Sponsor (Nov 1948-June 1949)

Minn i* tin* mi ii 1 1 i mi i wz im immv 01 IT WAS PILES OF CORN COBS LIKE THESE THAT PRODDED ART SEBRING INTO DOING SOMETHING ABOUT TURNING A WASTE SEZ: saga of American ingenuity I lio wonder story of Art Sebring and a mountain of corn cobs ^||^ Into the two-by-four kitchen ^^^ffl of his small cafe in Minne^B^^ sota's Redwood Falls marched Art Sebring recently, armed with a sack of corn cobs from a nearby seed corn plant, his grandmother's family recipes, and a bright idea. Sebring. a 51-year-old, barrel-chested, bifocaled Minnesotan with the pioneer spirit of a Horatio Alger hero, was making his latest effort to create something useful from what was generally regarded as being useless. Back in the days of the early Florida land boom, when he was an aggressive young man of 27, Sebring had been a partner in a construction firm that transformed an Orlando swamp into a race track. Later, in the early L930's, Sebring had built an oil refiner} in the middle of a rural communit) in Idaho. At the close of World War II in 191,-). Sebring tackled the housing shortage in Redwood Falls b) building low cost (,\ homes ($3,500-$12,000) from lumber ■ Hi from an old coal <l< »<k. some railroad water towers, and several outmoded grain elevators thai lie had dismantled and hauled to Redwood Falls. He had started, too, an auto-parts salvage him. geneiall\ lelt to siw the motoi i-ls of his communit) a total oi $250,000 annually. \ full of sage counsel foi youth a Benjamin Franklin, Sebi ing rei entl) looked around at the econom) ol the communitj ami snorted: "You young fellows give up too easy. Nothing is impossible . . . it's just that some things take a little more figuring!" As he started a cooking fire under a pan full of corn cobs, fresh from the waste pile of the DeKalb Seed Corn drying plant, Art Sebring was off again. In his mind was a picture of his grandmother, a pioneer spirit who had moved her family from the maplesugar bush country of Michigan to a farm in South Dakota. She had grown up in an area where maple syrup was plentiful, cheap, and a kitchen staple. In South Dakota, things were different. Maple syrup for the family's waffles and buckwheat cakes was literall\ an imported luxury. Grandma Sebring got busy with some corn cobs, sugar, and flavoring in her kitchen one day. The result was a corn-cob syrup that smelled vaguely like molasses, but which tasted and had a color like maple syrup. From time to time. Art Seining had thought about putting his grandmothers recipe I which became somewhat famous in a local ua\ I into commercial production. In earl) I'M1', lie was read) to tr\ . He tried out samples ol his tesl batch on neighbors, who poured it liberal!) over the flapjacks that form the basis ol so main winter breakfasts foi hard-working Minnesota families. Everybod) liked it. Seining -enl oil some -ample of his con coction to the University of Minnesota for analysis. The tests were extremely encouraging, and gave the corn-cob syrup a clean bill of health. A private chemist, hired by Sebring. now beginning to feel the excitement of a new project, backed up the findings of the Imiversity. Sebring decided then and there, on the basis of the tests and the good reaction he had gotten from his homemade "consumer panel," that he would take the plunge and put the corn-cob syrup his grandmother bad invented on the market. Sebring needed a name for the new product, something that sounded short and snappy. something which any housewife could remember. He decided on the name SEZ, which seemed to fill these specifications, and then moved the infant syrup business out of the kitchen of his cafe and into temporary quarters in a neighboring building that stood vacant during the winter and spring months. It was at that point that Seining ran head-on into a problem that has plagued mam a small manufacturer, anxious to bring out a new product on the consumer market. SEZ had no sales Force, no distribution, no advertising, and no acceptance. \rt Seining could not go ahead expanding his Operation until there was some assurance that the product would go Over with the public. He had to introduce 2" SPONSOR