What the Dog Saw [12]
If Ron had been the one to introduce the VCR, in other words, he would not simply have sold it in an infomercial. He would also have changed the VCR itself, so that it made sense in an infomercial. The clock, for example, wouldn’t be digital. (The haplessly blinking unset clock has, of course, become a symbol of frustration.) The tape wouldn’t be inserted behind a hidden door — it would be out in plain view, just like the chicken in the rotisserie, so that if it was recording you could see the spools turn. The controls wouldn’t be discreet buttons; they would be large, and they would make a reassuring click as they were pushed up and down, and each step of the taping process would be identified with a big, obvious numeral so that you could set it and forget it. And would it be a slender black, low-profile box? Of course not. Ours is a culture in which the term “black box” is synonymous with incomprehensibility. Ron’s VCR would be in red-and-white plastic, both opaque and translucent swirl, or maybe 364 Alcoa aluminum, painted in some bold primary color, and it would sit on top of the television, not below it, so that when your neighbor or your friend came over he would spot it immediately and say, “Wow, you have one of those Ronco Tape-O-Matics!”
7.
Ron Popeil did not have a happy childhood. “I remember baking a potato. It must have been when I was four or five years old,” he told me. We were in his kitchen, and had just sampled some baby-back ribs from the Showtime. It had taken some time to draw the memories out of him, because he is not one to dwell on the past. “I couldn’t get that baked potato into my stomach fast enough, because I was so hungry.” Ron is normally in constant motion, moving his hands, chopping food, bustling back and forth. But now he was still. His parents split up when he was very young. S.J. went off to Chicago. His mother disappeared. He and his older brother, Jerry, were shipped off to a boarding school in upstate New York. “I remember seeing my mother on one occasion. I don’t remember seeing my father, ever, until I moved to Chicago, at thirteen. When I was in the boarding school, the thing I remember was a Sunday when the parents visited the children, and my parents never came. Even knowing that they weren’t going to show up, I walked out to the perimeter and looked out over the farmland, and there was this road.” He made an undulating motion with his hand to suggest a road stretching off into the distance. “I remember standing on the road crying, looking for the movement of a car miles away, hoping that it was my mother and father. And they never came. That’s all I remember about boarding school.” Ron remained perfectly still. “I don’t remember ever having a birthday party in my life. I remember that my grandparents took us out and we moved to Florida. My grandfather used to tie me down in bed — my hands, my wrists, and my feet. Why? Because I had a habit of turning over on my stomach and bumping my head either up and down or side to side. Why? How? I don’t know the answers. But I was spread-eagle, on my back, and if I was able to twist over and do it my grandfather would wake up at night and come in and beat the hell out of me.” Ron stopped, and then added, “I never liked him. I never knew my mother or her parents or any of that family. That’s it. Not an awful lot to remember. Obviously, other things took place. But they have been erased.”
When Ron came to Chicago, at thirteen, with his grandparents, he was put to work in the Popeil Brothers factory — but only on the weekends, when his father wasn’t there. “Canned salmon and white bread for lunch, that was the diet,” he recalls. “Did I live with my father? Never. I lived with my grandparents.” When he became a pitchman, his father gave him just one advantage: he extended his son credit. Mel Korey says that he once drove Ron home from college and dropped him off at his father’s apartment. “He