Right now, I’m at a stage in my life where it’ll be a good three or four decades before I begin religiously checking the obituaries for “death notices,” informing me that a good number of my friends have shuffled off their mortal coils. However, since the Internet at the Coffee Emporium is on the fritz and they have free copies of yesterday’s Cincinnati Enquirer lying underneath the airpots of coffee, I am willing to check the obituaries for writing fodder. I could have paid a $1.50 for today’s Enquirer, but, as I have stated many times, the Enquirer is a journalistic abomination whose only redeeming qualities consist of the daily crossword, the comics, and movie listings, which don’t justify doling out a dollar and a half. Plus, not to sound too callous, but dead folk are going to be just as bereft of life yesterday as they are today, if not more so.
Granted, I did not set out to write this article about the obituaries, but am doing so out of necessity. I thought I would be able to get some funny snippets from the “Your Hometown Enquirer” section, but, alas, all I found were little pieces on local academic achievement and Memorial Day parades. So I turned to the Obits and saw a headline that arrested my attention:
“Fredric J. Baur was designer of P&G’s Pringles container.”
My initial reaction of smug amusement quickly turned to one of mild depression. This man who spent 89 years on this earth will be remembered, if he is at all, as the guy who created a cardboard cylinder into which Proctor & Gamble could put potato chips. Then it dawned on me that this man had been deemed the most successful and prosperous person to die in the Greater Cincinnati area on that day, according to the Enquirer. Now, what’s more unsettling: The fact that inventing a potato chip container is seen as the crowning achievement to a man’s life, or that no one else had any accolade to match it?
All of these thoughts, to some degree or another, passed through my mind just as I was reading the obituary’s headline. When I actually got to the article itself I became bewildered and, ultimately, incensed:
“Dr. Fredric J. Baur was so proud of having designed the container for Pringles potato crisps that he asked his family to bury him in one.”
Those are the first words of this man’s obituary and, while they may seem laughable, are for me quite disturbing. A man desired to be buried in a Pringles can, a can you can find on the shelves of any Circle-K or IGA across the country. How deep was this man’s emotional attachment to a casing for a snack food that he wanted to rest for all eternity inside of it? Part of me hopes that this was simply senility kicking in and that his request was made with all the sound judgment of a six-year old, but something tells me he genuinely wanted to buried in a Pringles can. That leads to even more absurd questions like what type Pringles can he wanted to be kept in. Would he choose regular because that was the only one P&G sold when he first designed the can or would he go with his favorite flavor: “We have lovingly placed the deceased in this can of Sour Cream & Onion Pringles. They were the only flavor that…I’m sorry…that when he popped, the fun indeed did not stop.”
What you might not have caught in the opening of Fredric J. Bauer’s obituary is that he was a doctor. Not only was he a doctor, he received his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from Ohio State. I cannot think of a harder degree to get than a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry. Basic classes in O-Chem are what send med-school students into semester-long bouts of lunacy where they remember nothing save waking up three months later in their dormitory, weeping uncontrollably while clutching their report card amid a pile of laundry that reaches the ceiling. Shit, I’d bet even money that 95% of Congress isn’t smart enough to get a PH.D. in Organic Chemistry, and the Enquirer buried it in the seventh paragraph. Dr. Bauer also was an aviation physiologist in WWII, testing out the medical effects of flying on pilots. That information wasn’t given until paragraph eight. His work with the National Presbyterian Church didn’t make it until the very end of the article. Oh, but the fact that he developed a fucking freeze-dried ice cream for Proctor that didn’t even sell well was important information about this man’s life that we needed to know right away.
My internship this summer is with an advertising company and it is part and parcel of the reason why this man’s obituary is so tragic. I could just go on a rant telling the Cincinnati Enquirer and the woman who wrote the article to go play in traffic, but it would be giving short shrift to a larger problem endemic to our society. We are a grossly consumer culture that has spun out of control to the point that bright men and women start to believe that promoting a snack food or a dish soap is something to be proud of and, in some cases, proud enough to judge your entire life’s worth by it.
But I could just be flat-out wrong. I’ll probably never look at a can of Pringles without thinking of this man being buried in one, so he’s found a small way to live on. I just hope this isn’t a trend because I don’t want to be constantly thinking about dead folks when I’m at the grocery store.
