While we were still basking in the glow of our growing brood, our family was also preparing for another meaningful birthday: the Post Cereal Company was marking its thirtieth year, and it continued to soar. The next New Year’s Eve found us toasting our most successful year yet, with our company president joining us for a private dinner at our home. “Colby,” Ned said, “we owe you our thanks. And Marjie, my dear, here’s to 1925.”
It was over his postdinner cigar and brandy that Ned laid out his ambitions for the coming years. Custom dictated that I should have excused myself from the dining room, leaving the men to their drinks and business talk at the table while I retired to the drawing room for the proper and ladylike postdinner tea or sherry. But both Colby and Ned knew that I wanted to be part of the company conversation, and in fact, it appeared as though my husband wished to enlist my opinions. “Marjie, it’s been thirty great years since your daddy changed breakfast for America.”
Colby and I both nodded, agreeing.
“We are now so much more than just breakfast,” Ned went on. “And we are poised to grow accordingly.” I liked how he said it—I liked that he said we would grow, to be sure, but also how he said we. Ned truly thought of my company as his, as well. We were a partnership, with my Post family legacy not a source of frustration or even embarrassment—as I’d so often felt it to be for Ed—but his cause also. Why, he’d given up the control of his own firm, resigning from that post in order to make my company his purpose, and he’d taken to it with mastery.
Ned exhaled now, a fragrant wreath of tobacco smoke encircling his relaxed smile as he said: “I’m thinking a veritable food empire. More than cereal, more than the Postum drink. We’ve conquered breakfast—let’s take on the other two meals of the day, too.”
I leaned forward in my chair. Ned was an intrepid businessman, but this…Was this realistic? Colby seemed to think so. He propped his elbows on the table and said, “Now’s the time. It’s about finding something the people not only want, but need, as well. You find something they need, then there’s no stopping you.”
“That’s it, Colby.” Ned nodded, gesturing with his cigar. “People need food more than they need oil or skyscrapers. Rockefeller started with oil, and look how he’s grown. Carnegie started with steel. No one in their right mind would claim that food is any less important—or profitable—than either of those.” Ned took a pull of his cigar, the cinders at the tip flaming bright orange, and then he turned to me, asking: “What do you think?”
Both Colby and Ned looked at me, waiting, as I considered it all. My mind swirled with cigar smoke and New Year’s champagne and memories. Thoughts of Papa and Uncle Cal and Shorty Bristol. Our Battle Creek warehouses, raking the warm wheat myself all those afternoons following school. And then my mind traveled to one particular Battle Creek morning. Papa and me walking, waving to the overworked mothers who had to hurry indoors with their daily milk jugs. Papa telling me that the American woman shouldn’t have to spend hours laboring over breakfast each day. And then, as if Papa sat there in the wood-paneled dining room with me, the thought skittered across my mind: Who was to say she didn’t want the same convenience for lunch and supper as well?
“If we’re going to think about lunch and supper, then I want to think about how we can make it easier for the American family to prepare it,” I declared, the newly formed thoughts moving quickly from my mind to my lips. “And not just with convenience in mind…Let’s think about how we can help the American woman get meals on the table with foods that make her family healthier.” I noted how both Ned and Colby sat back in their chairs as they listened. I went on, my tone as animated as I suddenly felt: “Papa started this company with those exact goals in mind. Most women do not have all of this”—I gestured around our grand room and over the long table still covered in our Sèvres dinner dishes, then toward the door that swung into my staff kitchen—“all the support I do, particularly in feeding her family. What does such a woman need? What does she want? Let’s think about it. Meals that are already prepared. And packaged. Let’s not cut the quality of the food, but let’s cut the amount of time it takes to prepare it.”
Ned raised his glass and drained the remnants of his brandy, smiling at me as he did so. “Marjie, my girl.” He hopped up from his seat, sailing toward me and pulling me up into his arms. “You’re right! You’re absolutely right. And you’re brilliant, to boot!” Colby Chester laughed as Ned swept me across the room in a makeshift waltz. “Here’s to the New Year. And to the Post Cereal Company!” Ned said.