King Of The Grill

Part 1-The recluse

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In the old days, when the Weber grill still needed hyping, its inventor used to pose for the catalog, tongs in hand, tending to the meat. One memorable publicity photo from that era shows him sitting cross-legged and wearing a souvenir-ugly straw hat at a faux barbecue luau, all dignity scattered to the winds.

But the inventor, now 69 and a resident of the Long Grove area, has not put his mug in the catalog for 15 years and has refused to give interviews for nearly 10. He even turned down the 'Today' show, said an apologetic company spokesman. 'He`s a very private man,' the spokesman added. 'He travels a lot. And, well, he just doesn`t like interviews.'

This makes him the Garbo of the grill, the Pynchon of the patio accessory, the Salinger of the steak-cooking device. And can we blame him?

Hasn`t he done enough? Hasn`t he changed the face of summer by forever altering man`s fundamental relationship with raw meat? Hasn`t he worn the silly hat? And hasn`t he now passed the tongs to a new generation?

What is left to say? To you? To me? To that parvenu, Debbie Norville?

Part 2-The mystery

Every so often, the grill company`s vice president of sales and marketing, Mike Kempster Sr., meets someone at a party who says, 'You work for Weber? What a coincidence! I recently sat on an airplane next to the Mr. Weber of the Weber grill.'

Shades of fraud! There is no Mr. or even Ms. Weber among the 500 employees of the Palatine-based Weber-Stephen Products Co. In fact, the last of the descendants of the Webers who founded the original Weber Bros. Metal Works in Chicago in 1887 left the company many decades ago.

The late George A. Stephen was running Weber Bros. in the early 1950s when his son, also named George A. Stephen (not George A. Stephen Jr.), and namesake invented the famous grill, which the company boasts has become the world`s most popular grill, in various forms inhabiting an estimated 15 million back yards.

So why isn`t it known as the Stephen Grill? Or, as it was briefly named, George`s Kettle?

The answer: failure of nerve.

Young George thought he could make a success of his new barbecuing device, but when he formed a new division of the company, he called it Weber- Stephen Products Co. in case he failed and had to return to more conventional metal work, where the Weber name was firmly established.

The newfangled grilling appliance gained public acceptance, but slowly, and by the late 1950s, when Stephen the Younger was at last sure his venture would succeed, the Weber name was, again, darn the luck, firmly established.

A less cautious, more egotistical man might have said: 'At last, my shot at immortality. Let`s change the name to mine.' But not George A. Stephen. He remained loyal to the old name, and thus he is now destined to remain the answer to a very hard trivia question.

Part 3-The legend

Today, the Weber grill seems so commonplace that it may come as a surprise that it had to be 'invented' at all. Did someone invent the frying pan? The cutting board? Well then.

But, according to company lore, there was indeed an epoch-making moment in 1951 when George Stephen saw two halves of a steel buoy being manufactured by Weber Brothers and thought, 'What if . . . ?'

The Weber Brothers plant was on West Madison Street in Chicago somewhere near where the enormous Claes Oldenburg baseball bat stands today. Workers there turned sheet metal into various useful shapes on a lathe in a process known as spinning, and George Stephen was then a salesman for the company and jack-of-all-trades.

Stephen, like so many other suburbanites, was at the same time having trouble with the open brazier barbecue in the back yard of his Mt. Prospect home: inconsistent flame, uneven heat, too much smoke and so on. He reasoned that if he cut a few ventilating holes in the buoy pieces, then stuck legs, a handle and a wire cooking screen in the appropriate places, he would solve his problems.

It worked. So well, in fact, that Stephen, with a proselyte`s zeal, began rigging up similar grills for interested friends and neighbors.

In 1952, he began selling his grills in modest quantities as George`s Bar-B-Q Kettles, and he kept that name for several years while testing the notion that there might be a substantial market out there for a better barbecue grill. His father, again according to secondhand sources, thought the future was in more conventional metal works, and so, in 1955, the young inventor formed a barbecue division of the company and located it in Wood Dale. In 1956 he came out with his first catalog.

The Custom Bar-B-Q Kettle Model BK 710 in that offering bears a striking resemblance to today`s One-Touch Kettle Model 71001, the classic, flagship, familiar Weber grill. The price back then was $46.95-outrageous! five times the price of other backyard cooking devices!-and gave the product a certain snob appeal as well as the informal nickname the Cadillac of Grills.

