1995 A& E Bio Kellogg Brothers

About

Anecdote time: In 1994, on the heels of the film, "The Road to Wellville," I received a call from a researcher at the A&E Network, asking if I had any information about the Kellogg Brothers and their cereal story. They had tried nearly every route to the information in Battle Creek and nobody was returning their calls.

I appeared on a contact list because of a play I had written for the Michigan Radio Players the year before, featuring an imagined radio interview with Dr. John Harvey Kellogg in 1931. A studio version of the play ran on NPR locally, and it apparently made its way on a pre-internet database. I was the only one willing to chat, from all indications. The call lasted about three hours.

Over the next several months we exchanged documents, photographs, and videos (the phonograph playing the exercise record is one in my collection), along with connections to other area folks willing to talk to them. They then came to Battle Creek for two days of interviews (unscripted ones, by the way - we didn't see the questions beforehand), and mine was scheduled to follow the one from a Kellogg Company representative, who kept delaying his brief appearance from mid morning to late afternoon, and that moved things for Duff Stoltz and me to the point where we both wound up meeting in Duff's museum, in the original cereal factory site, by the very late afternoon, to save set-up time. We were all exhausted. They then went back to New York to piece all the bits together, there were more and more conversations, faxes, and FedEx'es. At the completion of the broadcast, Molly Thompson, the producer, mentioned that the idea of biographies was becoming so popular that A&E was considering a separate cable channel just for that feature - thus, the "Biography Channel" was born.

Duff, Norm, Frances Thornton, Mary Butler - so many friends involved locally with this project are now gone - and it's so nice to have this artifact to remember them by. And my appearance as a "filmmaker/collector" was primarily because I was the guy who actually answered his phone....now, 26 years later, I probably still have that tie somewhere.

This is an A&E production, and I claim absolutely no rights to it. My VHS copy of the studio edit, presented here, was my sole compensation - but the friendships that grew from these encounters remain a priceless memory.

Human-made No record of this work says a model made it. What this means.

Archive

Internet Archive, in The VHS Vault

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Credit

Animating Apothecary Archives

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