Inventions for Pets

Cat litter, it could be argued, kicked off the pet products industry. After its invention in the 1940s, other inventors started to come up with products that today are standard in the homes of people with pets.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 2:07Holly Frey?

  Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

• 2:18Holly Frey?

  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey.

• 2:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

• 2:23Holly Frey?

  Tracy, you're a pet person.

• 2:25Tracy V. Wilson?

  Uh huh.

• 2:26Holly Frey?

  Many of our listeners are pet people, we know, because they send us pictures of their adorable animals. So if you step into any pet store today, you're kind of inundated with so many clever products to make caring for your animals easier or to improve their well-being. But this is actually a pretty new industry. The idea of a pet store didn't really exist until the late 19th century, and that was when Victorian England started to be more and more interested in keeping animals in the home instead of as livestock or like an outdoor collection. And then from there, this idea of companionship pets as sort of a, something to be acquired, spread to the US and the rest of the world.

• 3:10Holly Frey?

  But even so, those early shops were really about selling the pets themselves with a few care products like that you would need to support that thing to live. So the idea of a store filled to the brim with merchandise that's engineered expressly for use with pets did not really happen until the mid 20th century. And perhaps the most well-known story of an invention intended to help pet lovers and make their lives easier is kitty litter. This one has some problems in modern thinking that we will talk about. But kitty litter, it could be argued was what kicked off an entire new industry.

• 3:49Holly Frey?

  So today, we are going to talk about the origin of cat litter, as well as other products that many of us probably have in our homes right now. And we're going to start by talking about the man who is credited with the invention of kitty litter, and that is Ed Lowe.

• 4:03Tracy V. Wilson?

  So Henry Edward Lowe, who went by Ed, was born on July 10th, 1920 in St. Paul, Minnesota.

• 4:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  When he was still young, his family moved to Marcellus, Michigan. Ed was not a good student. He'd had to repeat the fourth grade. He later attributed this to not being interested in his coursework. Ed's father was a serial entrepreneur. That's S E R I A L, in case you think we're about to talk about breakfast food. Ed learned to value the idea of figuring out ways to make money for yourself rather than working for someone else. This was something that Ed embraced early on as a way to have money for his own purchases. And so he found all kinds of ways to generate an income, including newspaper delivery, scrap metal sales, and pest control.

• 4:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  And then as he got older, he worked in his father's businesses.

• 4:58Holly Frey?

  As a young man, Ed served in the Navy during World War II. And when the war ended, he returned to Michigan and started working at his father's company in the town of Cassopolis. This was a business that sold sawdust and wood shavings for a variety of industrial absorbency uses, so things like absorbing oils, spills, and machine shops, et cetera.

• 5:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  There are multiple versions of the story of how he invented kitty litter. According to the most common, one cold January day in 1947, 27-year-old Lowe was working at his father's shop and a woman named Kay Draper came in. She had an indoor cat, but according to this story, the sand-filled litter box she used for this cat had frozen. She hoped to purchase some sawdust from Lowe to use as a litter box substrate.

• 5:52Holly Frey?

  Okay, if you're like me, the frozen sand story immediately brings up questions. But there may be an answer if we look at the state of litter boxes at the time. One, a lot of people were not yet keeping their cats indoors with a litter box, so it was kind of a new thing. Using plain sand and sawdust was pretty standard at this point for those rare houses where people did keep their cats inside. So none of those substrates were clumping. So a box that used sand or sawdust could potentially retain liquid and freeze if it were in a cold enough spot. It is very possible if it were kept somewhere like a garage or a utility room that it could easily get cold enough in Michigan in winter to freeze.

• 6:35Tracy V. Wilson?

  And in a case, Lowe later claimed that he had a bolt of inspiration in the face of Draper's dilemma. For a long time, his father had offered bags of sawdust for soaking up oil spills in places like mechanics' garages. But the company had just introduced another material that did the job better, and that was granulated clay. This was clay that had been dried in a kiln to the point that it would crumble. And with all the moisture removed from the naturally porous clay, it became really absorbent. This was great at handling oil, so Ed thought that it might also work for Kay Draper's cat. She took a bag of it and went home.

• 7:16Holly Frey?

