Health, Wealth & Wheaties

The man who was easily the world's best pole vaulter a decade ago keeps neither a scrapbook nor a trophy room, cannot even remember where he stashed the gold medals he won in the 1952 and 1956 Olympic Games. Yet at 41, jut-jawed Bob Richards is as familiar a figure as most active athletes. Nobody could be happier about that than General Mills, Inc., maker of Wheaties, the breakfast yummy that Richards, one of the country's most successful single-product salesmen, enthusiastically pushes on television.

The evangelical fervor that Richards can bring to even a bowl of cereal comes naturally enough, since he is an ordained Church of the Brethren minister. He neither smokes nor drinks, and his favorite expletive is "Smoly Hoke!" Their emphasis being on clean living, the TV commercials he makes for Wheaties are in perfect character. So are the 80-odd speeches that Richards delivers on the banquet circuit each year, appearances liberally laced with a can-do gospel that is equal parts Norman Vincent Peale and Knute Rockne.

"Americans are hungry for inspiration," says Richards. "We have everything else, but we need dreams." So effective is that approach that Richards makes $75,000 a year on his Wheaties contract (plus another $50,000 or so for personal appearances), has just signed for his tenth year with the cereal.

Explorer Telescopes. The arrangement is equally agreeable for Minneapolis-based General Mills, which has always shown plenty of zeal in pushing Wheaties. No sooner did the cereal come into being in 1924 than the Washburn Crosby Co., General Mills's onetime parent company, bought into a local radio station, used it to advertise its new product. The cereal was promoted by one of radio's first singing commercials ("Have you tried Wheaties?"), a pioneer coast-to-coast radio serial ("Skippy") and some of the earliest premium offers for kids anxious to be the first on their blocks with such prizes as Explorer Telescopes. Soon after the company began sponsoring "Jack Armstrong, All-American Boy" in the 1930s, Wheaties became "the breakfast of champions"--and its profitable tie-in with sports was born.

In the early 1950s, General Mills made the mistake of downplaying Wheaties' sports image, and sales fell sharply. Reversing itself, the company founded the Wheaties Sports Federation, made Richards its director, also began turning out "how-to" films on various sports. In addition, Wheaties has stepped up its sponsoring of major league baseball broadcasts. Wheaties' sales not only ended their decline, but have increased by 21% since 1958. For General Mills, the second biggest cereal maker (its other leading brand: Cheerios) behind Kellogg, that turnabout helped push annual earnings from $14.7 million to $23.3 million over the same period.

God, Guns & Guts. Until joining General Mills, Bob Richards never earned more than $6,000 a year. Something of a neighborhood tough during his boyhood in Champaign, Ill., Richards got religion when he started going with a girl who "wanted a Christian boy friend." After high school, he attended a small church school in Virginia, where he was a star athlete, and where he met and married Mary Leah Cline (they have three teen-age children). He then transferred to the University of Illinois, where he showed equal proficiency in the vaulting pit and the classroom. Armed with a master's degree in philosophy, Richards competed in track meets, meanwhile delivering sermons around the U.S. and teaching at a church-operated college in the Los Angeles suburb of La Verne.

Richards still lives in La Verne, keeps physically fit by jogging five miles a day, exercising on his backyard trampoline or riding his palomino stallion Sun Up. The garden of his $50,000 ranch-style home is equipped with a pole-vaulting rig, and Richards claims he can still clear his best competition height of 15 ft. 6 in. He also has other interests. He owns an 8,000-acre ranch in Colorado and a film studio--an abandoned Methodist church--in La Verne.

He buys photographic equipment with a passion ("This gear really turns me on"), has already sunk $40,000 into a self-produced, partially completed western in which he stars as a frontier preacher. Its title: God, Guns and Guts. Richards himself is no longer active as a minister, but he remains a religious man who believes that "you have to have faith to achieve." How does that square with his role as a breakfast-food pitchman? Describing his work as "just straight selling of good food," Richards says he has made it clear to General Mills that "I would never say anything in the ads I didn't believe in." The company needn't worry. Bob Richards starts every day with bacon, eggs and Wheaties, sometimes helps himself to a late-evening serving of the breakfast of champions.

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