It is no doubt a well known fact, but one that bears repeating -- one of the most familiar, and beloved food products in the entire world is Kool-Aid, developed right here in Southwest Nebraska, at Hendley, by Edwin Perkins, the uncle of McCook's Frank Shoemaker.

Edwin Perkins was born in Iowa in 1889, but moved with his family to Hendley at an early age, when his father bought a General Merchandise Store in Hendley, southeast of McCook. It was a family operation. The family's living quarters were in the back of the store and every member of the family had his duties in making the store a success.

Young Edwin had an inquiring mind and proved to be a real pest in his mother's kitchen, as he was constantly experimenting with various household ingredients in an attempt to invent new products for the family. At age 11, he ordered a Junior Chemist's set from a mail-order house and began to develop his own line of useful products -- from perfumes to flavoring extracts to healing salves for people and animals.

In high school Edwin got a bit more serious about making and selling food products when he sent away for a mail order kit, "How to Become a Manufacturer." One of the girls in his school, Kitty Shoemaker, who would become Edwin's wife, introduced him to a delicious new powdered dessert mix called "Jell-O." It proved to be a good seller in his father's store and probably was the product he fashioned his own signature product after -- years later.

As a teenager, Edwin worked in his father's store and must have answered a lot of ads in magazines. One of these ads, "Start a print shop in your own home. Make money," led to his buying a small hand press and a few fonts of type. Then in the loft adjoining his grandfather's "Haymaker's Livery Stable," he launched his mail order business, offering for sale small bottles of perfume and calling cards (which were in common usage in the early days of the 20th century). He used his printing press for making labels, premium catalogs and other printed supplies. The entire country was his market.

Upon graduation from high school Edwin embarked on several ventures, which he needed to pay the bills, giving him time to develop his mail order business. In 1909 he started a weekly newspaper in Hendley -- The Hendley Delphic. In 1914, he was named postmaster for the Hendley Post Office, and soon after that he started the Hendley Telephone Exchange (The façade of that building is now in the Hi Plains Museum).

In addition to his many and varied duties in the community, he kept busy experimenting and developing new products to offer through his mail order business. And, he kept in touch with Dr. George Shoemaker's daughter, Kitty, who through the end of World War I was teaching "out west."

Through letters, Edwin made some quite outlandish claims -- that if she would only become his bride he would provide for her beyond her wildest dreams -- because he was going to be a very rich man. Somehow she believed the young dreamer, and came back to Hendley, where they were married.

In Hendley, Edwin developed a salve, made from petroleum jelly and carbolic acid and a few other ingredients, which sold quite well, and was the basis of most of his business. (Frank Shoemaker says that the salve was really quite wonderful, and very healing for sunburn, other bums, insect bites, and a healing ointment for wounds. For many years the salve had a prominent place in the Shoemaker medicine cabinet.)

In 1920, Edwin and Kitty made the decision to give up his various Hendley positions and concentrate on Edwin's inventions, They moved to Hastings, with Edwin's parents. It was here that Edwin established Perkins Products Co., a mail order business, with some 125 items for sale -- flavorings, spices, toilet preparations, medicines, and household products, including FruitSmack, a liquid fruit flavored concentrate

While Perkins had modest success with a number of products, it was Fruit Smack that proved to be his most popular item. His problem with the liquid Fruit Smack was that the bottles were heavy to ship and too many bottles broke in transit. His solution to the problem (in 1927) was to remove the liquid from Fruit Smack, pack the resulting soft drink powder in a vacuum pack, and change the name, from Fruit Smack to Kool Ade (later Kool-Aid). (Merrill Ream of McCook says that his grandfather was a Perkins distributor in Hastings and was disappointed when Perkins discontinued the liquid product and changed to a dry powder.)

By 1931, the Kool-Aid business had grown to the extent that the mail-order line was discontinued, and the entire operation was moved to Chicago to be more in tune with a nationwide system of distributors for the product. Originally, the packets of Kool-Aid sold for 10 cents each. During the depths of the Great Depression Perkins lowered the price to 5 cents a pack, which proved to be a godsend to millions of cash-strapped Americans, and almost overnight Kool-Aid became America's drink -- a tasty affordable sweet treat for those troubled times.

By 1950, some 300 Perkins production workers were turning out a million packets of Kool-Aid each day. Every summer 225 million gallons of Kool-Aid, 17 gallons every second, were consumed. In 1953 Mr. Perkins sold his Kool-Aid business to General Foods, which merged with Kraft Foods in 1989.

In looking back on "Uncle Edwin's" career, Frank Shoemaker believes that Edwin made a few great moves that changed his business from a modest success to one of the great business success stories of our time.

First, of course, he developed a good product, Fruit Smack. But he changed the form of that good product into a dry product, in a vacuum pack, which was light in weight, and didn't break.

He kept his product line simple and manageable. He had a genius for merchandising and developed promotional stands and ads, which enabled the stores that used his product to sell it successfully.

Perhaps his shrewdest business move was to sell his company to General Foods, which had a much greater distribution network. GF promotion of the product world-wide, and their royalty agreement on each pack of Kool-Aid did indeed fulfill Edwin's promise to Kitty of a very comfortable life.

Frank Shoemaker remembers almost annual family summer vacations to Chicago and later to Florida with Uncle Edwin and Aunt Kitty. Edwin was a dedicated Chicago Cubs baseball fan and these trips always included afternoons at Wrigley Field. Frank's father and Edwin were old friends from the days in Hendley and would regularly sit up most of the night, trading between talks of old times and dreams of the future.

Edwin and Kitty did not have children of their own, but remained close with their Perkins and Shoemaker relatives. And they never forgot their Nebraska root. They visited here often, and through their Perkins Foundation they were instrumental in funding many projects. In and around Hastings, they made substantial gifts to Hastings College, Mary Lanning Memorial Hospital, Good Samaritan Retirement Village, the Hastings Museum and the Museum's Lied Super Screen Theater.

Southwest Nebraska continues to show the beneficial effects of the Perkins legacy through the various Shoemaker businesses and The Shoemaker Foundation.

Edwin Perkins and Kitty returned to Nebraska one last time, to be buried in Hastings, Edwin in 1961, Kitty in 1977.

They have been gone for many years now, yet their memory is invoked every summer, each time a young entrepreneur hawks a frosty fruit flavored drink from his/her neighborhood Kool-Aid stand

Source: McCook Museum of the High Plains archives and Personal recollections.