As far as I was concerned, for as long as I could remember, the red plastic party cup just appeared one day, like that mark on your left arm and Ed Sheeran. Like, plop. Red outside, white inside, sturdy as a tank. They multiplied at barbecues and house parties, they were gathered up, then they reappeared the next time they were needed. No one made them, they simply were. Like the sun and moon. Which, it turns out, is not correct. The Holy Grail of party cups, the Solo red party cup, was invented in Chicago, and though Solo Cup has since been swallowed by Dart Container, red Solo party cups are not made nowhere — they are made in Urbana.
Indeed, it goes deeper.
This Fourth of July, should you find yourself holding a red plastic party cup, consider: You are not holding just a red plastic party cup, you are holding a story, a lineage, a tragedy, a comforting cultural signifier of communal togetherness, and a darker cultural reminder of excess. You are holding a lesson in the pros and cons of ubiquity, and a model of clean design. You are holding a cultural artifact created by a man so tightly wound and formal that, for Christmas, his own children once gave him a pair of jeans as a joke.
You are holding 16 ounces of history, good and bad.
Let’s start with the cup itself.
Owned for generations by the Hulsemans of Winnetka, Solo began in the 1930s in the South Shore neighborhood of Chicago, moved to Highland Park, then Lake Forest. Today, the company still keeps offices in Lincolnshire, but the nearest to Chicago you will find production of its red plastic party cup is that Urbana factory, which opened in 1973. I visited this plant recently. It’s long and boxy and dated. Could be a manufacturing facility, could be a high school. It’s across the street from a Champaign County Jail. The manager is a guy named Mike Oakley who started here in 1983 and has all the levity of Tommy Lee Jones. He’s also the kind of person you want to stand beside if something goes wrong.
Before we step on the floor, he instructs me to wear ear plugs, safety goggles, steel-toed shoes, a hair net and a beard net (though I am sporting nothing more than a heavy stubble). He asks that I do not insert any extremities into any of the churning, chugging machinery and I wash my hands before entering the factory floor and I stick close to him at all times. He explains that, in the event of a disaster and an urgent need to evacuate, he will lead me to a shelter.
You do make plastic cups here, I said.
Yes, he said. “You’re going to see a forming atmosphere. We take raw materials, blend them into building material. Once it’s mixed it’s conveyed into a hopper, then an extruder, which takes plastic, heats it and pushes it into sheets that goes through rolls that bring it to a certain thickness. Then it is heated again and goes through a forming station, then the cup is formed, then it goes through a trim press, then conveyed to a roller which will tuck the lip of the cup under — so that should give you some idea of what you will see.”
“Should I expect disaster?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
We were not allowed to bring cameras or photograph any of the equipment or the process that creates the iconic cup, but I can describe it, and in short: It was not a party.
But first, history.
Since it was created in the early ’70s, the red Solo plastic cup has become synonymous with good times, backyard picnics, frat-house keggers, tailgating. The red cup, says Louise Harpman, New York architect and design expert (whose “Coffee Lids,” a new book with architect Scott Specht, is the history of another Solo-related innovation), became a deeply American tradition, “the opposite of wimpy, a firm handshake that always feels right when you grab it.” Conversely, a Disney screenwriter working on a teen movie once told the Los Angeles Times that the cup is so associated with youthful transgression, “a red-Solo-cup conversation” is filmmaker code for uneasy implications.
Nothing shocking there.
And yet, according to Dart itself, mysteries remain. Such as, well: When exactly was the red Solo cup invented and why. You know, minor stuff. “When we bought (Solo) in 2012, we were really frustrated at how little company history and artifacts they had retained,” said Margo Burrage, communications director for Michigan-based Dart.
Most likely, the cup was part of a natural evolution, created without any clear innovation.
