ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, June 3, 1996 TAG: 9606040001
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO AP. 1. THE HOME
DATELINE: UNTINGTON, N.Y.
SOURCE: TED ANTHONY AP NATIONAL WRITER
Tupperware came on the scene 50 years ago, a plastic convenience that became a staple of another post-World War II institution - the suburb. And the home party's still a popular way of marketing it.
On a cool spring evening, in a kitchen on the edge of one of America's original suburbs, Patti Tupper is busy preparing to live up to her name.
She opens a closet and smiles. On five shelves sit nearly 180 labeled, stackable plastic containers brimming with everything from Quaker Oats to white chocolate chips to light brown sugar.
``I guess it's pretty obvious - I love Tupperware. There's not much I don't have,'' says Tupper, no relation to founder Earl Tupper but enthusiastic enough to be.
Tonight, Patti Tupper is about to play hostess to an American tradition: the Tupperware party.
For five decades, since Earl Tupper molded some innovative plastic cups and bowls and figured they'd sell better if they brought suburban housewives together, Tupperware has been a fixture on the national landscape.
Today, its maker estimates it can be found in 90 percent of the nation's households. And Patti Tupper, who lives in an immaculate Long Island home with her husband, Jeff, her 5-year-old daughter, Cori, and a breathtaking view of Huntington Harbor, is but the latest to fill the role of Tupperware party hostess.
She is far different than her counterparts of a generation ago.
Unlike most housewives of the 1950s, Patti Tupper is a full-time investment banker in Manhattan. Unlike many housewives of the 1950s, she must balance family and career. And, unlike some housewives of the 1950s, she has more to fill her life than a plastic bowl's burping seal and a lifetime guarantee.
Tupperware - a piece of the foundation of the American suburb - is a housewife's domain no longer.
``This is a product for the woman of the '90s - women who do everything,'' says Roseann Stephens, who will be selling the Tupperware on this night.
Six people are invited, all women. Except for one who is slightly older, all appear between the ages of 30 and 50. This, though, is the kind of crowd where you don't ask.
A silver tray of brie, strawberries, grapes and water biscuits is laid out on one end of the dining room. On the other sits a basket filled with eight varieties of crudites, including three colors of peppers.
No one touches it. The women consume only chablis, from huge brandy snifters. Many are still dressed up from the workday.
They get together for this sort of event once a month, they say, whether it be for Tupperware, Shaklee home products or Longeberger handmade baskets.
``There's nothing better than having six women in the room. You have six times the energy,'' says one guest, Lois Denino, a stay-at-home mom who left a bank job and now distributes Shaklee, a line of creams, cleaners, lawn care products and other household materials.
``This isn't just about buying Tupperware,'' she says. ``We wouldn't do this if we didn't enjoy it.''
In 1967, when a family friend leaned into Benjamin Braddock's ear in ``The Graduate'' and whispered, ``Just one word - plastics,'' Earl Tupper was already 21 years into making Tupperware one of the best-known plastic products of the postwar generation.
Tupper, a chemical engineer, founded a plastics company in 1938 and devised a way to adapt defense technologies by purifying a bad-smelling byproduct of oil refining into smooth, supple, extruded plastic. He named it after himself and put it on the market in 1946 as the ``Wonderlier Bowl'' and the ``Bell Tumbler.'' It sold reasonably well.
Then, in 1948, Tupper pulled a new being from the Fuller Brush Man's rib - the Tupperware Lady. She was someone who could bring together housewives trapped in the suburbs with little to do but mothering and housework.
They'd get together to talk, socialize - and buy Tupperware. The home demonstrations, quickly dubbed Tupperware parties, worked so well that, by 1951, the product was pulled from store shelves entirely.
``Suburbia was a strange, new, insecure place,'' design critic Thomas Hine writes in ``Populuxe,'' his social history of the 1950s and 1960s. ``Tupperware added a ritual, the party, which helped new suburbanites deal with the insecurity and loneliness that was part of their pioneering lives.''
Women also wanted jobs.
``This gave them an opportunity to make a very good income and hone their skills working with people,'' says Tupperware USA President Gaylin Olson. His mother began selling Tupperware in 1956, and he started at age 16.
Today, 50 years after it was introduced and 13 years after Earl Tupper died, his product is both omnipresent and - because of its absence from stores - strangely invisible.
Tupperware is sold in offices, by youth groups, in 60 foreign countries and on the Internet. The company has marketed kimchi containers in South Korea, tortilla keepers in Mexico and rice receptacles in China.
Tupperware parties are held everywhere from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and 800,000 people sell Tupperware across the world - 5 percent of them men.
