Gobel

"O, Dunderbeck, O, Dunderbeck, How could you be so mean,

As to invent that horrible thing, A sausage-meat machine?

For alley-cats, and hounds, and rats, Will never more be seen;

They've all been ground to sausage-meat in Dunderbeck's machine."

Vulgar rhymes of this sort have long cast a quite unmerited mal-odeur upon the sausage business, and perhaps no man was more sensitive to the unfortunate effect of balladry than the late Adolf Gobel, sausage manufacturer. While recognizing, of course, that the Dunderbeck of the song was an entirely legendary figure, he could not do other than deplore the attitude of people who actually believed that when they ate liverwurst, bologna, or a bit of scampf, they were partaking of pulverized canine cadavers. Some thirty years ago this Adolf Gobel, who has done more, perhaps, for the sausage business, than any other man of his era, went about Brooklyn with a wicker basket.

The basket contained sausages.

He sold them to housewives. He noticed that people in apartment houses ate more sausages than other people. (The reason was simple--it saved cooking.) He noticed also that more and more apartment houses were being built, and putting two and two together he decided that an increasing number of sausages was going to be eaten in Brooklyn in the next thirty-five years. He started a sausage factory. The business grew to include not merely sausages but the whole line of delicatessen products. Today the name, "Adolf Gobel, Inc." on these products is an assurance of the highest excellence. Last week a Wall Street group purchased, through Hitt, Farwell and Co., the Adolf Gobel Co. for $2,500,000, reorganized it under the same name. Thus they assure themselves of an $8,000,000 yearly turnover.