You’ll have noticed that in recent months we have drifted into doing more posts about American corporations and brands. I just want to assure you that our mission hasn’t shifted. This thread has arisen as an outgrowth of my researching and writing about old time radio and early television programs, which were of course sponsored by these companies. And in many cases, the phenomenon resembles the old time medicine show.
So today a post about a Post: C.W. Post, that is (Charles William Post, 1854-1914).
Though I’d grown up eating various Post cereals, I first learned the name of the company’s founder when, in a post-modern gesture, the company announced C.W. Post cereal in 1975 with a series of commercials. This was the height of the natural foods movement, so the company introduced this new line of granola-based breakfast chow. To heighten the back-to-basics message, Johnny Haymer played Post in the commericals as a Music Man type flim flam man. Sort of a mixed message if you’re trying to inspire trust in your product, one would think.
Especially considering that there was a bit of truth to it. Post had made his original pile as a salesman, manfuacturer, and inventor of farm implements in his native Springfield, Illinois. A couple of nervous breakdowns later he wound up at the Kellogg Sanitarium in Battle Creek Michigan. (A post on Kellogg’s amazing origin story is upcoming. To date, my only related post is on Kellogg’s Pep). I mean, we’ve always known that Kellogg’s and Post were the big cereal rivals, at least we knew that when I was a kid, but I had never quote known the stark truth of it. Post, already a nervous character, developed that weird obsession with the digestive tract that so characterized his era. In the late 19th century, all anyone could seem to think about was regularity and elimination. Listen, this is a country that needs to keep moving, know’m sayin’? Converted to the Kellogg philosophy, Post went on to to develop his own line of products that seemed troublingly similar to ones that Kellogg’s offered. It started with the hot grain beverage Postum (1895), which was rather like Kellogg’s Caramel Coffee Cereal. Followed by Grape Nuts (1897), with were not unlike Kellogg’s Malted Nuts. And then came Elijah’s Manna (1904), later rebranded as Post Toasties, which had the audacity to duplicate the grandaddy of them all, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. The two companies later competed head to head with their own versions of bran flakes, raisin bran, shredded wheat etc.
Like I say, Post was obsessed with gut health. He complained constantly of stomach distress. In 1914 he had a successful appendectomy, but it didn’t stop the pain. In despair, he shot himself and ended his life. (Ironically his company had been sued several years earlier for claiming that Grape Nuts cured appendicitis). His name would later be immortalized in various ways: Long Island University’s C.W. Post campus, a Liberty Ship named after him in World War Two, and a company town he founded in Texas.
Post’s firm, then known as the Postum Cereal Company was inherited by his only child, Marjorie Merriweather Post (1887-1973). Fortunately, Post’s daughter had learned the tradethroroughly and was better than well prepared to take over the family business. Furthermore, in 1920 she married the financier E.F. Hutton, who was naturally well primed to advise on and assist with her business decisions.
Not long after that, radio came in, so we pause here to mention several Postum sponsored radio shows: Lum and Abner, Beulah, The Aldrich Family, and the original radio version of Father Knows Best. Also, as coincidence would have it, Grape Nuts sponsored Admiral Byrd’s 1933 trip to the South Pole and his weekly radio broadcast from that location, which we wrote about here just yesterday. In the ’20s Post bought up several other companies like Jell-O and Maxwell House which went on to sponsor their own radio shows, and which we have written about. Other companies she absorbed included Log Cabin Syrup and Birdseye Foods (then a small start-up that was introducing a radically new technology: frozen foods. Post made it huge). With this wide diversity of products, Post needed to rebrand. In 1929 the company became General Foods.
Post was for many years the richest woman in America. Her legacies are many. Here’s one you may or may not like. During the Florida Land Boom of the mid 1920s she built a fabulous estate at Palm Beach. You know it as Mar-a-Lago. When she died in in 1973, she willed it to the U.S. government for its use in hosting foreign dignitaries. The government felt that he had no use for it so they gave it back. In 1985, the Post Foundation sold it to one Donald J. Trump. Man, what a weird country this is. And it always gets weirder! This little tidbit comes from Travalanche’s good friend, circus historian, author, lawyers and former Ringling clown David Carlyon, who slipped me the intel that in 1928 Post hosted a special CIRCUS benefit for poor children at Mara-a-Logo. Dave wonders, intelligentally, if this event couldn’t have been the inspiration for the Marx Brothers’ At the Circus (1939). Margaret Dumont’s character in the film seems reminiscent of Post, and the sight of the circus on the seaside estate seems more than similiar. On the top of that the Marxes’ earlier The Cocoanuts (1929) was set against that same Florida Land Boom that gave us Mar-a-Logo. It’s a thought, anyway.
Now on to some other interesting family connections.
Prior to marrying Hutton, Post was hitched to an attorney named Edward Bennett Close (married 1905-1919). Close was the grandfather of actress Glenn Close (b. 1947). Edward Bennett Close and Marjorie Merriwiether Post had two daughters. The better known of the two was Eleanor Post Close (1909-2006). The first of Close’s six husbands was none other than Preston Sturges, though that marriage was quickly annulled.
E.F. Hutton and Marjorie Merriweather Post had one child, actress Dina Merrill, whom we wrote about here. Hutton’s niece was “Poor Little Rich Girl” Barbara Hutton (1912-1979), whose maternal grandfather was F.W. Woolworth, and who counted among her many husbands Cary Grant. Farrah Fawcett starred in Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story (1987); Anne Baxter played Marjorie Merriweather Post in the telefilm.
Post’s other two husbands were Joseph Davies, U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, and businessman Herbert A. May.