The Smell of Success

Plastic artificial roses that actually smell went on sale at Macy's this week. The man who put the fragrance in the flowers is Jack Barry, onetime master of ceremonies and co-owner of Twenty One and Tic Tac Dough.

Barry has not been able to get a TV job since a congressional committee sniffed at his quiz shows, found the smell was far from rosy. But in happier days, when he was earning as much as $200,000 a year and had sold his shows to NBC for $1,000,000, he invested $50,000 in a small Manhattan chemical firm, the Fragrance Process Co. It was founded in 1952 by Alfred Neuwald, 64, a Hungarian-born chemist who used Barry's money to perfect a pellet to impregnate plastics with hundreds of different fragrances.

When his TV jobs folded, Barry became Fragrance's executive vice president, invested another $50,000, and went to work to sell his product. He persuaded the American Botany Corp., biggest U.S. maker of plastic flowers, to try the pellets. The company now buys 2,000 lbs. a month to scent 1,200,000 flowers with a fragrance that is said to last more than four months. Barry signed Texas Plastics Inc. of Elsa, Tex. to scent its plastic bags. The response was so good that it is planning to turn out some 100 million scented bags this year, chiefly for packaging clothes and bedding (cedar scent) and for wrapping hosiery in perfumed sacks.

Barry sees the time coming when almost all polyethylene bags will be scented to match the product enclosed, even to spinach, orange and other odors for foods. There is even a better scent for mousetraps: one Midwestern maker has ordered pellets to give his traps the scent of chocolate or bacon, which mice prefer to cheese.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.