My family has a secret in our closet, but it's not a skeleton, which is not to say there are no skeletons in our family's closets because there are plenty. My Uncle Johnny is the focus of this article and he was written up in a prestigious magazine called Men of Science (now called Men and Women of Science) for his discovery of the formula for Natural Real Ice Tea!
He graduated from University of Toronto, Canada in the 50's and after being a professor for Food Chemistry he got a job at headquarters of Lipton's Company in Paramus, New Jersey. He did manage to come up with a formula that much of the world eats now but in the 60's was only called Lipton's Instant Cup a Soup, but wasn't great enough to make the Men of Science magazine.
One day at lunch he was strolling in the grocery store and notice Nestle had an Instant Tea labeled "REAL ICE TEA" on the shelf, so he bought it and took it back to the lab at Liptons. Quickly he noticed that REAL it was not. So he went upstairs to the VPs office and told him about it. The VP told him to come up with a REAL Ice Tea before anybody else. Which he did!
Lipton's lawyers wrote Nestle's lawyers and told them to stop saying they have REAL Ice Tea because it's not and Lipton's does. Thanks to Uncle Johnny the world now has not one but two delicious products that people eat and drink at levels of Coca Cola and Chicken Soup.
With a family member that invented a food and drink billion dollar products in his short career as a Food Scientist that at the end of his life he would have a billion or two to leave his nieces and nephews, as he was never married, but we all got an equal share of $11,459.00.
To Uncle Johnny morals seemed to be worth more than money, because when he saw the cancer causing chemicals Lipton's and other companies were putting into their products he called it quits and lived out his life detached from the real world, which he knew as corrupt and dangerous.
I will add more details of this fascinating story in later posts. Thanks for reading!