As time went by, Ag Research prospered and grew. When Pops first took over the agency, he inherited six employees on the third floor of the Tompkins County Trust Company building in downtown Ithaca. He said the agency was “pretty ratty” and didn’t have many accounts. He hired some agriculture students from Cornell and said he taught them how to write and take pictures.
They took pictures of chickens and cows, which were numerous in upstate New York. My father told them that farmers are not interested in pretty pictures but in pictures that tell them something about the value of their animals. Thanks to this pragmatic approach, on such instruction the agency prospered, and in four or five years Pops had 125 employees and added an office in New York City to his branches in Albany, Washington, Raleigh, and Richmond, where Johnnie was working until 1949.
Another young man my father brought into the company was a graduate of the hotel school at Cornell University. While attending Cornell, he was the advertising manager, and later the business manager, of the Cornell Daily Sun. Stewart Underwood was hired as an account executive in my father’s Raleigh, NC, Ag Research office in 1947 because of this experience, and was destined to work for Pops for the next sixteen years.
In the meantime, my father had moved his office to a building he bought in Ithaca in 1945, when he founded his real estate division, RHP Incorporated. The building also housed the printing plant for his two magazines.
His agency included Dairymen's League, American Cranberry Growers, Southern States Cooperative and the Philco Corporation among its clients, as well as Thomas E. Dewey during his political campaigns. Because of his reputation for successfully reaching a large segment of dairy farmers and the agricultural population, Pops directed the farm campaign for Thomas E. Dewey’s 1946 successful run for governor of New York. When Dewey ran for president in 1948, he ran the advertising campaign for Dewey in the northeast. When he woke up on the morning after Election Day, Pops was as surprised as just about everyone else in the country when Harry Truman won. Most people had assumed that Dewey had it in the bag.
If Dewey had won, Pops said he would have ended his career as a retired government bureaucrat. Fortunately, fate decided otherwise—and Pops knew that after Dewey lost he would be on the outside looking in, in terms of political pull or connections.
It meant he might not be able to do as much for his company’s clients, so he told them that there wouldn’t be any hard feelings if they wanted to move their accounts elsewhere. Some did.
“That was the year a piano-playing ex-haberdasher from Missouri showed Mr. Dewey a thing or two,” he said. “Old Harry nearly wiped out my company because nobody loves a loser, and we had tied ourselves to one. ‘Close’ only counts in horseshoes.” Most of the accounts that stayed with his agency were farmers’ cooperatives.
But even before the election, his farm co-op clients had been talking to Pops about helping them develop a brand name. These producers of milk, fruit, honey, and other foods that were packaged and sold under other people’s brands weren’t doing especially well, and after the election, he turned to the project with renewed interest. Studies showed there was a clear need for the farmers’ cooperative to increase revenue through franchising a name already established in the food field.
One of the early employees of Ag Research before my father took over was Monroe Babcock of Babcock Poultry, a friend of, but no relation to Johnnie's father, H.E. Babcock. Aside from his friendship with Ed, Monroe bought hatching eggs from him for many years. Referring to Ed as the man who made GLF at least the largest agricultural cooperative in the country, Monroe said, “Ed was one of the smartest men in America. Aside from being chairman of the Board of Trustees of Cornell University, he was a director of Avco Corporation, and he had fifty new ideas every day.” Monroe said, for example, there were no freezers in American homes before Ed Babcock cooked up the idea and persuaded a company that made ice cream freezers to manufacture and sell them.”
Ed had been talking to professors in the Cornell home economics department about formulating new, more nutritious foods, with his prime interest being a cake mix. My father and he agreed that if they could come up with a cake mix that was different from the rest, it could be one of the first products taken to market once they came up with the right name.
So in mid-1948 the search began for a brand name for GLF, and unbeknownst to my father, he was about to enter his third career, as one of the first franchisers in America.