  Then, according to this version, a week later, Draper was back, asking for more of that clay. She found that it worked way better than sand or wood shavings, and she wanted to switch her cat over to it completely. So Lowe sold her another bag, and then he decided to try selling more bags to see if other people liked it. He loaded up 10 sacks with the granulated clay, labeled them. Sometimes this is written as or described as him using like one of those oil crayons that get used for marking things in shops and labeling it as kitty litter. And then he tried to get a local pet store to carry these bags, and the store was not interested.

• 7:57Holly Frey?

  So Lowe asked if maybe they would be willing to give them away to customers to try. And those 10 customers were the start of his new business. I didn't find any claims as to the number of how many of that 10 returned to the store asking more of the clay litter. But according to a story that Lowe told many times, enough of them wanted more that he figured out how to launch a division of the family business around it.

• 8:21Tracy V. Wilson?

  Another story came up in a newspaper from 1955. That article, published in the Kalamazoo Gazette, was all about how Lowe had expanded his business beyond cat litter. But that article also includes this excerpt, which makes it sound like a lot less of a scrabbly spur-of-the-moment idea. Quote, "Lowe's kitty catering all started because some friend of his wife's asked him to crawl under the front porch in the dead of winter and get sand for her beloved cat's box. I got it, but I did a lot of thinking afterward. I knew there must be a better product than sand for that job. There was. It was a clay once used to filter impurities out of petroleum products.

• 9:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Lowe and his chief assistants, Tony Friesel and Bob Bollett, started bagging it by hand. We called it kitty litter. At the time, we had to almost give it away. Now there is a big demand. We have about 10 men strip-mining the stuff for us near Perry, Tennessee, and it's all packaged automatically." I'm not sure if that's really supposed to be Paris, Tennessee, where there is some mining in the area, but Perry is what it says in the article.

• 9:34Holly Frey?

  Yes. In a 1985 version of the story that appeared in the LA Times, the details were once again a little different. This one stated, quote, "In 1947, a neighbor asked him for a cat box filler. She had been piling ashes in her cat box and was tired of a house full of sooty paw prints. She asked for sand. He suggested the absorbent clay." Quote, "More to get rid of her than anything else." So that sounds very different. But from there, his story was more or less the same as the one in which he said he labeled the 10 bags of clay himself and took them to a pet store.

• 10:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  Then, one more story, which appeared in the Washington Post in 2015. That version states, quote, "One day in 1947, his father received a sample shipment of a new clay product, but he was already loyal to a different brand. He would have nothing to do with this order of clay and left it in their storage garage. It sat around until one of Ed Lowe's acquaintances, Kay Draper, asked him if he knew of any good absorbents for pet waste."

• 10:41Tracy V. Wilson?

  So according to this version, the problem was not a frozen box of sand or ash footprints. It was silica dust because Draper's cat was tracking this dust all around the house. And Lowe suggested that she could use the Fuller's Earth that his dad had not been interested in using.

• 10:56Holly Frey?

  So regardless of which of these stories is accurate, and it's possible none of them is actually how Lowe's invention happened, kitty litter's slow start did not last long. Ed started driving around with stock, taking it to pet stores and attending cat shows as an exhibitor. And then over the course of several years, his business grew to the point where he actually needed a warehouse and a distribution process as a wholesaler. He acquired that warehouse from his father's company. In a 1949 write-up in the Delaware County Daily, there's an interesting write-up that cites another man that we mentioned earlier, Robert Follett, who I think was called Bob in the article that Tracy mentioned just a moment ago.

• 11:40Holly Frey?

  And this article mentions him as being Lowe's partner. The men are listed together in that 1949 write-up as originators of kitty litter. It's a bit unclear what happened to that relationship, but the two gave a joint statement to the paper at that time, saying, quote, "All we need is good business science, right promotion, and the cooperation of a few million cats." The cats definitely seemed to cooperate. Kitty litter was available in supermarkets by 1954. By the time that 1955 article that we cited earlier was written, so just a little more than eight years after its invention, kitty litter sales were expected to top $1.5 million.

• 12:22Tracy V. Wilson?

  Even so, it was still a new enough product that ads continued to explain what it was. One in 1955 stated, quote, "Kitty litter is a specially-produced material which provides a new and better solution to a problem confronted by owners of cats. In short, it does away with the daily unpleasant messy sandbox routine. Unlike sand, it dries and deodorizes, and unlike sand, it is not harmful to your pets, and it's inexpensive."