Its other nickname at the time was Sputnik, because of the strange satellite-like shape. Barbecuing then was still a more adventurous and chancy sort of thing than now-the measure of a man and all that-and Weber employees from the top down worked hard getting out the word that their product made it much easier. They put on numerous hey-anyone-can-do-it demonstrations at home shows and shopping centers, posed for amusing promotional photographs and backed up their blitz with 'Charkey,' a cartoon cook who dispensed recipes and helpful advice.

Charkey has since been retired, in part because barbecuing has become such a mainstream activity. The Barbecue Industry Association, based in Naperville, reports that 82 percent of family households now own barbecuing equipment and there were an estimated 1.7 billion 'barbecuing events' in the country last year. They expect even more in 1990, said a spokeswoman,

'because of the whole cocooning trend.'

Part 4-The nerve center

The executive and manufacturing headquarters for the privately held Weber-Stephen Products Co. are tucked away behind a molded products factory in a corner of Palatine called the Sellstrom Industrial Park. The company has been called Weber-Stephen since 1960, when George A. Stephen bought out his father and devoted the company exclusively to barbecue products.

He left Wood Dale in 1966 for Arlington Heights, then moved to the still- larger facility in Palatine in 1980, which employs 11 family members. The corporate wing today is remarkable chiefly for the number of barbecue grills in odd corners where other businesses might display plants.

A bright-red spanking new charcoal kettle is the centerpiece of the reception area. Mike Kempster Sr. has one of the original, podlike grills next to a copy of this year`s model in his office. Out in the secretarial area are several grills here and there, most notably a hideous lime green model attached to a serving cart with wheels.

'We don`t make these anymore,' said Kempster, patting it on its offensive dome. 'In the 1970s we had a lot of bright yellows and bright greens because that was the trend in outdoor furniture. We follow the trends very carefully, we don`t dictate them. Today, we`re looking at the emergence of more gray and blue tones.'

The lime kettle was called 'The Gardener.' The copper-colored kettle was 'The Warrior.' Names for other colors and sizes of grill included 'The Statesman,' 'The Gourmet,' 'The Imperial,' 'The Penthouse,' 'The Fleetwood.'

In 1980, however, the company dropped nearly all the elegant designations for its charcoal grills because they had meaning only to the company salesmen who could keep them all straight. Instead Weber began using only four names:

'Bar-B-Kettle,' for the basic model; 'One-Touch,' the basic plus a cleaning device; 'Smokey Joe,' for the tiny picnic model; and 'Ranch,' for the jumbo grill that can cook 19 whole chickens at once.

Part 5-The flops

Lime green grills do not mark the only or even the greatest misadventure in Weber history. The biggest failure, in fact, was the kettle-shaped gas grill, introduced to a yawning public in 1971.

Gas grills are a lot easier to use than those that require the lighting of charcoal briquettes (did you know, by the way, that auto pioneer Henry Ford, a man bold enough to name a product for himself, first developed the briquette in the 1930s?), and Weber-Stephen thought the best way to enter this burgeoning field was to trade on consumer identification with the distinctive shape of the Weber kettle.

'We tried and tried and tried, but it never took off,' said Kempster, looking sadly at a vintage Weber catalog. 'Finally in 1985 we said, `Heck with it.` '

Since August 1985, the company has had much better luck marketing its non-kettle-shaped 'Genesis' line of gas grills to compete with the Broilmasters, Charmglows, Ducanes, Arklas and Falcons of the world.

Another Weber pratfall was boating grills. Nautical photographs on the walls at headquarters attest to George Stephen`s interest in sailing, and twice so far he has failed to find a strong market for a gimballed galley grill that remains level in choppy waters, presumably so that yachtsmen can get queasy on freshly turned pork chops.

The Weber electronic insect killers never took off either, nor did the battery-operated fire blowers, the lanterns, the charcoal chests and the exhaust hoods that allowed (crazy) people to barbecue inside. The Weber birdfeeders are history, too, though even now the last of them are sitting on the loading dock in Palatine.

Weber offshoot products that have endured include Webergrabber tongs and other barbecue tools, Weber mesquite and hickory chips and the Weber portable fireplace.

Part 6-Changing times

In the 1960s, Weber sold an accessory for Asian-style cooking and called it 'The Coolie Pan.' Today it is 'The Wok Pan.'

Part 7-The process

The main body parts of Weber kettles begin as flat, shiny circles of low- carbon steel that arrive at the plant from a metal blanking company in Chicago. The steel is sprayed with a lubricant, to help it bend more easily, then placed in stamping machines that force the circles into bowl shapes with up to 800 tons of pressure.

