This one’s about the little color that could.

Ezra Cornell was a Quaker farm-kid who grew up to be a successful engineer.  He was a telegraph pioneer and a founding member of Western Union, and as a result became fabulously rich.  Eager to provide opportunities for other young strivers, he created a land-grant college in Ithaca, NY and hired Andrew Dickson White as its first president.  At its opening in 1868, the school busted out its new colors:  Cornelian Red for its founder, and White for its president.  Presto, the Big Red.

30 years later, Cornell’s football team rolled into Philadelphia to play Penn.  Sitting in the stands that day was Herberton Williams, an executive from the Joseph Campbell Preserve Company across the river in Camden, who took one look at Cornell’s uniforms and thought, “my, don’t those boys look sharp in PMS Red 187.”  He shared his thoughts with John Dorrance, a chemist at the company who was working on a new idea called “condensed soup.”  Shortly thereafter, Dorrance’s product, clad in Ezra Cornell’s team colors, won a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1900.  Shazam, Campbell’s Tomato Soup!

30 years later, at the other end of Pennsylvania, Andrew Warhola was born to a Slovakian immigrant family.  Sickly and a hypochondriac, young Andy could not join his father and brothers in the coal mines, so he was shipped off to study art at Carnegie-Mellon.  There, legend has it, he developed a love for movie stars, money, Coca-Cola, and Campbell’s Tomato Soup, which he claimed he ate every day for years.  In 1962, he unleashed an idea called “Campbell’s Soup Cans” which was nothing more than silk-screened paintings of 32 Campbell’s Soup cans lined up like a grocery shelf.  Most art critics dismissed it as tripe, but the public loved it.  Kapow, Pop-Art!!

Dennis Hopper bought one of those first canvasses for the bargain price of $100.  In 1970, “Vegetable Beef” sold for $60M, setting the record auction price for a painting by a living American artist.  In 2006, “Pepper Pot” sold at auction for almost $12MM, and ironically proved the critics right:  Pepper Pot’s distinctive ingredient IS tripe, AKA stomach lining.  Today, the rest of Warhol’s work in PMS 187 hangs in the Museum of Modern Art.

But that wasn’t good enough for the ivy-league brainiacs.  Recently, some  idiot thought Cornell needed a “brighter” look for their uniforms, and redid them all in PMS 186.  The student body howled.  Ezra Cornell started spinning in his grave.  Instant PR meltdown!!!

Thankfully, they quickly regained their senses, and brought back the classic, PMS 187.

You go, Big Red.