Colac’s Glad Evans has 105 reasons to be glad today.
Happy 105th birthday to Glad!
Colac’s Glad Evans, pictured front right, celebrates her 105th birthday today. Glad has celebrated each birthday since she turned 100 with an afternoon tea with her friends Peg Wilson, Val Roberts, Lois Steffen, Joy Gullan, her daughter Di Smith and Val Graham.
One Response to “Happy 105th birthday to Glad!”
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Good on yer Glad. Happy birthday.
Little known story. Glad Wrap was named after Glad Evans.
It was originally going to be named from Union Wrap after Union Carbide which was the company that created it but they didn’t want it to have the negative associations that the word “union” had at the time in the US due to the activities of Jimmy Hoffa and the IBT.
David Darroch the then owner and CEO of Union Carbide sent Doug Taylor who was head of sales and marketing on a visit to Australia in the 1960s to meet with the Australian inventor of “Union Wrap”, chemist Douglas Lyons-Ford. They also had a series of meetings with Australian businessmen Frank Lowy and John Saunders. Taylor and Darroch wanted the pair to distribute the product through their fledgling Westfield chain.
Taylor initially hoped to set up a manufacturing plant in Werribee, but ended up choosing Rhodes in NSW as it was closer to Lyons-Ford’s home and the first Westfield site at Blacktown.
Taylor and Lyons-Ford toured a number of shopping districts with Lowy and Saunders, and had a chance encounter with Glad Evans during the tour which inspired the renaming of the product which would go on to become synonymous with any form of plastic or cling film type product.
Glad happened upon the duo of Dougs demonstrating the prototype and was impressed with the potential, noting that it would be very useful to keep lettuce crisp in the summer, however she queried the requirement for stickers or a band to hold down the edges, wondering if the film itself could be made a little sticky itself. It was initially packaged in square sheets piled on top of each other which meant that it couldn’t have that stickiness that we associate with it today.
It was Glad Evans who suggested to Doug that packaging it as a roll and adding the self adhesiveness that we know and love today could greatly improve the product. Lyons-Ford and Taylor made some improvisations in his hotel room that evening using a toilet roll inner and a watered down portion of another Australian invention, Clag, wiping a thin film of it across one side of the plastic and carefully winding it around the toilet roll inner.
The result was a much better product that didn’t need the band or stickers and was eventually refined into the product we know today. Before his death in 1996, Taylor would often tell the story of the chance meeting with Glad Evans and how it changed his life, Union Carbide and the world, estimating that she had indirectly been responsible for the creation of thousands of jobs. He’d be delighted to see her hit this milestone.