A museum for an icon: Jell-O

If you're on the trail of something different in the Finger Lakes, there's always room for the Jell-O museum.

The Jell-O Gallery opened in LeRoy, N.Y., in 1997 on the 100th anniversary of the product's invention in that small town 30 miles southwest of Rochester. The gallery now attracts 13,000 visitors a year hungry for insights into the creation, marketing, advertising and social history of a classic American food -- all topped with a healthy dollop of nostalgia.

"Jell-O is an American icon -- maybe more American than apple pie," says Lynne Belluscio, director of the LeRoy Historical Society, which runs the Jell-O Gallery. Still, she expects raised eyebrows. "I lose all credibility when I go to museum conferences and say, 'I'm the curator of the Jell-O museum.' " When she first took a job at the historical society in 1988, the former industrial arts teacher says, "I was not really thinking that Jell-O was going to take over my life."

Pearle Bixby Wait, a LeRoy carpenter and homebuilder who dabbled in patent medicines, found a way to color and flavor dried gelatin 114 years ago. His wife, May, named the product Jell-O, inspired by Graino-O, a coffee substitute then sold in town. They didn't strike it rich with the stuff and in 1899 sold the Jell-O rights for $450 to neighbor Orator F. Woodward, who continued to produce it in LeRoy. In the early going, he, too, found the business to be something of a lemon (one of the four original Jell-O flavors). He offered to sell the business for $35 to the plant foreman, but the man said no.

Clever marketing at the turn of the last century firmed up Jell-O's future. Well-dressed salesmen widely distributed recipe cards and free samples door-to-door and demand swelled. Oil paintings centering on shimmering molded Jell-O were commissioned from top artists and reproduced as magazine ads. Several originals now hang in the Jell-O Gallery. By 1906, when Woodward died, annual Jell-O sales topped $1 million.

Woodward's son Edward sold the Jell-O business to Postum Cereal Company for $66 million in 1925 in a merger that would become General Foods. Jell-O employed 300 people in LeRoy in 1964, when production was moved to Dover., Del., and printing of the boxes moved to Sarasota Springs, N.Y. ( Jell-O is now owned by Kraft.) "There was terrible resentment" over the pullout, Belluscio says. "Some in LeRoy will not allow Jell-O in their house."

Dwelling on what Jell-O is made of is hardly appetizing. Suffice it to say that gelatin is extracted from animal bones and connective tissues. Among the flavors that came and went over the decades were mixed vegetable, celery, seasoned tomato and -- in shades of brown -- chocolate, coffee and Coke. In 2001, Mattel sold a Barbie doll packaged with a box of Very Berry Barbie Jell-O and a B-shaped mold.

Advertising has been key to Jell-O's success. Jack Benny became the product's radio spokesman in 1934. (It was his program that introduced the still familiar J-E-L-L-O chant.) Bill Cosby visited the Jell-O Gallery in 2004 to mark his 30 years as Jell-O's TV pitchman. (He has a prominent inscription on "The Jell-O Brick Road" leading up to the gallery.) Baby boomers in particular will be drawn to the gallery's TV monitor and its loop of Jello ads from yesteryear, among them:

--Charles Nelson Reilly, seated at a table brimming with grapes, oranges, lemons and bananas, implores each to reveal the secret of the "fresh-picked taste of Jell-O fruit flavors."

--In his folksy-sheriff character on "The Andy Griffith Show," Andy enjoys a bowl of Jell-O pudding and proclaims to Barney and Opie, "It's goo-OOD!"

-- Jim Nabors as Gomer Pyle turns his hard-nosed drill sergeant into a pussycat with a quickly prepared serving of Jell-O Instant Pudding.

--The 5th Dimension harmonizes atop a Jell-O box about "the cool light snack you like to have around."

Visitors to the Jell-O Gallery (75 bus tours came through last year) are invited to add their personal Jell-O reminiscences to a notebook on display. Elizabeth from Rochester wrote, "My mother made Jell-O and drank it from a glass." Brigitte wrote, "I found some I had in the cupboard for 26 years. I didn't make it, but I thought about it." Peg, a 4-H leader, wrote "Jell-O in a brain mold is used to demonstrate why horseback riders should wear a hardhat. The Jell-O brain is dropped and smashes like a real brain would if a rider's head hit the ground without a hardhat."

Chances are, you've got a Jell-O memory to share, too.

WHAT Jell-O Gallery

WHERE 23 E. Main St., LeRoy, N.Y.

INFO 585-768-7433, jellogallery.org

HOURS April through December, Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Sunday, 1 to 4 p.m.; January through March, Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Closed New Year's, Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter.

ADMISSION Adults, $4; ages 6-11, $1.50; younger than 6, free.