Founded
in 1936 as Gettelfinger Popcorn Co., Preston Farms purchased the
plant in 1995 and has since taken it to the next level of creative
popcorn products.
If brothers Irvin and Herbert Gettelfinger
seem like the per-fect picture of American enterprise and can-do,
it’s probably because they are.
Beginning in 1936 with half an acre producing
almost 1,000 pounds of popcorn, Gettelfinger Popcorn Company has
expanded more than the average popcorn kernel, so that now, almost
60 years later, the company’s contracts with area farmers
cover nearly 6,000 acres, yielding millions of pounds of bulk popcorn.
The brother’s story began in 1936 when
the two were schoolboys in Palmyra, Ind. They lived with their parents
and six more brothers and sisters on a 100-acre dairy farm where
their father, Henry F. Gettelfinger, worked two other jobs to keep
the large family afloat. Herbert recalls many early, cold mornings
spent milking and says with a laugh, “That’s the reason
I got out of that kind of farming.”
That spring, Herbert, Irvin and several of the other
children wanted their dad to buy them a bicycle. But, it was the
Depression and what little disposable income there was had to go
for farm machinery. Herbert says they thought about that, and then
returned to their father with another proposition: Could they plant
popcorn?
Apparently more amused than impressed, Henry
agreed to give the children one-half acre to plant popcorn, which
they did. They harvested their popcorn and spent their 1936 Thanksgiving
holiday hand shucking and shelling with a small hand crank sheller.
But, Herbert says, when the popcorn was ready to sell, “We
didn’t know what to do with it.”