Nearly 85 million human beings worldwide attended a Tupperware party in 1994, and the company reported net sales of $1.3 billion that year. Tupperware, based in Orlando, Fla., has been a subsidiary of Premark International Inc. for nearly a decade but is breaking off this summer to be an independent company once again.
The Tupperware party changed the face of sales, becoming the prototype for all sorts of in-home demonstrations and marketing among acquaintances - from lingerie and facial cream to baskets and sex toys.
``Tupperware made it friendly,'' says Rudolph Lewis, president of the National Association of Home Based Businesses in Baltimore. ``It wasn't just a stranger at the door anymore.''
And what the friendly face brought through the door lasted longer than anyone expected.
Today, old Tupperware is passed to the next generation or snapped up at garage sales. The art world - in keeping with the post-Warhol tendency of elevating the ordinary - considers Tupperware something of a treasure.
Vintage pieces and some new items reside in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
That pleases no one more than Morison Cousins, Tupperware's vice president of design. ``Sometimes,'' he says, ``I really find myself saying, `This is a charming vegetable peeler I'm looking at.'''
A 25-year-old San Francisco artist named Tony Meredith goes a step further. He trolls garage sales for vintage Tupperware pieces in pastel colors and uses them to fashion retro lamps that cost $175.
Absurd? Barney's, one of New York's top department stores, doesn't think so. Last winter, it allowed Meredith's lamps to share a window display with featured Vera Wang gowns. All but one sold.
``It's fascinating to me to use such a plain item that was done right in the first place,'' he says.
In Patti Tupper's paisley-wallpapered dining room, Roseann Stephens holds court before an attentive audience. A half-hour into her 50-minute presentation, the brandy snifters require refills. The women are crunching the ice at the bottom and beginning to giggle.
Stephens, who distributes Tupperware to all of Long Island, is in full live-infomercial gear, her hands caressing the Tupperware on the dining room table with the same care Vanna White uses to turn letters.
``I know you're busy every day with families, on the go,'' she tells the women. ``So here's some tumblers.'' She passes out 30-ounce ``Thirstquake'' cups for all.
``Free gifts'' have long been a Tupperware party fixture. Everybody receives at least one item; the hostess gets scads. Patti Tupper will end her evening with a set of tumblers, a frying pan ensemble, microwave divider dishes, Tupperware refrigerator magnets and a pink tea-bag squeezer.
Stephens, nary an ``ah'' or an ``um'' interrupting her flowing Long Island delivery, talks up the three-dozen items on the table. Each description seems more enthusiastic than the last.
n``More of the items are for the microwave - that's the trend we're moving toward. These days so many of us are busy and just want to come home from work and be convenient.''
n``If you're looking for a double-sided dish, this item'' - pause to hold it up - ``is the answer.''
Stephens, 39, married with two children, appears every inch the sleek suburban woman. Her hair, her turtleneck, her miniskirt, her scarf, her hose are all jet-black. Her jacket is bright yellow.
She first sold Tupperware in 1985. In February, named one of the company's top saleswomen, she was promoted to distributor. Now she supervises 33 managers and more than 250 salespeople.
``I can be at home with my kids and be there when they come home at 3 in the afternoon,'' Stephens says. ``And I can still be successful.''
She won't say how much she earns, but the company says sales consultants - the notch below Stephens - can earn 35 percent of gross profit plus incentive gifts by selling to friends and acquaintances.
Patti Tupper still has the high-school cheerleader demeanor and the looks to go with it. In a pink minidress with white stockings and a matching bow, she lights up the room when she grins. She uses Tupperware in all 11 rooms of her house, she says.
She grew up in Greenwich, Conn., an affluent New York suburb, and in 1993 married Jeffrey K. Tupper, a Huntington native she met at the Manhattan bank where they work.
Jeff Tupper walks in at 7:39 p.m. with briefcase in hand. He smiles and makes tracks into the bowels of the house, venturing out only when the presentation is done.
The women socialize throughout, interspersing Tupperware comments with talk about families, careers and Heloise-type hints. Then the subject shifts.
``Sally has a date tonight.''
``With who?''
``I don't know. It's at TGI Friday's.''
And then it's back to Tupperware.
``I love the QuickShake. That is the most wonderful thing,'' says Patti Tupper. ``It's great for chocolate milk. It's the greatest thing in the whole A world.''
The enthusiasm is partially - but not completely - for the Tupperware.
``You get together, have fun, have food and when it's done you have to put your leftovers into something with a blue top,'' says Anne Hawes, Tupper's next-door neighbor.
``The Tupperware,'' she says, ``is almost secondary.''
LENGTH: Long : 182 linesby CNB