• 12:53Holly Frey?

  Lowe soon recognized that if people were willing to spend money for kitty litter, they were probably willing to spend money on other items for their cats. And we'll talk about how he expanded his business based on that idea after we pause for a sponsor break.

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• 13:41Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:10Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:22Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:33Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 14:40Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:22Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 15:45Speaker 06

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• 16:46Holly Frey?

  In the mid 20th century, cats were not generally pampered in the ways that are very commonplace today. Once cat litter caught on, quote, "We made a list of every conceivable item a well-groomed cat could use and rated them as to importance." "We keep our cats at the local veterinarians and test each product on them first to determine acceptance."

• 17:10Tracy V. Wilson?

  Low also cited one particular cat as the true determiner of whether a product moved forward from testing to production. Though there was a group of cats cared for by a veterinarian, there was also a cat at the Low offices. Those offices were run out of a home that had been converted to business use. And that cat, a Red Point Siamese named Impy, got to test and approve a lot of the innovations that are probably in your home if you have a cat. Impy tried out cat toys, catnip, scratching posts, and cardboard scratch pads, and other potential products. By the mid 1950s, thanks to Impy's hard work as a tester, Low had introduced his own dry shampoo for cats, flea powder, disposal trays,

• 17:55Tracy V. Wilson?

  and something called a kitty castle, which was not a multi-tiered cat condo, like the name seems like it might be. It was a small cozy decorated box for a cat to curl up in.

• 18:07Holly Frey?

  All of this was apparently in line with Low's own adoration of cats. A reporter in 1955 claimed to have been riding in a car with Low when a stray cat wandered in front of the vehicle and said that, quote, "Low came to a quick halt, hopped out, and escorted the feline across the road."

• 18:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  By 1985, sales of kitty litter and cat accessories through Low's company hit $100 million. At that time, his Low's branded kitty litter had 12.6% of the market share. Tidy Cat had surged past it to 22.5%, but that still put Ed Low on top because he also invented Tidy Cat. It was launched as a supermarket brand while he kept kitty litter as a brand for specialty pet stores. But he was also willing to spend money on research and promotion. He started spending a reported $4 million each year in research and development alone. That budget was used to both develop new products and refine the cat litters that the company already sold.

• 19:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  From the time competitors entered the market with their own versions of kitty litter, Ed worked diligently to make sure his outperformed any others. This included building a research facility that employed a full team to test litter for odor management, absorbency, and weight. He also built a cattery with a full-time population of 120 cats to use all of the products while they were monitored and cared for by a team of veterinarians and behavioral researchers.

• 19:41Holly Frey?

  In that LA Times article we cited already, Ed stated that all of his expenditures and the expansion of his product line were parts of a long-term business plan with massive goals, stating, quote, "Lowe's will not be sold. Lowe's will go on forever. Lowe's will become a billion-dollar company. We know that we can't become a billion-dollar company as a cat box filler."

• 20:06Tracy V. Wilson?

  Surprisingly, five years later, he sold the company. On September 13th, 1990, the New York Times ran a brief statement about the company changing hands, which read, quote, "Edward Lowe Industries, the maker of kitty litter cat box filler, agreed to sell its marketing and manufacturing operations to an investment group. Terms of the sale were not disclosed. The buyer is a group led by the Good Capital Company of New York and Knightsbridge Incorporated of Chicago. Philip L. Smith, the former chairman and chief executive at Pillsbury and General Foods, will become chairman of the new company, which will be known as the Golden Cat Corporation. Edward Lowe, who invented kitty litter in the 1940s, said he would retire from day-to-day

• 20:51Tracy V. Wilson?

  operations but retain an equity interest and be a director of Golden Cat. Later on, it was revealed that Lowe had sold the company for $200 million plus stock in the new company. It was eventually acquired by Ralston Purina before being purchased again by Nestle."

• 21:11Holly Frey?

  Preceding the 1990 sale of the company, it seems as though Ed Lowe's personal life got a little bit complicated. The year before his interview in which he said he would never sell the company, he and his children had a massive falling out. He had four kids and all of them, plus three of their spouses, had been working for the company for some time. And in the early 1980s, they started to claim that his behavior had become erratic. Lowe grew up poor, and once he was successful, he made up for lost time by spending his money as he wished, sometimes on relatively impractical things, like at one point, he bought an entire town. But his kids claimed that he had become more than just impulsive,

• 21:54Holly Frey?

  and they attributed the behavior to alcohol misuse. Lowe, in response, denied those accusations and accused his kids of trying to steal the company from him, and he fired them all. So this whole family was estranged for years, but they did eventually make up.

