Working for Union Carbide

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"I went to work for a company called Union Carbide. This company had a division called the Visking Division, and this division would make skins for skinless wieners. There was a man who noticed that America was buying more and more hot dogs. By the way, do you know how they make hot dogs? They stuff meats into…a casing, something to hold it. And originally, they would use animal intestines for that, so there just weren’t enough animal intestine to make all the hot dogs that America was gonna buy. So this man found a way to make skins...for skinless wieners, and he made them out of cotton linters, okay?

Ah…skin, the cotton is cellulose, cellulose is indigestible. So when they made these nice wieners…you can’t eat the cellulose. So these guys were very good marketers. They said, 'Look, we have skinless wieners!' Not because you’re getting something better, but because you couldn’t eat it. And so they used the skin to make the wiener, and then they would take the skin off, and you probably don’t remember anything but skinless wieners.

Later on…my company was bought out...and we were transferred from the original location in Chicago to New Jersey, and then when I went to New Jersey, I began to travel all over the states, and all over the world, selling our product, not really selling it, showing people how good our product was and how to use it, and it took me to a lot of places: Europe, America, Japan."