SunHerald.com:
Earl Tupper’s invention was more than a food storage container, vast improvement though it was over the previous standard of shower-cap-style bowl covers. The ingenious marketing network that a Florida transplant named Brownie Wise created for Tupper’s bowls turned a household product into a household word.
Tupperware parties gave birth to a modern American institution, the girls’ night out. Positively prim compared with today’s Botox, Taser and sex-toy parties, they featured product demonstrations, refreshments and silly ice-breaker games. (One favorite: tuck an orange under your chin and pass it, no hands, to the next guest.) But for women in the late 1940s and 1950s who were cooped up at home raising baby boomer broods, they were a real kick.
Kealing tells how Tupper, a New England farm boy turned plastics manufacturer, figured out how to transform polyethylene slag into handy containers in hues like Avocado, Harvest Gold and Chickadee Yellow. Mostly, though, his book pays tribute to Wise, the marketing genius who moved door-to-door sales inside American homes and turned sales pitches into parties.
Logo from Tupperware.