Though to get there, I need to explain a few things about beverage receptacles. The first were likely natural — hollowed-out ostrich eggs, coconut shells, etc. The problem with this, according to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry for drinking vessels, is anyone could afford a coconut. So to distinguish a rich man’s cup from a poor man’s, cups of the wealthy and ruling classes needed to be “made with great labor.” Hence, golden chalices, carved rhino horns and glass tankards. The trouble with that — a historical and relative lack of cheap, ready-to-use cups for everyone else.
Said Russell Flinchum, a design historian at North Carolina State University: “You find concerns among Brits about drinking from the contaminated Thames in the 19th century, but in this country, if you’re looking for water in public, it’s a bucket of water and a ladle, and should you drink from the same ladle as a sick person …” Paradoxically, the public became more aware of how germs were spread about the time temperance advocates were suggesting public troughs of water as an alternative to a stiff whiskey.
“Basically, conditions were perfect for disposable cups,” Flinchum said. “At the same time, the commodification of drinking water — I’d say that starts right about here.”
By 1911, a Tribune campaign against communal “death cups,” as the paper called them, led to a state ban on “common drinking cups” in civic spaces. But Illinois was not alone. For years, the Individual Drinking Cup Company of New York — later renamed Dixie — had been popularizing campaigns against common cups, circulating pamphlets that showed skull-shaped mugs chained to fountains. By the ’30s, the image-savvy company was a household brand, sponsoring NBC radio serials (and later hiring Saul Bass, the legendary graphic designer known for his striking movie posters and credit sequences, to create its logo). In 1936, the Individual Drinking Cup Company came to Chicago (at the time a hub for foldable paper products) to merge with Vortex Cup, then a leading manufacturer of conical disposable cups.
That same year a Vortex salesman named Leo Hulseman —a South Dakota native whose success would later bankroll a side career as a prominent North Shore polo player — left the company to start his own cup business. This became Solo. (On the occasion of Solo’s partnership with the Lucasfilm movie “Solo, ” writer Robert Loerzel reported recently for Chicago Magazine that Hulseman likely adopted the company name from a Czech immigrant who invented a solo-use cup maker that would also provide Hulseman with his early footing. Loerzel is also a copy editor for the Tribune.)
By the 1950s, Solo was developing cups with wax-coated walls that kept drinks cold at drive-ins and theaters; by the ’60s, the company was a leader in disposable cups, best known for its cone-shaped cups and Cozy Cup disposable inserts for coffee. But in the early ’70s — the Hulseman family is uncertain of the exact date — Leo’s son, Robert Hulseman, who had started working at Solo at 18 years old, flew to Germany to observe a plastic-extruding process that “co-extruded” multiple layers of plastic at once. “Likely Dad was searching for a product to distinguish Solo from Dixie,” said Robert’s son Paul. Another of Robert’s sons, Tom, said his father detested thin cups: An ability to print the inside layer white and the outside red was distinguishing, but the sturdiness of a simple cup constructed of layers of plastic (today, it’s four) was probably the light bulb moment.
“Some said it was too thick,” Tom says, “but I have an image of my father in our backyard in Winnetka — he was into softball, though before he would join a game, I’d see him on our deck, squeezing plastic cups. He was obsessed.”
In time, Solo’s red cup — initially made with kitchens and housewives in mind, and likely a joint creation of Robert and Solo engineers Phil Ephraim and Jack Clements (whose “Solo Traveler” sip lid is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York) — became so familiar that, last winter at the International Home + Housewares Show in Chicago, a French company displayed pricey, satiric porcelain replicas of crumpled Solo cups. Vicki Matranga, design programs coordinator for the Rosemont-based International Housewares Association that puts on the show, said fancy tableware is moribund (“millennials don’t care about impressing at home”), the trend is “carry-around cups.” Yet Solo is different, sort of an evolutionary step between those trends, not quite a keeper, not quite disposable. “To me it screams immaturity.”
To Tim Parsons, chairman of the designed objects program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, it screams sleek, precise, recognizable but “hard to consider from an ethical-design perspective — how many get recycled?”
