Philip Kives

Philip Kives was born on February 12, 1929 on a Jewish colony farm near Oungre, Saskatchewan, Canada. The third in a family of four children, his family survived on government welfare during the Great Depression. By age eight Kives was trapping animals and selling their furs so he could make enough money in order to afford clothes. Philip left the family farm in 1957 and moved to Winnipeg, where he worked a variety of jobs ranging from taxi driver to short order cook as well as tried his luck as a door-to-door salesman. In 1961 Kives made his way to New Jersey and did sales demonstrations for various products on the boardwalk of Atlantic City with his younger brother Ted. He returned to Winnipeg the following year. Philip struck gold with a live five minute TV commercial for a Teflon non-stick frying pan that in turn beget a significant boost in the sales of said frying pan. Kives subsequently founded the marketing company K-tel International, which made its fortune selling and pitching such items as the Pocket Fisherman, the Miracle Brush hair remover, and the Veg-O-Matic vegetable slicer. However, Philip scored his greatest, most popular, and enduring success with the music label K-tel Records, which released an enormous volume of compilation albums throughout the course of several decades, with the compilation album "Hooked on Classics" in particular selling over ten million copies altogether. Kives died at age 87 on April 27, 2016 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.