In
the 1967 movie The Graduate, young
Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) is cornered at a party by one of his
father’s contemporaries who conspiratorially offers him a one-word piece of
business advice: Plastics. For most people who saw the movie then, it was a
great gag line. For me, it was personal.
My
father was one of the people who got into plastics in the early 1950s, and he
did pretty well at it. He had a little shop in Pasadena where he made a lot of
precision parts used at Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other high-tech places.
He and the people he worked with could put together a mold to make almost
anything, and he was always willing to talk with someone who had an idea.
That,
I assume, is how he met the guy with the idea for a plastic champagne cork. It
was the early 1960s, when I was ten or eleven. An internet search turned up a
patent for a synthetic cork granted to Julius Fessler on March 8, 1960, which
would fit. Fessler lived in California, so I’m guessing it was he who somehow
found my father. Drawings from the Fessler patent certainly look very much like
my recollection of the prototype cork my father made.
What
I also remember was that Dad was on fire about the plastic cork. It would be
cheaper than real cork, seal more precisely, and wouldn’t rot in the bottle.
Better in every way. How could it lose?
One
of the things you need to know about my father at this point is that he was a great salesman. Shortly after World War
II he got hired at a Chevrolet dealership in Los Angeles and sold more cars
than anyone else every year he was there. Many times I’ve wished I inherited
that sales gene, but it seems to have skipped a generation.
So
Dad set out to make the plastic cork the coin of the realm in the champagne
industry. I have a vivid recollection of a family vacation where we went to the
mountains (Sequoia National Park, I believe) for some R&R, then descended
into California’s Central Valley for a week and stopped at just about every
winery in California. Or so it seemed.
It
was the middle of the summer and perishing hot. Dad would go in to make the
sales call while my mother, sister and I waited outside in the station wagon,
which quickly became unbearable. There was usually a shade tree nearby, but it
was over 100 even in the shade.
After the first few stops, my sister and I were bored out of our minds,
and my mother had to increase the soft-drink ration in order to avoid a
rebellion.
And
it was all for nothing. My father, great salesman that he was, got laughed out
of most of the wineries and never made a sale. They said the public would never
go for a plastic cork, and that it was simply out of the question. He kept
after it another year or so but never made a dime from it.
In
the 1970s, I remember bringing home a bottle of champagne to have with my
girlfriend (now my wife) and being stunned, when I took the foil off, to see a
plastic cork. More than a decade after my father had gotten nowhere with it,
the idea finally caught on. It taught me a valuable lesson. You can have a
great product and a great salesman but still fail. Luck and timing matter.
