Will Keith Kellogg

Will Keith Kellogg, the quiet younger brother who turned a hospital diet into the American breakfast, died in his hometown of Battle Creek, Michigan, on October 6, 1951. He was ninety-one. He was born in Battle Creek on April 7, 1860, into a Seventh-day Adventist family that took food and health very seriously. As a young man he sold brooms, and in 1878 he went to Dallas to help run a broom factory. A year later he came home to work for his famous older brother, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where wealthy patients took cold-air cures, water treatments and a strict vegetarian diet. For more than two decades W. K. kept the books, answered the mail and did much of the unglamorous work while the doctor got the attention. In the sanitarium kitchen the brothers worked out how to flake cooked grain, and Will saw the business in it long before John did. He wanted the process kept secret; John let visitors watch, and one guest, C. W. Post, went off and built his own cereal fortune. The brothers then fell out over sugar. Will wanted to add it, the doctor did not, and in 1906 Will struck out on his own with the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company. History has rendered its verdict on the sugar question, one spoonful at a time. His company was among the first to print nutrition information on a box and the first to tuck a prize inside one. During the Depression he ran his plant on four six-hour shifts so more Battle Creek families would have a paycheck. He loved Arabian horses, built a celebrated ranch in Pomona, California, and gave it to the University of California in 1932; the land later became the core of Cal Poly Pomona. He poured some 66 million dollars into the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, explaining simply that he would invest his money in people. He outlived most of his children and was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Battle Creek, the town that still smells faintly of toasted corn.