In 1936, an engineer from Racine, Wis., put on a cutaway jacket, striped pants, a bright blue shirt and a lemon-yellow tie, and talked his way into Fred Waring’s dressing room after a big-band show in New York City. And that interaction is what brought you your frozen margarita.
If you thought that Fred Waring invented the Waring Blendor (spelled with an “o”), you are sadly remiss in your small-appliance history.
Waitrose Food Illustrated knows the truth, offering that “history barely recalls (the) true champion” of the blendor, “one Frederick Osius.”
All of which I find rather a thrill because Fred and I have the same last name. My sister Lucy happened to see an article on the blender and the Freds in a Bon Appetit magazine in a friend’s bathroom.
I found various confirming accounts on the Internet, and she found something else there: someone else with our last name in Colorado. He lived in Loveland. One day I picked up the phone.
Tim Osius said that Frederick was his great-great-uncle. Tim also knows the family genealogy, has talked to my father’s cousins in his research, and has traced the name clear back to Cordova, Spain, and one Bishop Osius, who converted Constantine in A.D. 290.
Tim reckons that he and I are cousins removed about 10 times.
In all fairness, I must note that it was, in 1922, Steven Poplawski who first placed a rotating blade in the bottom of a container to mix the flakes in malted milks.
The Poplawski blender was intended only for the sweet, but small, soda-fountain world. Osius saw the potential to bust out into clubs, hotels and restaurants across the land.
Among Osius’ many inventions was, with another engineer, Chester Beach, a small motor that could use either AC or DC electrical power. They and a master marketer, Louis Hamilton, created Hamilton-Beach Manufacturing and in 1910 used the motor to make a hand-held vibrator – for massaging the face, OK? – and then hair dryers and vacuum cleaners.
Osius was granted a patent in 1933 for his own “drink mixer,” improving upon the Poplawski invention. He produced it in the summer of 1936.
It had two problems, though: It wasn’t selling (one account says it withered on the pages of the Sears, Roebuck catalog) and it leaked.
Although the sale of his company in 1923 had made him wealthy, he apparently needed a backer and a celebrity, and saw both in bandleader Fred Waring, who was known to be fascinated by gizmos.
After talking his way into his own audition, Osius set up his great invention. It leaked.
What would you do if some guy dressed like a clown barged in on you and showed, as Waring’s widow, Virginia, later wrote in her memoir, an “undeveloped and seemingly unworkable device?”
Waring – who was forward-thinking, inquisitive and a teetotaler with an ulcer, on a special diet of fruits and vegetables – laid $25,000 on him, a fortune for the time.
Debuts in 1937
The blender debuted in 1937 at the National Restaurant Show in Chicago, to great acclaim. Its selling price of $29.75 is said to have been, in the Depression era dollars, about equal to a week’s pay. The extremely energetic Fred Waring took it on tour and talked it up in shows and on the radio.
Ferne Buckner, a member of the Waring’s 55-piece band, The Pennsylvanians, wrote in a memoir that the device “proved to be the only truly irritating new member inducted into the Waring ranks.”
“The thing,” as she called it, required a huge trunk equipped with lemon squeezer, can opener, knives, glasses, ice, strainers and measurers. A second massive trunk contained stacked cans of ingredients from mangoes to sauerkraut.
At first she and the other band members thought the gadget a harmless amusement.
Coerced into sampling drinks made from everything from cranberries to cabbage, the band members, she recalled, eventual began “casing any and all alternative routes between stage and dressing rooms in each new theater in an attempt to avoid the thing.”
Only at the end of a long tour did Waring begin to experiment with alcohol – which Buckner took as proof that he was “desperate” for tasters – and produce a daiquiri.
She was the appointed taster one day as he experimented with alternating amounts of lime, rum and sugar. By around 11:30 a.m. she was history.
Waring gave a blender to his fellow musician Rudy Vallee, who loved frozen daiquiris. Vallee immediately offered to sell the appliances. After a show, he would pack a blender into a bar, slyly scope to see if the bar already had one, and then order a daiquiri. “Don’t you have a Waring mixer?” he’d ask in faux wonderment.
Then he’d mention he happened to have one with him, leap behind the bar and whip up a pitcher of daiquiris, and the bartender and even the customers would order them. Vallee sold hundreds.
Osius, unfortunately, did not live to see the Waring Blendor’s success first hand. He died at age 59 in 1939; his family inherited his royalties.
He seems to have told his brother, Tim Osius’s great-grandfather, that he would like to do something for him but died before taking action, and as you may imagine nothing about distribution of his estate was simple.
A role in medicine
“Trickle-down economics don’t work,” says Tim, an optometrist. “I drive a minivan and have student loans.”
The blender went on to use in laboratories for serums for yellow fever and Rocky Mountain tick fever, even for developing the polio vaccine.
By 1954 the Waring Blendor had sold a million.
Being imbued with family pride, plus glory-hungry, I would rather like it if we collectively knew this historic boon to mixology as the Osius Blender. But it is also clear that while Osius created it, Waring was the one to make it happen.
So give Osius one last prop: He was also smart enough to know when it takes a showman.
Alison Osius lives in Carbondale and is the recent recipient of the American Alpine Club Literary Award. Last week, she made hummus in her blender for a party and thought of Fred Osius.
