By Charmaine Noronha
TORONTO (AP) --Philip Kives, the tireless TV pitchman whose commercials implored viewers to "wait, there's more!" while selling everything from vegetable slicers to hit music compilations on vinyl, has died at age 87.
Samantha Kives said Thursday that her father died a day earlier after being hospitalized with an undisclosed illness.
Kives became wealthy after founding marketing company K-tel International, which sold Miracle Brush hair removers, Veg-o-matic vegetable slicers and compilation albums with such titles as "Goofy Greats" among numerous other products.
Through it all, Kives mostly remained in his beloved Winnipeg and always balanced work with family life, his daughter said.
"He would literally leave in the middle of a business meeting to come watch us play in a tennis tournament," she recalled. "The commercials were also a family affair. A lot of the commercials he shot, he'd bring us kids in … and we'd be actors in the commercials."
Kives started K-tel in the 1960s, and according to a biographical sketch on his website, his biggest selling product was the Miracle Brush, which sold 28 million in the late 1960s. More products would follow, including the Pocket Fisherman, a hamburger patty stacker, and the mood ring.
The TV commercials sometimes included the hook line: "But wait, there's more!"
For a generation of teenagers in the 1960s and 1970s, Kives' legacy was a long list of compilation albums with hit songs that were sometimes edited down to fit 20 or more cuts on two sides of vinyl. A glam-pop song by The Bay City Rollers could be found on the same record as country singer Dolly Parton and soul act The Drifters. Novelty song compilations such as "Goofy Greats" featured songs about purple people-eaters, itsy-bitsy bikinis and surfing birds.
Kives said his biggest music seller was 'Hooked on Classics,' which sold more than 10 million records.
K-tel grew exponentially in the 1970s and by the early 1980s, the company had sold more than half a billion albums world-wide.
Kives was born in Ougre, Saskatchewan, on Feb. 12, 1929, the third of four children. The family lived on a small farm and survived on government welfare at times during the Depression. By the age of eight, Kives was trapping animals and selling the fur to afford clothes.
"In 1957, I left the farm for good for the lights of the big city of Winnipeg, Manitoba," the biographical sketch reads. "I had various jobs — from taxi driver to short-order cook. Then I tried my luck selling door-to-door, such items as cookware, sewing machines and vacuum cleaners."
In 1961, Kives made his way to New Jersey and did sales demonstrations at a department store. The following year, he returned to Winnipeg and found a new way to push products to a much larger audience.
"I made a live five-minute TV commercial on a Teflon non-stick fry pan," he recalled. "To my surprise, sales took off at a remarkable pace. I quickly spread the TV advertising throughout Canada and this five-minute commercial became the world's first infomercial ever."
California governor signs law to protect children from social media addiction
California will make it illegal for social media platforms to knowingly provide addictive feeds to children without parental consent beginning in 2027 under a new law Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Friday.
California follows New York state, which passed a law earlier this year allowing parents to block their kids from getting social media posts suggested by a platform's algorithm. Utah has passed laws in recent years aimed at limiting children's access to social media, but they have faced challenges in court.
The California law will take effect in a state home to some of the largest technology companies in the world. Similar proposals have failed to pass in recent years, but Newsom signed a first-in-the-nation law in 2022 barring online platforms from using users' personal information in ways that could harm children. It is part of a growing push in states across the country to try to address the impacts of social media on the well-being of children.
"Every parent knows the harm social media addiction can inflict on their children — isolation from human contact, stress and anxiety, and endless hours wasted late into the night," Newsom said in a statement. "With this bill, California is helping protect children and teenagers from purposely designed features that feed these destructive habits."
The law bans platforms from sending notifications without permission from parents to minors between 12 a.m. and 6 a.m., and between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. on weekdays from September through May, when children are typically in school. The legislation also makes platforms set children's accounts to private by default.
Opponents of the legislation say it could inadvertently prevent adults from accessing content if they cannot verify their... Read More