Oscar Mayer, Dies at 95

It’s just one of those business stories that goes unnoticed. In a week when we mourned and yet celebrated the lives of celebrities … a man, the offspring of German immigrants, employing thousands and selling more hot dogs than anyone ever sold CDs, passes with little notice. Apparently it’s just the way he wanted it.

The business was founded by his grandfather, Oscar F. Mayer, a Bavarian immigrant who started his career in 1873 at the age of 14 as a “butcher’s boy” in a Detroit meat market. Ten years later Oscar, along with his brothers Gottfried and Max, opened a meat market, according to the Kraft web site. It was one of the first companies to volunteer to join the then-new federal meat inspection program. Oscar F. Mayer died in 1955 and Mayer’s father, Oscar G. Mayer Sr., died in 1965.

Mayer’s death underscores the human element of business that gets lost in today’s world of mega-mergers. Consumers forget that there people named McDonald —actually they were brothers — who operated a burger chain that Roy Kroc acquired and made famous. The Ford family still plays an active role in the Ford Motor Co. (F) and the Sulzbergers control the New York Times Co. (NYT). But these are the exceptions.

Maybe I’m making too much of it. Maybe it’s because my grandfather Jake immigrated here as a teenager at the turn of the last century from Croatia and started his own successful meat business. Maybe it’s story after story of immigrants from Croatia or Germany or Mexico or Cuba or Tibet or China, or Vietnam or, or, or … who arrive with nothing and make something, create capital, help grow an American economy, and no one notices … until they are gone.

There’s a lesson in Mr Mayer’s life. A lesson.