• 22:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  After he sold the company, Ed started the Edward Lowe Foundation in Big Rock Valley, Michigan. This is an organization that offers education and seminars for entrepreneurs that are past the startup phase and need to build their existing business. Ed died in 1995, but the foundation continues. In addition to its original mission, the foundation now also leads programs to research the best ways to manage land stewardship.

• 22:39Holly Frey?

  In the last several decades, there has been increasing concern about the long-term viability of clay-based cat litter. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, as of 2024, there were 73.8 million cats kept as pets in the U.S. And while not all of them are indoor-only cats with litter boxes, a lot of them are, and that has made cat litter a multi-billion-dollar market. But where is all that clay coming from? And what happens to it after it's used? Well, there are 11 states that have open pit mines that extract clay for cat litter. And that clay is a finite resource.

• 23:20Tracy V. Wilson?

  And there's an additional issue. 75 million tons of Fuller's earth, which is the clay used for cat litter and other absorbent applications, was mined in 2024, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That clay gets used once and then thrown away, which would theoretically mean that it was returning to the earth. But usually, these clays have been treated with chemicals to help them clump and resist odor, and things like fragrance have also been added. So all of that is just going into the nation's garbage dumps. Per a 2015 Washington Post article about it, quote, "The rise of commercial cat litters may even explain why indoor cat populations grew so quickly, to the point that felines

• 24:05Tracy V. Wilson?

  have overtaken canines as America's most popular pet. At the same time, cat litter has made consumers dependent on a supply chain that converts a natural resource to waste."

• 24:17Holly Frey?

  Aside from environmental concerns, one of the lasting legacies of the invention of cat litter is that it helped expand the number of households that were willing to keep cats as pets. And that opened the door to other inventions.

• 24:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  The next one is brief, because there's not a whole lot of information about the inventor readily available. But on January 11, 1968, a man named Frank L. Crowe filed a patent for the first cat tree. His patent, which was granted on November 25, 1969, starts with the following, quote, "Disclosed herein is a cat tree embodying a plurality of cat landing stations or platforms carried by a sectional pole, adapted to be mounted in a vertical position in a selected room of a dwelling, with a base engaged against the floor to hold the tree against rotation, with a spring-loaded plunger engaged against the ceiling, and with the

• 25:14Tracy V. Wilson?

  platforms covered with a rough textile material which provides a scratching claw-sharpening surface."

• 25:21Holly Frey?

  Crow's patent notes that his invention is designed to solve two primary problems. Cats ruining furniture by clawing it and cats climbing the curtains. He notes that his cat tree is a decorative accessory as well as a functional one, and that it can be matched with any decor. I have thoughts on this that any cat person that owns a cat tree might be having as well. We'll talk about it on Friday. The application that Crow filed touted the ease of assembly and how much this tree could be customized to fit the space and needs of a cat, including the addition of dangling toys to the platforms. The platforms, per Crow's design, were intended to be replaceable, so you could update worn-out

• 26:04Holly Frey?

  pieces without having to buy a whole new cat tree each time it showed wear and tear.

• 26:09Tracy V. Wilson?

  Crow also wanted the placement of the platforms to be thoughtful to enable rapid movement by a house cat from one to the other. Quote, "The invention is characterized in that the cat landing stations or platforms are of crescent shape or equivalent non-circular configuration and are arranged in angularly-displaced step succession, such as to facilitate ascent and descent from one platform to a succeeding platform, a preferred shape being a crescent shape developed by a scalloped cutaway of one side of a circular platform so as to attain a maximum aesthetic effect in the assembly."

• 26:48Holly Frey?

  And cats rejoiced. Coming up, we're going to talk about another invention that became hugely popular very quickly in helping people deal with pet messes. Dog people were coming for you. But first, we're going to hear from the sponsors that keep the show going.

