Let's switch things up a bit. On an upstate trip this past June I stopped in LeRoy, southwest of Rochester, to visit the Jell-O Gallery. Although Peter Cooper patented a gelatin dessert in the 1840s it wasn't until Pearle Wait developed a fruit-flavored gelatin, that his wife Mary named Jell-O, in 1897 that such a dessert became popular. Actually, even Wait couldn't make a go of it so in 1899 he sold his formula to fellow LeRoy resident Orator Frank Woodward for $450. The bill of sale is in the gallery!
It took a few years but enterprising sales techniques (salesmen provided stores with recipes and samples but very few boxes of Jell-O. Demand quickly exceeded supply!) and an advertising campaign that started with Ladies Home Journal finally got sales going in the early 1900s. Even though Jell-O was sold to Kraft and the factory moved to Delaware long ago, the entertaining ads for Jell-O trace their lineage back a century.
Most of the LeRoy Jell-O factory still stands but it is no longer associated with the company. The Jell-O Gallery is operated by the LeRoy Historical Society. Is it "LeRoy," "Le Roy" or maybe even Leroy? I don't know. The village website, which I won't link to because it wants to crash my Firefox, says "LeRoy" so that's what I'm going with.
The gallery is stuffed with all sorts of Jell-O paraphernalia. One back cubby is devoted to nothing but TV ads. A continuous loop of more than 50 years of Jell-O commercials plays on that little TV next to Bill Cosby, Well, not quite continuous. I was told to push the button on the TV to start the show. Bill Cosby himself paid a visit to the gallery in 2004 to celebrate 30 years as a Jell-O spokesman. You can see him on the TV being out-cuted by Emmanual Lewis.
At one time Jell-O was a status symbol--to make it you needed a refrigerator, so serving Jell-O signaled your possession of such a unit.
Posted by: Jeff | 22 August 2011 at 10:50 AM
What no mention of Jell-O shots?
Posted by: judy | 23 August 2011 at 09:15 AM