The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
K-Tel creator and pitchman pioneer Philip Kives
One of North America’s best-known and most frenetic TV pitchmen, Philip Kives, has died aged 87.
Mr Kives, whose name is pronounced Key-vuss, was the founder of K-Tel International, which has hawked items including the Veg-o-matic vegetable slicer, the Miracle Brush and compilations of pop and classical songs.
He died peacefully on Wednesday in a hospital in Winnipeg, Manitoba, said his daughter Samantha Kives.
His survivors include three children and his wife of 45 years, Ellie.
Mr Kives was born on February 12 1929, on a small dairy farm near the village of Oungre in Saskatchewan, according to a brief biography on the K-Tel website. His parents fled persecution of Jews in Romania and Turkey before emigrating to Canada in the 1920s.
He was the third of four children in a home without electricity or running water.
“We struggled on our small farm, living on welfare for many years, as did other farmers in our area,” he wrote in his website biography.
He finished high school and stopped his formal education there.
He moved to Winnipeg and worked as a taxi driver and short-order cook before discovering his destiny by selling cookware, sewing machines and vacuum cleaners door to door.
Later, he travelled to Atlantic City and found work demonstrating products in a Woolworth shop.
“If you did not produce, you were out of the Woolworth Store in a flash,” he wrote.
“I was a keen observer and learned the art of demonstrating a variety of products.”
Back in Winnipeg in 1962, he decided to sell to the masses by producing a five- minute TV commercial for non-stick frying pans. Sales exceeded his best hopes.
From then on, he focused on TV advertising for household products and later compilations of music, including Twenty-five Polka Greats and Hooked on Classics.
Diversifications into oil, real estate and other businesses didn’t always work out.
K-Tel reported a loss of $33.8 million in the year ended June 30 1984, and made a bankruptcy filing in October of that year.
Mr Kives reorganized the business and went back to his roots in TV marketing.
He acknowledged his fallibility as entrepreneur in a 2006 magazine interview.
“One of the biggest mistakes I ever made in my life was having 13 relatives working for me,” he said. an