Ron Popeil, the hypnotic TV pitchman Ron Popeil made a fortune hawking such offbeat yet oddly clever contrapt - Los Angeles Times

With a sales technique honed as a sidewalk hustler, hypnotic TV pitchman Ron Popeil made a fortune hawking such offbeat yet oddly clever contraptions as the Veg-O-Matic and Mr.

As he pioneered, in the middle of the 20th century, what became known as the infomercial, both Popeil and his fervently promoted products became part of the pop-culture landscape.

Popeil, who helped create many of the gadgets he sold, died Wednesday night at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, his family said in a statement.

Popeil’s gated Beverly Hills home was partly a shrine to silly-sounding devices that the silver-tongued Popeil sold over and over with such signature lines as “But wait, there’s more!” and “Isn’t that amazing?”.

Years before he sold his company, Ronco, for $55 million in 2005, Popeil — pronounced “poh-PEEL” — insisted he had moved more than $1 billion worth of merchandise.

“What Henry Ford was to industrial strength and genius, Ron Popeil is to the next generation of American ingenuity,” Robert Thompson, a professor of television and pop culture at Syracuse University once told the Associated Press.

Without Popeil, “there’d be no home shopping channels, no ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up’ Medic Alert gadgets, no Clapper,” John Mingo, editor of “The Whole Pop Catalog” told USA Today in 1993.

Relatives never visited, he later said.

His paternal grandparents claimed the brothers when Ron was about 7, and they lived with an aunt in Florida before moving to Chicago with their grandparents when Popeil was 13.

His grandparents fought constantly and his grandfather was mean, Popeil later said.

In Chicago, Popeil began discovering his family heritage while working weekends at Popeil Brothers, founded by his father and an uncle in 1939.

“He was mesmerizing,” Mel Korey, his first business partner, told the New Yorker in 2000.

When a friend told him that he could produce a commercial for about $500 at a Tampa, Fla., television station, Popeil made a two-minute spot in the mid-1950s for the Ronco Spray Gun, a high-pressure nozzle that was one of the few products he sold that he did not help create.

He bought whatever time he could find cheaply on local television stations and sales soared.

“TV made the way for me,” Popeil told Inc.com magazine in 2009.

A few years later, he starred in and filmed another commercial for the Chop-O-Matic — another product invented by his father.

For some time, he and his father ran separate public companies that sold similar merchandise!

The younger Popeil, who was married four times, admitted to spending too much time on business.

Infomercial icon Ron Popeil lists Santa Barbara ranch.

Inventory and infomercial icon Ron Popeil is selling something new: his 150-acre Santa Barbara ranch, which just listed for $4.9 million.

When Ronco’s trademarks and inventory were auctioned off a few years later, Popeil bought them back for about $2 million.

He launched his return to television in the 1990s as a born-again practitioner of the 30-minute infomercial, which had mainly been developed during his absence.

Popeil sold food hydrators and pasta makers — and claimed to make more money than ever.

When he sold Ronco in 2005, he said he wanted to spend more time with his two young daughters.