• 27:07Speaker 07

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• 27:37Speaker 06

  Okay, Chicken Nugget fans, I've got huge news. The new Burger King Chicken Nuggets just dropped, and they are the crispiest, the juiciest, and the tastiest chicken nuggets ever at Burger King. Burger King heard that a lot of you didn't like the old chicken nuggets, so they got to work and reinvented them. To go along with the new chicken nuggets, a lot of the sauces were reinvented too, because better chicken nuggets deserve better sauces. We're talking new buffalo sauce, honey mustard, sweet and sour, and even a whole new option too, the new special savory sauce, which is only available for a limited time at participating US restaurants. I mean, you need to taste it all for yourself. This new chicken nugget, reinvented,

• 28:22Speaker 06

  based on real feedback, is made with 100% white meat chicken and is now better than ever. You gotta try the new Burger King Chicken Nuggets and sauces today.

• 28:33Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 29:44Holly Frey?

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• 30:26Holly Frey?

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• 30:52Holly Frey?

  So the last inventor we'll talk about today was, like the first we talked about, a man of many inventions who did very well for himself in the pet products industry. In 1960, Alan Simon opened a chain of stores in Brooklyn called Puppy City. And like most modern pet stores, these sold food and pet accessories and also offered grooming services.

• 31:15Tracy V. Wilson?

  But then in 1970, Simon decided he didn't just want to sell pet products. He wanted to invent them, and he invented a lot of them. But one of his original set of inventions became hugely popular and really served as the cornerstone for a new business, and that was the Wee Wee Pad. Similar to the way sand was supplanted by kitty litter, Alan Simon had noticed that while working in the pet retail business, that the newspaper that people often use to keep accidents off the floor while house training a puppy was not all that effective.

• 31:49Holly Frey?

  In an interview he gave in 2019, he said, "The dogs would urinate on the newspaper. So one day I got the idea of using a hospital pad. And we chemically treated a hospital pad and I came up with a seven pack and we had a TV ad for 10 seconds. It was free housebreaking wee-wee pads with every purchase. So it went from a seven pack to a 14, to a 25, to a 50, to 100. And then it went to like $25 million in wee-wee pads. Simon's invention did make cleanup from housebreaking puppies a whole lot easier and soon it was used for a lot of other things, too.

• 32:28Holly Frey?

  People use these absorbent pads under litter boxes, under food and water dishes, in carriers, and the list goes on. Their utility in so many uses helped boost their steady adoption among people with pets."

• 32:43Tracy V. Wilson?

  Simon often gave interviews to the press in which he summed up his impressive business history succinctly, but also making it clear that he had achieved a lot. In a quote he gave to Dejura Magazine while talking about the launch of the newest business, he said simply, quote, "I manufactured and invented over 200 products, including the original and world-renowned wee-wee pads and the Allen Pooper Scooper. Over the years, we grew into one of the largest manufacturers in the pet industry."

• 33:14Holly Frey?

  To manufacture wee-wee pads, Simon founded a new company called Four Paws, which also made the other pet products that he invented. He held so many patents for various items. One of the interesting things about a lot of his patents is that they are completely void of the florid language and over-explained design and function that we often see in patent application documents. Most of them follow a very simple template style of writing with a very basic name for the invention and then a description and a claim that basically add up to, "Just look at the pictures."

• 33:48Tracy V. Wilson?

  They didn't all go that way. One particular invention was an improvement on an automatic pet food dispenser and it had a lot of supplementary writing to explain it. It started out by explaining the pet food dispensers that preceded it by noting, quote, "A typical device of this type includes an elongated serving tray, which is adapted to rest on a flat surface such as the floor." A hollow storage container is secured to the tray at one end of the tray, and is raised above the bottom wall of the tray. An opening is provided in the bottom wall of the storage container to permit a dry or liquid pet food placed inside the container to drop down into the serving tray by force of gravity. As the pet consumes the food from the tray,

• 34:33Tracy V. Wilson?

  it is replaced by fresh food from the storage container. But to Simon, the problem here was that you couldn't take the apparatus apart. And as his patent application goes on to explain, loading it was a messy process. His dispenser could be taken apart, and it had a screw top lid for filling the food reservoir. These kinds of auto feeders are still common today.

• 34:57Holly Frey?

