat, and therefore the greatest food, ever invented by human ingenuity, while making untold millions for Kellogg’s, I nominate Mildred Day for Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year.

Image HTs: Mildred Day images, Des Moines Register; Krispie Treat image, Kellogg’s; newspaper images, Cook’s Info.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

The Al is no stranger to grape-growers, having nominated innovative winemakers Thibaut Scholasch and Sébastien Payen in 2014. But Bob Fletcher grew grapes in a way more reminiscent of Wim Nottroth or Roddie Edmonds.

A lot of Japanese-Americans in California during World War II were farmers. Most of them lost their farms to foreclosure when they found themselves interned in camps in 1942 because Franklin Roosevelt was a bonkers-racist-pseudoscience-freakazoid-weirdo who thought Japanese people were inherently violent because of the shape of their skulls. (“The president wrote back asking whether the ‘Japanese problem’ could be solved through mass interbreeding.”)

Bill Taketa’s mother had paid off 85% of the mortgage on her 32-acre farm, and lost it all. “She didn’t have anywhere to come back to because they took it,” he recalls.

Bill Taketa even joined the U.S. Army and served in the Pacific theater, fighting Japanese forces on behalf of the stars and stripes. But that didn’t get him his family farm back.

Bill’s wife Doris Taketa, however, can tell a better story. She was 12 when she was shipped off to a camp in Arkansas with her parents and two sisters. But when she came back, the farm was still there for them. And two other families in her hometown of Florin, California had farms waiting for them, too.

Thanks to Bob Fletcher.

Fletcher, himself the only child of a walnut-farming family, watched the disastrous injustices being inflicted on California’s Japanese-American farm owners from his perch as a state agricultural inspector. He knew from the start that the whole thing was crazy, and that Japanese-Americans “were the same as everybody else – it was obvious they had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor.”

So he decided not to remain a California agricultural inspector. The time had come to try his hand at grape-growing.

Fletcher quit his job and took over operating three grape farms – a total of 90 acres of Tokay grapes – belonging to three interned families in danger of foreclosure: the Tsukamotos, Okamotos and Nittas. For three years, he was able to do just enough work to keep up the mortgage payments on all three farms. By agreement with the families, after paying the mortgage bills he kept half the remaining farm income to live off of, and stored the other half away to hand over to the families when they returned.

“I was born on that land. He took really good care of it,” Doris Taketa would later say.

Many Florin residents were less appreciative. He was jeered in Florin, and called a “Jap lover.” At one point some fine specimen of American bravery actually came out and shot a gun at Fletcher while he was working the Tsukamotos’ property.

There were about 2,000 Japanese-Americans living around Florin before the war. Doris Taketa estimates about 80% of them chose not to return. And who can blame them?

“Few people in history exemplify the best ideals the way that Bob did,” said Marielle Tsukamoto, who was five when she was interned. “He was honest and hard working and had integrity. Whenever you asked him about it, he just said, ‘It was the right thing to do.’ ”

After returning, Doris said to Fletcher: “We owe you everything.”

The rest of us owe him a debt as well. In partial repayment, I’m proud to nominate Bob Fletcher for 2019 Al Copeland Humanitarian of the Year.

Photo HTs: Top photo, Florin, Ca. historical society, via the California Sun; middle photo, AARP.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

It! Is! That Time!

Time once again for us to solicit nominations for the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award, that is! The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded, so by immemorial custom it is time to begin considering which non-Nobel-esque humanitarian we will honor.

As our thoughts turn Al-ward this October, recall that this has been a banner year for fast-food chicken joints bringing joy to the world. Scott Lincicome elegantly captured the moment back in August:

There’s a full-on chicken sandwich war underway, yet some lunatics still question capitalism.

Words for the ages, Scott. America has problems, many and serious. But lack of an economic system that delivers goods and services to the people who need and want them is not one of them – thanks to heroes like Al Copeland.

In September, a local KFC tried to top everyone by giving a free car to a single-mom worker who had walked to work for a year. Josh Jordan suggested Popeye’s could do KFC one better by giving that mom the last of their new chicken sandwiches!

But you want to hear about The Al. Nominations can be submitted by emailing a draft of a blog post advocating for your nominee. If Jay likes it, he will post it with your name attached. A winner will be announced after Halloween.

The criteria of the Al Copeland Humanitarian Award can be summarized by quoting our original blog post in which we sang the praises of Al Copeland and all that he did for humanity:

Al Copeland may not have done the most to benefit humanity, but he certainly did more than many people who receive such awards.  Chicago gave Bill Ayers their Citizen of the Year award in 1997.  And the Nobel Peace Prize has too often gone to a motley crew including unrepentant terrorist, Yassir Arafat, and fictional autobiography writer, Rigoberta Menchu.   Local humanitarian awards tend to go to hack politicians or community activists.  From all these award recipients you might think that a humanitarian was someone who stopped throwing bombs… or who you hoped would picket, tax, regulate, or imprison someone else.

