Perkins of Portland: Perkins The GreatButler, Ellis Parker
General
Perkins of Portland: Perkins The Great
Butler, Ellis Parker
Advertising -- Fiction; Humorous stories
We owned our own cows, and built our own dairy and cheese factory, and
made first-class cheese. As each cheese was just the right size to fit
in a can, and as the rind would protect the cheese, anyway, it was
not important to have very durable cans, so we used a can that was all
cardboard, except the top and bottom. Perkins insisted on having the top
and bottom of tin, so that the purchaser could have something to open
with a can-opener; and he was right. It appealed to the public.
The Perkins cheese made a hit, or at least the Perkins advertising
matter did. We boomed it by all the legitimate means, in magazines,
newspapers, and street-cars, and on bill-boards and kites; and we got
out a very small individual can for restaurant and hotel use. It got to
be the fashion to have the waiter bring in a can of Perkins's cheese,
and show the diner that it had not been tampered with, and then open it
in the diner's sight.
We ran our sales up to six hundred thousand cases the first year, and
equalled that in the first quarter of the next year; and then the cheese
trust came along, and bought us out for a cool eight-hundred thousand,
and all they wanted was the good-will and trade-mark. They had a factory
in Wisconsin that could make the cheese more economically. So we were
left with the Cloverdale land on our hands, and Perkins decided to make
a suburb of it.
Perkins's idea was to make Cloverdale a refined and aristocratic suburb;
something high-toned and exclusive, with Queen Anne villas, and no
fences; and he was particularly strong on having an ennobling religious
atmosphere about it. He said an ennobling religious atmosphere was
the best kind of a card to draw to--that the worse a man was, the more
anxious he was to get his wife and children settled in the neighborhood
of an ennobling religious atmosphere.
So we had a map of Cloverdale drawn, with wide streets running one
way and wide avenues crossing the streets at right angles, and our
old cheese factory in a big square in the centre of the town. It was
a beautiful map, but Perkins said it lacked the ennobling religious
atmosphere; so the first thing he did was to mark in a few churches. He
began at the lower left-hand corner, and marked in a church at the corner
of First Street and First Avenue, and put another at the corner of Second
Street and Second Avenue, and so on right up on the map. This made a
beautiful diagonal row of churches from the upper right-hand corner to
the lower left-hand corner of the map, and did not miss a street. Perkins
pointed out the advertising value of the arrangement:
“Cloverdale, the Ideal Home Site.
A Church on Every Street.
Ennobling Religious Atmosphere.
Lots on Easy Payments.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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