Longtime Presto Chairman Brought SaladShooter, FryBaby to the Masses

By STEPHEN MILLER

National Presto Industries Inc. introduced the home pressure cooker at the 1939 World's Fair. The company's longtime chairman, Melvin S. Cohen, believed in his flagship product so firmly that his dinner often required three of the contraptions to prepare.

Under Mr. Cohen's leadership, the Eau Clair, Wis., appliance company developed dozens of household gadgets, including the FryBaby and the SaladShooter. For every winner there were numerous duds, like the ChipShot potato chip slicer.

Mr. Cohen, who died Dec. 16 at age 90, stockpiled the company's cash in between expensive product rollouts. From 1994 to 2000, Presto had at least 70% of its assets in investment securities. The Securities and Exchange Commission subsequently demanded that it register as a mutual fund but lost an appellate court decision in 2007.

An attorney trained at the University of Minnesota, Mr. Cohen worked at the Office of Price Administration and the Civil Aeronautics Board before joining the National Pressure Cooker Co. in 1944. The company had put kitchen tools on the back burner during the war while concentrating on munitions manufacture for the government.

After the war, pent-up consumer demand for pressure cookers drove rapid expansion. The company tended toward vertical integration, doing its own tool-and-die work, printing and shipping. In 1946, Mr. Cohen married Eileen Phillips, daughter of the company's largest shareholder.

In 1953 the company began concentrating on the burgeoning consumer market for appliances. It introduced the first steam iron to use tap water, and then in 1956 had a big hit with a submersible electric frying pan, the first of a long line of submersible appliances.

By now an expert on patent law, Mr. Cohen negotiated an agreement with the Farber family that prevented a potentially destructive court battle over a similar Farberware product. He was named Presto's president in 1960 and chairman in 1976.

Under Mr. Cohen's leadership, Presto developed its own products and avoided debt while continuing to produce munitions as American involvement in Vietnam scaled up.

"One of Dad's guiding principles: Thou shalt always have a war contract," says Maryjo Cohen, who succeeded her father as chairman in 2002.

The focus returned to consumer goods in the 1970s, when Presto scored big with the PrestoBurger and FryBaby, appliances designed for making McDonald's-style meals at home. Presto had another hit with its slicer/dicer SaladShooter, introduced in 1988, and another with the TaterTwister in 1991.

Despite strong sales, the company didn't have a major new introduction after that, and the stock price stayed flat for years. By 1999, Presto had built a cash reserve that attracted the interest of shareholders, the SEC and the New York Society of Security Analysts, which issued a report calling for greater accountability at the family-dominated company.

Seeking to invest the cash in new products, Mr. Cohen in 1999 issued a public appeal in Inventor's Digest that generated 565 proposals, including a motorized jump rope.

"Realism necessitated rejection of all but 43," he wrote. "None survived critical analysis."

In droll letters to stockholders -- he single-handedly penned the annual corporate report starting in the 1940s -- Mr. Cohen stressed competent corporate governance and the company's unbroken string of dividends (set to extend to a 65th consecutive year, Ms. Cohen affirms).

Notes Ms. Cohen, "Just about all our competitors have merged or gone out of business. We're the last of the independents."

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