Tupperware Unsealed: Brownie Wise, Earl Tupper and the Home Party Pioneers by Bob Kealing

(University Press of Florida,  Hardcover, 250 pp., $28.00)

Reviewed by Molly McGreevy

            After WWII, a tireless inventor and former plastics researcher named Earl Tupper transformed polyethelyne, a smelly black slag from military manufacturing, into his own line of plastic storage products.  Tupper’s “Millionaire Line” didn’t take off in high-end department stores but orders were still streaming in from salespeople selling Tupperware door-to-door.  These dealers were booking parties in living rooms to demonstrate how a Tupperware product “bounces instead of breaks” and, when the vacuum seal was applied correctly, “burps just like a baby.”  Once housewives saw how it worked, they couldn’t help but order a few Miracle Bowls.

            For Tupper, one dealer really stood out:  Brownie Wise, a young divorcee and single mother who lived in Dearborn, Michigan.  In 1947, she ordered from his plant over $65,000 worth of merchandise.  Wise had big dreams and a talent to match it.  Tupper immediately promoted her to distributor for all of Florida and then, a few years later, to general manager of the Tupperware Home Parties Division.  Her ambitious mobilization of a predominantly female sales force made corporate history.

            In Tupperware Unsealed, Bob Kealing gives us an inside look at the business relationship of Tupper and Wise, the “yin and yang” of the company.   Tupper was a low-profile and pragmatic, if somewhat paranoid, father to his plastic designs.  Wise was the charismatic public persona who devoted herself relentlessly to the product and her sales force behind it.  Kealing finds in their story the tragedy of Wise’s fall from the height of corporate power, at a time when virtually no women held executive positions.

            Wise was deeply idealistic, motivated by desire to fulfill the American dream.  While still a secretary at a torpedo plant, Wise wrote down her vision of success: “Not just money—but to be a success in dealing with people, bringing Jerry up and to find an inner sense of accomplishment.”   Around this time, Wise wrote an advice column in the local paper under the pseudonym “Hibiscus,” whom Kealing refers to as her “alter ego.”   Hibiscus’s world included a doting husband, a home with a wide reception hall and marble fireplaces, a warm haven where others could find “encouragement or happiness.”

            At Tupperware, Wise worked relentlessly to spread this dream of happiness through press conferences, talks, memos, and company newsletters.  “You talk a lot,” Tupper told her, “and everyone listens.”  Motivational speeches at training camps brought tears to the eyes of new recruits.  “Live this day,” she told her dealers.  “Make it work for you; for the magic of this day walks tomorrow.”

            From her trademark wicker chair, Wise and her staff organized “Jubilees,” company galas thrown at the Orlando headquarters.  At the first jubilee, dealers grabbed shovels and unearthed mink stoles, gold watches and radios Brownie’s staff had buried on corporate grounds.  One woman exhumed a toy Ford, and when shown the real-life car she won, “pressed her face against the hood, and sobbing uncontrollably, kept repeating, ‘I love everybody.’”  Future Jubilees included spending sprees with fake money, the biggest cake ever baked in Florida, a dealer’s name spelled out in fireworks, and human totem poles.  “And the highlight of everything will be wish granting!” Brownie writes in Tupperware Sparks, in advance of one jubilee.   “Such excitement, such suspense!  There’s never been anything like it!”

            The Jubilees were successful press events, garnering the attention of national news networks and Life.  Papers and magazines across the country ran stories on Tupperware and its face of success, Brownie Wise.  She was the first woman to grace the cover of Business Week.  The April 1957 issue of Cosmopolitan wrote an article titled “Sunshine Cinderella.”  Local papers featured her home along Lake Toho—what her son Jerry referred to as a “castle”—as a “virtual paradise.”   It had sweeping staircases, an indoor swimming pool and a fifteen-foot dining table.

            The dream would not last forever.  In the book’s first chapter, Tupper called a meeting where Wise is conspicuously absent.  When two executives arrive that morning in January 1958, Tupper tells them, “I’ve had enough of Brownie Wise, and I’m going down there to headquarters and I’m going to tell her this is her last day.  She’s fired.”

            Kealing is a journalist from Orlando who has written on other Florida topics such as Kerouac in Florida.  He documents Wise and Tupper's relationship through correspondence and memos which, for the most part, he lets speak for themselves.  Although reading so much business correspondence got a bit wearisome (Brownie’s enthusiasm for exclamation points made me reevaluate my own), as the book moves forward, the suspense gains momentum, and the hidden side of Tupperware begins to burp open.

            Readers discover Wise suffered from chronic migraines and an ex-husband with a serious drinking problem.  There was a “Distributor Revolt,” complete with clandestine meetings and bugged hotel rooms.  At the sixth Jubilee, drunken boat operators transporting party-goers collided in a late-night tropical storm, resulting in severe injuries and lawsuits for the company.

            After these events and the publication of her memoir, Tupper grew suspicious of Wise.  He thought she put her own self-promotion before his product.  Many thought Wise began to believe all her puff pieces.  To keep her flawless image, Wise never let her guard down and her staff avoided crossing her.  Although she was “racked by guilt” from the boat accidents, she never publicly apologized for them.

            Kealing partly attributes her demise to this ego-inflation.  But Brownie’s downfall was also due to Tupper.  “Earl was either high on a person or very quickly wanted to pull the rug out from under them,” said his long-time accountant. Tupper’s anxiety about government estate tax was making him anxious to sell his business—and he saw Wise as a liability.

