Death of A Salesman

Ron Popeil, who died late in July, hawked the Veg-O-Matic, the Smokeless Ashtray and the Pocket Fisherman, making the world safe for a new generation of TV pitchmen. Attention must be paid

- DAVID WEISS

THE RECENT PASSING OF 86-year-old gizmo guru Ron Popeil will yield few flags lowered in his honor, despite his having waged endless war for our fleeting attention for decades. Granted, salesmen are salesmen, not men of action or valor, but give Ron props for being the perfect pitchman for the new, cathode-ray times he came up in—with the hard sell, the rat-a-tat rhythm of the immigrant boardwalk peddler only just slightly modified for the cooler medium of television.

Hearing Ron Popeil monomaniacally extol the life-changing virtues of a vegetable-shredding geegaw—for a full half-hour, no less— was a slightly higher-tech variant on the hysterical, vaudeville-era carnival barker, with juicers and food dehydrators taking the place of bearded women and vitalizing, cocaine-spiked tonics.

Ron learned the fast-talking, tricky trade at his O.G. father Sam’s knee— it was the visionary gadget-Galileo Popeil the Elder who made and marketed the hot-selling mechanical siblings, Veg-o-Matic and Chop-o-Matic. Both sold like the proverbial hotcakes.

Ron distributed said products before reinventing himself in 1964 as Ronco Inc. and competing directly with dear old dad as a grateful son should. Or perhaps Popeil II felt residually aggrieved that Sam had consigned him and his brother to an orphanage after divorcing their mother. Needless to say, considerable enmity and estrangement came to pass, as well as a great fortune for all concerned. Ron was worth an icy $200 million when he passed.