Any ad agency will tell you that to successfully sell a product you need the right face for the job. For Maine potatoes in the mid-20th century, that face belonged to one boy whose wholesome image helped put Maine spuds on plates from here to Florida. Jennifer Mitchell has the story of this marketing icon and his life after advertising.
William Findlen of Fort Fairfield has been many things over his 85 years. Visitors to the town's historic block house might know him as the guy who shows them around the fort. A generation of vocational students might know him as the teacher who volunteered his time to educate them about farm equipment mechanics. And many of his neighbors know him as a successful potato farmer.
But hundreds of thousands more would know him as something else. "I was the Maine Potato Boy, yes, yes," Findlen says.
And as Maine Potato Boy, Findlen's job as a child was to market potatoes to the masses.
Film Announcer: "One-seventh of the nation's potatoes are grown here. Most of them in some 400,000 closely cultivated acres in one county."
Back in the 1930's, a few years before this film was made, Maine table stock potatoes were struggling for market share against potatoes from Idaho, Connecticut, and Vermont. A few Maine legislators decided that it was time to get serious about advertising. They proposed spending $25,000 on a potato marketing campaign.
But taxpayers complained. And then, Sen. George P. Findlen, William's dad, had an idea.
"So he developed a way to tax the farmers - I think it was a cent a barrel of potatoes. And that was the bill that he put through - it did get passed," Findlen remembers. "The farmers were very unhappy about it. Didn't like George Findlen anymore."
But with the money raised through that potato tax, the state hired a New York advertising firm, which chose young William as its face. Stores were soon stocked with life-size displays of the boy in a red neck-kerchief and straw hat. Leaflets and bags were printed with William's picture. And a series of ads appeared in homemaking magazines promising women that Maine potatoes were "easier to peel" than other types and wouldn't cause weight gain either.
Today, a boy in his position would probably get a signed contract, maybe an agent. "I didn't even know what they were doing at the time," Findlen says, "but I dressed up as a country boy, and had red hair, and freckles."
Jennifer Mitchell: "What was the image that they were going for? You know, like marketing?"
William Findlen: "I just think it was sort of that, the potatoes were grown on a farm - you look at him and he's a farm boy."
Jennifer Mitchell: "Is that how you remember yourself?"
William Findlen: "Yes! Yeah...and young!" (laughs)
Findlen's image was used into the 1950's. The wholesome farm boy image wasn't an act. Findlen was the youngest of 10 children. All of the family's food came from their Fort Fairfield farm. And when his father butchered a steer, there was plenty left over for bartering. "And he'd take it down to the local grocery store and trade it in for other things that were needed, molasses, salt and pepper, that sort of thing," Findlen says.
Later, Findlen got his first agriculture job working once again in service of Maine potatoes for the very firm that had created the first ad campaign using his likeness. But this time, it was Findlen's job to travel up and down the East Coast, setting up marketing displays in grocery stores, and performing quality control on the product.
There was also a new addition to his job description: potato enforcement, "investigating at the markets, places that would be dumping Connecticut potatoes into Maine bags. And that sort of thing," he says.
Jennifer Mitchell: "And did you actually bust anybody doing that?"
William Findlen: "We didn't have any way to bust 'em anyway. All we did was, you know, recommend they stop."
Jennifer Mitchell: "Obviously, Maine potatoes must have been - the name must have been worth something."
William Findlen: "Yes. It was. I think because of the advertising that was being done."
Findlen eventually went home to the family farm in Aroostook County. He's now 85 years old. He's been married to the same woman for 64 years. And he's now - reluctantly - retired from potato farming. He currently rents his land to another grower.
"I wear a pickup out just going around the farm, seeing what's going on, what's he's doing, that sort of thing," Findlen says. "I enjoy that very much, and watching how good a potatoes he's growing, and how good a farmer he is."
Jennifer Mitchell: "Are you a backseat farmer?"
William Findlen: "I'm a backseat farmer, yes." (laughs).