A succession of machines then trims the edges, rolls the edges under and stamps in the ventilation holes, without which the fire would die and you`d end up serving steak tartare. Big spot-welding machines then affix the leg mounts and the handles, then the naked kettles enter a conveyer-style washing machine to remove the lubricant.

Meanwhile, other workers are stamping out and otherwise preparing such accessories as ash catchers, vent covers and One-Touch cleaning levers.

From the washing machine, the kettle parts travel on hooks back up above all the machines they have just been through and into booths where they are sprayed with porcelain enamel. The spray appears dirty gray until it is cooked on, at which point it becomes shiny black; other colors require a second trip through the oven.

After a once-over from quality control inspectors, the oven-fresh kettle parts go back on the overhead conveyer for a stately ride to the packing area, a faintly absurd spectacle, all these disjointed barbecue parts seeming to float along like something out of a cow`s bad dream.

In the packing and final assembly area, a 30-person crew unites the lids and bowls, till rust do them part, screws the handles on and otherwise turns a jumble of parts into a Weber. The wire grills themselves come from an outside manufacturer, as do the wheels, drip pans and various other minor attachments and accessories.

One last machine glues the boxes shut, and off they go to the 12-bay loading area, ready to be sold for a retail price of around $70, now not so outrageous.

Part 8-The devotee

'I`m sure there are other brands of grills, but Webers are just made better,' said Robert Killian of Evanston, an advertising executive who does not work for Weber-Stephen, but probably should.

His family owns seven Webers-the big, the small, the charcoal, the gas;

the-first string, the reserves. They cook out five nights a week, year-round. 'Why would you want to cook on a stove or in an oven?' Killian said.

'That would be silly.'

He bought his first Weber 25 years ago, and began accumulating them in 1977. But as much as he is ga-ga for barbecuing, even he didn`t like Weber`s gas kettle. 'It really was not a terrific product,' he said sadly. 'It seemed to attract spiders.'

Part 9-The competition

Not everyone in the world is excited about Weber grills. Monica Holland, product manager of Char-Broil, a division of the W.C. Bradley Co., Columbus, Ga., says that Weber products are 'overrated and overpriced' in her experience, and that her company`s rectangular CB-940 model is, in fact, 'the Rolls-Royce of grills.'

It offers a lower door Weber doesn`t have that allows the cook to add charcoal during cooking, Holland said, it has four legs to Weber`s three, it comes with side shelves, and-and-it rolls on casters.

Sales manager Tom Boyett of Meco Corp. in Greensville, Tenn., another competitor in the charcoal grill field, says Weber is better known than the others only because it advertises more and that his rectangular Meco 4400 grill is actually the superior product.

'You can move our cooking grid up and down to get your steaks closer to the coals for searing, if you want,' he said. 'You can`t do that with a Weber. And you can also tilt our grill surface so a medium-rare and a well-done steak are ready at the same time.'

As for Weber`s claim that the kettle shape makes for better heat distribution, Boyett snorted, 'What`s shape got to do with cookin`?'

In 1976, Weber dropped the slogan 'The Best There Is' in part because the company was tired of defending itself against every feisty Tom Boyett who came along. The marketing slogans are now 'It`s Great Outdoors' and 'The One, the Only.'

Part 10-The restaurant

In Wheeling, exactly 11.2 miles from the barbecue plant, is the Weber Grill, a novel dining establishment managed by Weber-Stephen employees. The cooks there grill most of the entrees on actual Weber charcoal kettles, though their commitment to verisimilitude does not extend to wearing aprons that say 'Kiss the Chef.'

Dining out would seem to be the antithesis of the barbecue`s raison d`etre. Yet diners appear to feel no shame taking vicarious pleasure in watching the barbecuing process through windows in the kitchen. They can also enjoy the gallery of historical Weber photos on the walls near the restrooms and take home souvenir Weber satin jackets, Weber baseball hats, Weber coffee mugs and ashtrays shaped like teeny Smokey Joes.

The moderately priced restaurant has been thriving since it opened in February 1988, according to Kempster. The vision, yet unfulfilled, is for Weber Grills to open in other major cities.

Part 11-The future

Their mission is a secret, their projects under wraps, but tucked away inside Weber-Stephen headquarters is a six-person research and development team.

King Of The Grill Embroidery Design

'They`re testing products, doing a lot of cooking, working on the next generation of grills and trying to make things more sophisticated and easier to use,' Kempster said.

We can only imagine: 'Hey, what if we set the steak on its edge?'

King Of The Grill Svg

'What if we put the meat under the charcoal?' 'Let`s barbecue some oatmeal!'

King Of The Grill