Al Copeland never threatened to bomb, picket, tax, regulate, or imprison anyone.  By that standard alone he would be much more of a humanitarian.  But Al Copeland did even more — he gave us spicy chicken.

The 2018 winner of The Al was Joy Morton. Like Al Copeland, Morton promoted good by doing well. It was known that small amounts of iodine could prevent goiters, but no one was doing anything about this until Morton saw a way to gain a competitive advantage for his salt company: adding iodine to salt, and advertising its health benefits. The bumper crop of nominees in 2018 also included Elizabeth Vandiver, Leo Moracchiloli, Richard Garfield, Eric Lundgren, Adam Butler and Autumn Thomasson and George Henry Thomas.

The 2017 winner of The Al was Stanislav Petrov, who literally saved the world from nuclear destruction by refusing to follow Soviet orders to retaliate against what he suspected (as was later confirmed) was a false warning of a US strike. It’s not quite spicy chicken, but it’s close. Petrov was selected from an excellent set of nominees, including Whittaker Chambers, Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon and Russ Roberts.

The 2016 winner of The Al was Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, who prevailed over a very competitive field of nominees, including Tim and Karrie League, Remy Munasifi, and Yair Rosenberg.  Edmonds stood up against fascists at considerable risk to himself by declaring that he and all of his fellow prisoners of war were Jews to foil the Nazis’ effort to separate Jewish prisoners.  It is this type of courage in the face of illiberalism that we need more of in these times.

The 2015 winner of The Al was internet humorist Ken M.  Ken M did more to improve the human condition than just make us laugh by making idiotic comments on social media (although that would have been enough).  His humor reveals the ridiculousness of people trying to change the world by arguing with people on the internet.  Given how much time ed reformers waste on social media, especially Twitter, Ken M’s humor is a useful reminder that many of the people reading your posts are probably not much swifter or influential than the Ken M persona.  Ken M beat a set of strong nominees, including Malcolm McLean, Gary Gygax, and John Lasseter.

The 2014 winner was Peter DeComo, the inventor of the Hemolung Respiratory Assist System.  To save a life, DeComo tricked border control officials to bring a model of his artificial lung machine into the US from Canada, because the device had not yet been fully approved by the FDA.  DeComo won over a worthy field, including Marcus Persson, the inventor of Minecraft, Ira Goldman, the developer of the “Knee Defender,”  Thomas J. Barratt, the father of modern advertising, and Thibaut Scholasch and Sébastien Payen, wine-makers who improved irrigation methods.

The 2013 winner of The Al was Weird Al Yankovic. Weird Al beat an impressive set of nominees, including Penn and Teller, Kickstarter, and Bill Knudsen.

The 2012 winner of The Al was George P. Mitchell, a pioneer in the use of fracking to obtain more, cheap and clean natural gas. Mitchell won over a group of other worthy nominees: Banksy, Ransom E. Olds, Stan Honey, and Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes.

In 2011, The Al went to Earle Haas, the inventor of the modern tampon. Thanks to Anna for nominating him and recognizing that advances in equal opportunity for women had as much or more to do with entrepreneurs than government mandates. Haas beat his fellow nominees:  Charles Montesquieu, the political philosopher, David Einhorn, the short-seller, and Steve Wynn, the casino mogul.

The 2010 winner of The Al was Wim Nottroth, the man who resisted Rotterdam police efforts to destroy a mural that read “Thou Shall Not Kill” following the murder of Theo van Gogh by an Islamic extremist. He beat out The Most Interesting Man in the World, the fictional spokesman for Dos Equis and model of masculine virtue, Stan Honey, the inventor of the yellow first down line in TV football broadcasts, Herbert Dow, the founder of Dow Chemical and subverter of a German chemicals cartel, and Marion Donovan and Victor Mills, the developers of the disposable diaper.

The 2009 winner of The Al – in the first year the award bore that name – was Debrilla M. Ratchford, who significantly improved the human condition by inventing the rollerbag.  She won over Steve Henson, who gave us ranch dressing, Fasi Zaka, who ridiculed the Taliban, Ralph Teetor, who invented cruise control, and Mary Quant, who popularized the miniskirt.

Also noteworthy from 2009: history’s greatest monster, William Higinbotham, was declared permanently ineligible to receive The Al. He remains the only individual thus disqualified. In (dis)honor of Higinbotham, The Higgy award has been bestowed on (un)worthy candidates annually since 2012.

Al Copeland himself was honored in 2008 as the official humanitarian of the year of Jay P. Greene’s Blog. The award was renamed in his honor the following year.

Happy nominating and good luck!