            Tupper yanked the rug Wise was standing on.  She left with no job, no home, no severance pay.  Wise’s counterclaim would not hold up in court since she had no paperwork to prove her assets.  To add insult to injury, Tupper tried to erase her from the company’s history.  He ordered remaining executives to bury all copies of her memoir and from then on, not to utter her name in the same sentence as “Tupperware.”

            The final section of Tupperware Unsealed hits a note of pathos.  On “an uncommonly cold December day, with the morning moon lingering,” Kealing pulled up to “a short, rutted, dirt-and grass driveway, past dense undergrowth and discarded bric-a-brac, ” to an old farmhouse on the west side of Lake Toho, from which Brownie’s lost Water’s Edge can be seen.  Inside was sixty-eight year old Jerry Wise.  In August, he had ridden out a hurricane that destroyed his landscaping business and left his home and health beyond repair.  Wearing a knit hat to keep warm, “Wise sat in front of a small, flickering television, a PBS children’s show barely visible.  A long, dusty brown extension cord powered it and a portable heater.”   Alone in a cold living room, Jerry was living the antithesis of Brownie’s great dream for herself and her young son.

Brother, I’m Dying, by Edwidge Danticat

(New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, 269 pages, $23.95)

Reviewed by Janet Parsons

           I am an Edwidge Danticat devotee, but I admit that when I first held a copy of her latest release, I felt a flash of apprehension.  Would the story be set in the Krome Detention Center, where, I knew, Danticat's uncle had met his untimely death?  Would the title phrase symbolize Haiti's plea for a cessation of ruinous embargoes and invasions?  But, quite the reverse, I found this memoir to be a celebration of life, a tribute to the author's two father figures: her natural father, Mira, and her uncle, the Reverend Joseph Dantica.

          Brother, I’m Dying has what I look for in a good read – the perspective of a different culture or a glimpse into history, enriched with imagery that can capture the essence of a moment.  Danticat constructs her narrative from events she witnessed, information from official documents, and "borrowed recollections of family members" and recreates a cohesive account of "a few wondrous and terrible months."

          In the sixties, President Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes drove Mira from Haiti. A shoe salesman, Mira guarded the store’s genuine leather shoes from Macoute thievery and displayed three-dollar shoes instead, which he first kneaded and softened. The author explains, with a singular mix of anxiety and humor, that it was this “experience of bending shoes all day and worrying about being shot that started him thinking about leaving Haiti." Mira’s older brother, Joseph, later travels to New York to visit Mira and his family and to receive treatment for his throat cancer, returning to Bel Air, in Port-au-Prince, to attend to his church and family.

Soon after Joseph’s return from one of these visits, in 2004, a crisis occurs, when his neighborhood is invaded by two military groups.  The SWAT-style CIMO squad of Haiti’s post-Aristide provisional government, cooperating with a UN “peacekeeping force,” enters Bel Air in pursuit of chimère street gangs.  The author recreates the clamorous scene: Gun “blasts … sounded like rockets,” and in protest, the residents pound on pots and pans, “making clanking noises, a purposeful rattle [that in Creole was] . . . bat tenèb,” or “beating the darkness,” while the UN soldiers bulldozed barricades and walls, picking up some of the men in the neighborhood.

We witness this event through the author’s narrative and the eyes and ears of her Uncle Joseph, who obsessively records events in his pocket notebook.  We see close up, as Joseph huddles on the floor with his family.  Later, masked soldiers dressed in black break in on Joseph’s church service, aim assault rifles at quivering parishioners, and then shoot into the streets.  After they leave, a second wave of horror begins, that of people wailing, “Amwe, they shot my son. . . . My father’s dying. My baby’s dead.”  Joseph subsequently goes into hiding and eventually makes his way to Florida to seek asylum.  This would be his final journey to the United States.

That Danticat writes with no tone of anger intrigued me, as I could not manage such restraint.  With calm grace, Danticat describes how the stories of her father and her uncle are interwoven with Haiti's trauma. As in other Danticat works that I have read, The Farming of Bones and Krik? Krak!, where political upheaval batters Haiti and its citizens, the author shows her gifts as a storyteller. After reading Brother, I’m Dying, I understood better the family origins of Danticat's art.   Telling the Rapunzel story when Edwidge was a child, Granmè Melina’s voice would “grow shrill with excitement from the dangers that might lie ahead for this young girl,” an early lesson in drama.  The controlled voice of her writing style seems to show the discipline of her father and her uncle.  Uncle Joseph kindly edited the letters that young Edwidge wrote to her father in New York. The author recognizes the classic format of her father's letters, as well as the double entendre of his comment upon his presenting her with a typewriter: “This will help you measure your words … to line them up neatly.’’

During a visit to New York, Joseph called Mira, when cancer was blocking his airway, and whispered "Brother, I'm dying."  This memoir could be viewed as a handbook for the acceptance of death, which has been a large part of the author’s life.  She was one of the children who verified that Granmè Melina had died, on a morning after she had been telling them bedtime stories:  “The eyelid did not snap back by itself, so Bob had to lower it with the same index finger with which he’d raised it. By then we were all sure.”  We learn the wisdom about death imparted through stories that Danticat heard in her childhood, “Tell my daughter that when one is alive, one is alive, but when one is dead, one is dead.”  As the narrative draws to an end, Joseph and Mira have died, but Danticat has given them indelible life in this memoir.

Janet Parsons, a native Vermonter, is an editor in the Pathology Department at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina. Her master’s thesis is entitled Haiti, Through a Glass Darkly.