Boiardi, Hector

Operating from a small restaurant on Woodland Avenue near East Ninth Street, Hector Boiardi noticed a trend and used it to become a millionaire. Young families wanted to eat well, but they often were too busy to cook.

His solution was a 60-cent prepackaged dinner for four. This precursor to the modem TV dinner included a jar of Boiardi's secret sauce, dry spaghetti and Parmesan cheese.

Hector Boiardi came to America from Piacenza, near Parma, Italy, in 1914. After three years as second chef in New York's Plaza Hotel, he became chef at Cleveland's new Winton Hotel.

Boiardi was at heart an entrepreneur, and in 1924, he opened his own restaurant, Giardino d'Italia. By listening to his customers he learned there was a market for tasty food that could be prepared at home in less than 15 minutes. The chef packaged takeout spaghetti dinners. By 1928, he began assembly-line production upstairs above his restaurant. That same year, he began selling these prepackaged dinners in grocery stores.

Over the next decade, business boomed and Boiardi's operation, despite the Great Depression, outgrew three processing plants. As this Cleveland phenomenon of prepackaged, quick-fix dinners spread, Boiardi concluded that the product would sell better if he used a catchy and more easily pronounced name. He spelled his name phonetically and made Chef Boy-ar-dee and the muffin-jawed man behind the name familiar throughout the country.

In 1946, Boiardi sold his food business and the name Chef Boy-ar-dee to American Home Products for stock worth an estimated $6 million. After that sale, Boiardi continued to operate three restaurants in Cleveland: Pierre's, Chef Hector's Grill and The Capri.