  I have one. In 1993, he received a patent for a new type of cat litter scoop. This is simply called Scoop for Cat Litter, and the claim section simply reads, "The ornamental design for a scoop for cat litter as shown and described." So this is more like what I was talking about, how the rest of them tend to be like, "None of that's, none of that's spending time writing long descriptions." This cat scoop is unique because it has prongs on its underside, so the part that would touch the litter box as you're scooping, presumably to help dislodge any clumped material that might stick there.

• 35:31Tracy V. Wilson?

  One from 2008 is simply called Dog Toy, and the claim and description are almost comedically brief. They read, quote, "The ornamental design for a dog toy as shown and described. Figure one is a front view of the dog toy in accordance with the invention, the rear view being identical thereto. And figure two is a top plan view of a dog toy according to the invention, the bottom plan view being identical thereto." The toy that's not really being described here is a ball. It's common enough to find in a pet store today. It looks like a round knot of multiple strands of some kind of material, presumably plastic.

• 36:08Holly Frey?

  Had to say presumably because that's not outlined in the patent application.

• 36:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  Doesn't really say.

• 36:15Holly Frey?

  Another that he applied for in 2010, but which wasn't issued until 2014 for some reason, was a bristled grooming glove. As the name implies, it is a glove with spines on it to groom an animal using a pet motion. So sort of a glove and a brush had a baby. Simon's version, because others had invented similar things, but his had a closure band around the wrist to keep it securely on the groomer's hand. This and the others that we mentioned are just a handful of the hundreds of designs and inventions that he came up with and manufactured. From the start of Four Paws, Simon was able to grow the company to a business that made $30 million in revenue each year. It also acquired other companies

• 36:59Holly Frey?

  that made pet products, including Cosmic Pet and Mustang Pet Products. Then in 1997, he sold Four Paws to Central Garden and Pet for $55 million.

• 37:11Tracy V. Wilson?

  In 2014, Alan Simon launched a new venture, PetProducts.com. This was an online aggregator that connected small, local businesses, like his first pet store, to customers online. The company also has directories so people could find veterinarians in their area. One of the reasons the company cited for its business approach is that while large online retailers had driven a demand for consumer convenience, when it comes to pets, people still need a local resource they can turn to for care and community. And there was a recognition that some of those small, local businesses were going to struggle if there was not a way for them to simultaneously have online sales offerings.

• 37:54Holly Frey?

  Watching interviews with Alan Simon, and there are a number you can find online, he was very obviously a straightforward New Yorker. He has exactly what you think of in your head when you think, what does a guy from New York sound like? He reportedly was very generous. He gave both to charity and just to individuals who needed a hand. He is also quoted as saying, "With determination and hard work, anyone, even a kid from Brooklyn like me with a learning disability, can be successful and make their dreams come true." Alan died on January 6, 2022. It kind of seemed like he worked right up to the end. And that is our discussion of pet products today. Uh, I have listener mail, sort of.

• 38:38Holly Frey?

  I tried to read this listener mail and I cried too many times. So you're gonna get an abbreviated, abridged description of a listener mail from our listener Erin, and I just wanted to acknowledge, Erin, your email is beautiful. I am sorry for your loss. Um, that's literally all I can say because I keep falling apart. So just know that I have read your letter and it touched me deeply. Then Erin says, "Thank you so much for all you do to entertain and educate. You keep me company on my runs and my way to work. It makes me miss my history classes at college when I dreamed of being a teacher. Life had other plans. As a pet tax, I give you Sailor, my dad's dog, but he loves me best. He's a nine-year-old standard schnauzer that loves to play catch, can jump straight up and down,

• 39:22Holly Frey?

  and is just a good boy. Thanks." This dog.

• 39:26Tracy V. Wilson?

  So cute.

• 39:27Holly Frey?

  Listen, schnauzers can be so much because they're very high energy. And I, I think Sailor is the same, but they also are some of the sweetest, silliest dogs with just the most beautiful little faces. So thank you, thank you, thank you, Erin. I'm sorry I could not read your email. Too much for my little heart, but I really appreciate you sending it. If anybody else wants to send an email and make me cry, it isn't that hard, but I beg you, be gentle. You can do that at [email protected]. You can also subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 40:12Tracy V. Wilson?

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 40:26Holly Frey?

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 40:57Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 41:40Tracy V. Wilson?

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• 42:03Speaker 08

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• 42:30Tracy V. Wilson?

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.