Opinion - Columns - Bill Morem

Published: Thursday, Sep. 10, 2009

Bill Morem: The story of the Pop-up Turkey Timer

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In the grand scheme of things, it may not be the most complex or farthest-reaching of inventions. But when you consider that the device has been implanted in billions of breasts, its importance is both sublime and magnificent.

I speak of the Pop-up Turkey Timer, that humble but pivotal player that in one form or another has revolutionized Thanksgiving dinners for almost 50 years.

OK, so this story may have been better played closer to Thanksgiving, but after getting an e-mail from Judythe Guarnera of Grover Beach saying that her husband, Steve Kliewer, is the son of the man who patented the pop-up timer, well, the story became timeless.

It became even more so when I remembered that my esteemed colleague Lon Allan had opined in a March 3, 2009, column that it was HIS father who had developed the pop-up. What are the chances that two sons of Pop-up Turkey Timer inventors would live in the same county?

And who rightly deserves credit for creating the pop-up? Harry Allan or Goldie Kliewer? On this last question, it appears there are several contenders to the crown of being remembered as Pop-up Turkey Timer king.

• • •

Steve Kliewer is a precise, articulate man who wears silver-rimmed glasses, his graying hair and moustache neatly trimmed. He laughs easily and often, but can laser in on a technical bit of data that befits his talents as both an engineer in the private sector and physics and mathematics teacher at Paso Robles High School.

Steve, brother Mike, mom Barbara and dad George (known as “Goldie” for his once flame-red hair) lived in the San Joaquin Valley on a turkey farm that was once a World War II airport. A couple of apartments were built in the hangar for living space, as well as enough area to store tools, feed and all of the stuff that turkey farmers need. One of those needs was a workshop.

A workshop is key on any ranch. This is the place where farmers go to machine new, or fix broken, farm implements. Their skill is such that most farmers and ranchers can rebuild anything from fences to plows to tractor manifolds pretty much out of baling wire and gum. It’s a source of pride as well as economics.

Goldie Kliewer and his fellow turkey ranchers were no exception to that rule. They were born tinkerers.

The boys, known initially as the Inventors’ Club and later as the Commodities Marketers, would gather at Goldie’s hangar and chew the fat on inventions, going so far as having a box that collected their various ideas on how to make a home brew beer kit, wine kit and fishing kit.

All of these inventions were tinkered on in Goldie’s workshop; all of them discarded.

• • •

Another area of their interest, as the boys were all members of the California Turkey Promotion Advisory Board, was how to improve turkey production and the bird’s image with the consuming public.

A driving concern to turkey growers in the 1950s and ’60s was how to make sure a turkey was cooked to the point that salmonella was killed off, but that the resulting bird wasn’t so overcooked that it had the texture of old brogans. So the boys — who included Goldie, Lon’s father, Harry, Herman Winters, John Roberts, Bob McPherrin and Gene Beals — tinkered with the conundrum, some as active partners, some as silent.

Barbara’s hangar-home-kitchen became ground zero for test-roasting untold numbers of birds, with the boys leaving the mess behind. They promised her a solid gold Cadillac for her forbearance when they struck it rich.

By the early ’60s, as Goldie homed in on a patent that was to become known as the Temperature Indicator, the Inventors’ Club had become Commodities Markets Inc. And by the time his first patent was filed on Nov. 12, 1964 (No. 3,693,579), the hangar was home to Dun-Rite Manufacturing Corp.

The Dun-Rite Pop-up Turkey Timer zoomed in production, outgrowing the hangar and two other larger buildings. Through Norbest Turkey Processing Plant — which inserted the timers in millions of its birds — markets were expanded to Sweden, Canada, Japan and Denmark.

Dun-Rite had done so right that it attracted the attention of 3M Company, which bought the outfit in 1973.

• • •

Over the years, an odd thing has emerged: Some of the original members of the Inventors’ Club, like Gene Beals, tinkered some more with the pop-up timer and filed their own patents on the device, lightly mentioning Goldie’s contribution, if at all.

“You don’t patent an invention,” says Steve with a shrug, “you patent a bunch of ideas. You have to tie up as many ways as you can in order to have exclusivity.” Which means there may be other sons and daughters of Pop-up Turkey Timer patentees in the county.

And, oh, Barbara never got her solid gold Cadillac.