![]() On Chicago’s gritty Maxwell Street, Popeil turned to selling his father’s inventions and found he had an affinity for it. He also came up with such gadgets as the original Veg-O-Matic and Pocket Fisherman. The father he barely knew was Samuel Popeil, a descendant of sidewalk hustlers and manufacturer of kitchenware. In Chicago, Popeil began discovering his family heritage while working weekends at Popeil Brothers, founded by his father and an uncle in 1939. His grandparents fought constantly and his grandfather was mean, Popeil later said. His paternal grandparents claimed the brothers when Ron was about 7, and they lived with an aunt in Florida before moving to Chicago with their grandparents when Popeil was 13.īut his childhood remained unhappy. Popeil and his older brother spent their early years at a boarding school in upstate New York. It wasn’t very homey,” he said more than once. ![]() When he was 3, his parents divorced and essentially abandoned him. ![]() Ronald Martin Popeil was born May 3, 1935, in the Bronx. Without Popeil, “there’d be no home shopping channels, no ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up’ Medic Alert gadgets, no Clapper,” John Mingo, editor of “The Whole Pop Catalog” told USA Today in 1993.
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