Profile · Waukesha, Wisconsin
Donald Edward Goerke
Campbell’s SpaghettiOs creator from Waukesha (not other Goerkes tied to historic Goerke’s Corners)
$1.5 million+
Donald Edward Goerke was the Campbell Soup Company product developer later nicknamed the Daddy-O of SpaghettiOs, the canned pasta that put O’s in American pantries for generations. Waukesha raised him; New Jersey is where he died. He was born in Waukesha on August 8, 1926. At Waukesha High he played on the 1944 Wisconsin state championship basketball team, then served in the Army Air Force in World War II. At Carroll College (now Carroll University) in Waukesha he majored in mathematics, met June Marie Uthus (music), and later earned a Wisconsin MBA with a statistics focus. A Blatz market-research job came next before Campbell’s Franco-American division. In the early 1960s he was told to invent a canned pasta kids would eat without turning the kitchen into a mess. The team tried baseballs, cowboys, spacemen, and stars, then settled on the O because it survived canning, reheated cleanly, and was spoonable. They skipped a test market and shipped national with Jimmie Rodgers singing about “the neat, round spaghetti you can eat with a spoon.” Over a long career he helped create roughly a hundred Campbell products and spent decades as the company’s goodwill ambassador, signing cans, appearing on What’s My Line?, and meeting Ronald Reagan and Martha Stewart. He died of heart failure in Delran, New Jersey, in 2010.