But to Robert Hulseman, in the early 1970s, one of the primary questions on his mind was: What color?
One night he brought home more than a dozen colors of the prototype party cup. “I have nine siblings,” Tom remembers, “which gave my father a ready focus group. I recall once eating eggs off a plate, and the eggs were red because the color leached — we’d play quality control, too.” His father asked what color they liked best for the cups. They selected peach, yellow, blue and red. Red became the big seller. Robert Hulseman always tended to prefer blue.
The factory floor in Urbana is disorientingly loud. It goes thump, thump, thump, and pssst, pssst, pssst, and thrum, thrum, thrum, and pzzt-CHA, pzzt-CHA, pzzt-CHA. There are robots pushing boxes of cups, and workers at giant dial-laden computers that look borrowed from “The China Syndrome.” It is a hurricane of harsh UHF-like static and grinding sighs. And it smells like a llama on fire.
“What is that?” I asked Oakley. “Warm plastic?”
“I don’t smell anything,” he said.
Course not. He’s been there 35 years. He’s used to it. The plant runs 24 hours a day, five days a week. About 200 employees work here, making travel lids and several styles of cup, including the red cup. Solo, now a brand within Dart, only has a few factories left in Illinois, including in Chicago and North Aurora; only a couple of plants in the United States produce the red cup.
We start at the “blending department,” essentially large vats that hold mounds of polystyrene pellets — it resembles a bucket of coffee beans. The air here is sweet and artificial. The beans get vacuumed upward into another machine that melts it out, into four layers, red, white, a regrind of colors and a gloss coat. These layers go beneath rollers in an oven. As they leave one large oven, they enter a larger oven containing a plug — the plug pushes into the sheets, molding cups in a steady heartbeat of piston thrumps. This machine resembles a stack of metal cubes. Think Willy Wonka without the charm, or the sort of contraption that a kid imagines pouring in several disparate objects — a lamp, a duck, a pizza, a tire — and out plops a red Solo cup.
Actually, for a decade or so, partly on the success of the red cup, what plopped out of Solo was a show business vanity project, starring a Chicago singer named Dora Hall. You never heard of her. That’s because her real name was Dorothy Hulseman; she was wife of Leo, founder of Solo. Before they met, she performed in vaudeville; after she was diagnosed with breast cancer in the late ’50s, Leo set up Reinbeau Records in Chicago, partly to develop her music. “I think it was to help keep her alive — to give her something to do,” Paul said. Already in her 60s, Dora recorded 45s of contemporary hits — “These Boots Were Made for Walking,” “Satisfaction” — and Leo distributed them inside thin sleeves at the base of Solo packaging.
That’s not all.
Leo had started a small TV studio in the production hub of Culver City, Calif., used by shows such as “Candid Camera.” From 1971 to 1974, Leo and Dora made four syndicated variety specials here, all starring Dora. Leo gave them to stations in exchange for commercial time, and Dora got a platform — complete with canned laughter and B-list guests. The first special, “Once Upon a Tour,” found Dora on a bus (driven by NFL star Rosey Grier) to Hollywood, where she visits backlots and dreams of stardom; her dreams are the musical numbers, though it’s unclear why she would dream of performing alongside Frank Sinatra Jr. and Rich Little.
The specials, which reportedly cost as much as $400,000, were met with confusion: As one review began, “Who is Dora Hall? She’s a lady of middle years and modest talent.”
The irony is, Solo, keeper of an iconic cultural artifact, would never again have as clean a link to pop culture. To this day, said Kim Healy, Solo vice president of consumer products marketing and innovation, the company does not actively place red cups in movies and TV shows; actually, depending on the connotation and setting, it is more likely to turn down requests to use its red cups. That means — sorry frat flicks and tween shows — red party cups are too associated now with binge drinking and debauchery for comfort. (Indeed, many college drinking policy programs use the image of a red cup in cautionary materials, noting a 16- or 18-ounce cup holds more beer than you assume.)
