See Also:
Beginning of a FAMOUS Hero: The Gail Borden Story.
Life Lesson #26 – Think Big!
It was over a hundred years ago that a young boy named Edwin lived with his family in Hendley, Nebraska. Edwin’s father, Mr. Perkins, had a General Store that sold just about everything. Edwin HELPED his dad in the store a lot, but he also HELPED his mom in the kitchen a lot. He loved experimenting with tastes and textures. Edwin was also interested in chemistry, and he had many new ideas for inventing things.
After he graduated from high school, he began creating a number of products to sell. One product he came up with was called Fruit Smack, a concentrated drink that could have more water added to it to make an inexpensive juice for the whole family. There was a problem though. Shipping the bottles of Fruit Smack cost a lot of money, and many bottles were broken. So in 1927, Edwin Perkins developed a way to remove the liquid from Fruit Smack, leaving only powder that he repackaged in envelopes with a brand new name. He called it Kool Aid! By 1929, Kool Aid was distributed to grocery stores all over the nation.
Over time, they sold billions and billions of packages and became very wealthy. But they didn’t just keep all of that money for themselves. They gave large amounts of money to a college, a hospital, a retirement village, a museum, and a theater in Hastings, Nebraska. Oh, and you might want to know…Kool Aid is the official soft drink of the state of Nebraska. And Edwin Perkins is remembered, first of all, as a hard working young boy with lots of curiosity, and then as a hard working man who became a HERO.
– Jim Lord