That means, despite its product becoming a must for drinking games like beer pong, on college campuses and Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show” alike, Solo turns down frequent offers to package its cups with Ping-Pong balls and booklets of game rules. It’s an awkward position to more or less reject the culture that has partly created a cultural ubiquity. In 2011, Solo says the writers of the novelty song “Red Solo Cup” — later a hit for country singer Toby Keith — approached them about purchasing rights to the lyrics.
A sample:
You are my Abbot to my Costello
And you are the fruit to my loom
Red Solo Cup you are more than just plastic
That was a hard pass. Solo had no idea anymore how to produce a song. “Plus, it was not on brand,” Healy said. And yet again, for many customers of the cup, a party anthem couldn’t be more in character. It’s the cost of ubiquity: Baby leaves the nest, you lose control. Healy remembers attending a focus group, her first day on the job in 1998: “There are 10 red cups on the table, and my manager is sitting next to me and I ask: ‘Which is ours?’ And she sincerely didn’t know.” They inspired too many imitators.
So, in the early 2000s, Solo hired Metaphase, a St. Louis design company that specializes in hand-held ergonomic products. They arranged parties in private homes where they could study how red Solo cups were used; the first was in Deerfield. They observed placement of fingers on cups, how people wrote their names in Sharpie on the sides, how they overcompensated for sweaty cups with napkins. The goal, said Bryce Rutter, owner of Metaphase, was “rethinking a classic that also retained the DNA of the original” while allowing just enough changes to provide Solo more intellectual property rights — to differentiate its red cups from decades of copycats established since the 1970s. Which is why the standard red Solo cup is no longer as sleek and simple as the iconic original, but rather, squared at the bottom with long finger holds on its sides.
And it’s why the “Solo” name is now on the side of cups.
For generations, Solo was a family business, a relatively insular culture. Its name sat under its cups. Everyone knew they were holding a Solo cup, right? “Sometimes,” Rutter said, “the most obvious thing is only obvious from outside.”
At the end of the production line in Urbana, red cups spill out in an unbroken sheet, so long it sags down then tugs up into the next machine; it resembles an uncoordinated caterpillar, heaving forward. Cups are cut out of the sheet then enter a lip roller — imagine parallel coffee cans, spiraling fast, just barely touching — that curls the white edge of each cup in and under. After that stage, there’s counting, bagging, sorting and a quality check.
There was more nuance, of course.
Robert Hulseman, who replaced his father as president in 1980, liked nuance. “He’d summon you to the (factory) floor so you knew exactly how a cup was made,” Healy said. He was remembered as a tall, intimidating establishment figure — you didn’t dare drink from anything but Solo cups when he was around. Others said he lacked perspective. After Solo acquired Sweetheart Cup in 2004 — partly through investors and loans, only to report losses even as the family drew sizable salaries — an equity partner stepped in. Soon, Solo was no longer family-owned. (An unnamed executive told Forbes at the time, once public debt is involved, “it’s not a personal cookie jar anymore.”) Said Paul Hulseman: “My dad truly thought of himself as a failure to his family.”
The creator of the red party cup spent his last years as he always had — attending prayer groups in Winnetka, writing spiritually minded poetry and studying angels. Dart bought Solo in 2012, and Robert died a few years later at 84. He never knew beer pong, Paul said. “In fact, I doubt he ever understood the significance of any of this. He never knew he created a ubiquitous thing that everyone knew — which sounds nuts — but my father, he just did not pay attention.”
His son Tom once sat their father down to show him the “Red Solo Cup” music video. “Dad watched the whole thing then he said to me, ‘OK, how much did we spend on that?’ And I said, ‘Dad, we didn’t spend anything,’ and he said, ‘Well, why would anyone write a song about a cup?’ I laughed and said, ‘Dad — you created an American icon!’”
Anyway, that’s what’s inside a red plastic party cup.
cborrelli@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @borrelli
