Whats It Really Like to Drive the Weinermobile
Kyle Edwards and Hayley Rozman, two recent college grads in their early 20s, are at a grocery shop on the south side of Chicago, giving a tour of their temporary home away from home, a Wienermobile they've lived in since last summer.
Similar all hotdoggers, they speak near entirely in hot-dog puns. They've "relished" the experience of their temporary post and insist that anyone riding "shot bun" must wear a "meat belt" and enjoy the view from the "bunroof."
"To continue this job, you lot really have to show that you lot can cut the mustard," says Edwards, straight-faced.
"Hotdogger" is an official championship for the immature men and women who travel the country in giant mobile wieners, spreading the gospel of processed meats (and their employer, Oscar Mayer Foods Corp.). Since 1988, there accept been six Wienermobiles consistently on bout, visiting every U.s. state and Canada 12 months a year.
And ii hotdoggers — typically i male person and one female — are ever at the helm.
"Information technology can be easier to become into an Ivy League university than become a hotdogger," Ed Roland, a senior manager of experiential marketing at Oscar Mayer, told The Post.
He'due south not kidding. Applications from soonhoped-for-college grads take jumped from 6,000 in 2018 to vii,000 this year — thanks in part, Oscar Mayer reps speculate, to an increase in the Wienermobile's social-media presence. (YouTube videos of the Wienermobile fleet, posted terminal summer by Oscar Mayer, take garnered well-nigh two 1000000 views.)
With only 12 picked each year, that puts the Wienermobile acceptance rate at around 0.17 percent. The acceptance rate for Harvard is 4.6 percentage. Edwards and Rozman volition stop their yearlong journey in June, when the next crew of hotdoggers takes over. Though applicants come from across the country — the incoming grade includes graduates from Texas to Connecticut — the company actively recruits at iv colleges: the Academy of Missouri, University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of Texas at Austin and Pennsylvania State Academy.
Roland says they look for candidates with degrees in marketing, public relations, business organisation or other related fields and anyone with "stiff interpersonal skills with people of all ages." There are numerous interviews and callbacks, and applicants become above and across to endeavour to get noticed.
Robin Gelfenbien, a Connecticut native and onetime hotdogger now in her 40s who calls New York habitation, remembers a grueling process of trying to stand apart from hundreds of loftier-free energy students. "I wanted the job so bad, I made a demo cassette of original songs almost wieners," she tells The Post. "Information technology had lyrics like, 'Oscar Mayer exercise y'all hear me, I want to be in the weenie.' "
It isn't exactly a plum gig. The yearlong commitment includes an entry-level salary and a weekly per diem for hotels and meals. (Both the hotdoggers and Oscar Mayer spokespeople declined to share the exact corporeality.) The schedule demands travel across dozens of states, making around ane,200 stops every year. They get two days off a week and a scattering of vacation days for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas.
But the allure of the job is clear.
"I loved that everywhere we went, people would point and stare," says Gelfenbien. "Everyone is happy to see you lot. You get a celebrity by proxy. That'southward a very powerful drug."
The original Wienermobile drivers weren't eager college students looking for an anarchistic way to spend their postgrad year. They were trivial people. Or, as they were chosen in the 1930s and '40s, midgets.
The brainchild of the company's advertizement manager (and the founder's nephew) Carl G. Mayer, the first Wienermobile in 1936 was a xiii-pes, cylindrical-shaped metallic sausage (sans bun) that wasn't exactly roomy within.
So they drafted one of their employees, a 3-human foot-6″ salesman named Meinhardt Raabe, to play Piddling Oscar, "the World'due south Smallest Chef," who would pop out of a trap door at the tail terminate of the wiener.
The Wienermobile toured Madison, Wis., the company's domicile base, and a few major cities in the Eastward and Midwest, taking a brief hiatus so that Raabe could appear equally a Munchkin in 1939'due south "The Wizard of Oz."
Gas rationing kept the Wienermobile off the road during Globe State of war 2, but it soon returned and v more Wienermobiles were congenital to meet demand. The 1952 models, built past the Gerstenslager Visitor, were 22 feet long and built on a Dodge truck chassis. A 1958 redesign included a chimera cockpit for the driver and was the first, co-ordinate to designer Brooks Stevens, "to put the wiener in the bun."
Nine Little Oscars were hired past the company over the next 30 years, paid $80 a week to travel the land visiting stores, schools and children's hospitals and heighten awareness of the brand, mostly by handing out hot-canis familiaris samples and wiener-shaped whistles. The diminutive actors included Joe White, a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus performer, and Jerry Maren, another "Wizard of Oz" actor.
George Molchan, who traveled with the Wienermobile for 3 decades and had the longest tenure equally Fiddling Oscar, was visited by a Wienermobile at his 2005 funeral in Merrillville, Ind.
As priests said the terminal prayers over his bury, the 50 or and so mourners sang the Oscar Mayer jingle ("Oh, I wish I were an Oscar Mayer wiener/ That is what I'd truly similar to be") and so blew on wiener whistles every bit he was lowered into his grave.
The Wienermobile was put into "semi-retirement" in 1976, when the company decided to focus on TV ad. Commercials like the one featuring an adorable curly haired kid singing "My bologna has a first name" were doing more for make recognition than a roving sausage manned by a tiny chef visiting grocery stores.
But for the Wienermobile'south 50th anniversary in 1986, information technology was rolled out of storage for a special tour of a dozen cities (without Little Oscar). After almost a decade out of the limelight, the vehicles were so rusty they had to exist hauled by a flatbed truck to each destination.
Still, the reaction was overwhelming. Oscar Mayer was flooded with messages from customers, either complaining that the Wienermobile had skipped their city or wanting a return visit.
In 1988, the Wienermobile was officially relaunched. A new and improved fleet of wieners, each sporting a 23-foot fiberglass trunk mounted on a Chevrolet van with a V-half dozen engine, were deployed on never-ending tours. And instead of picayune people dressed equally chefs, they introduced the "hotdogger" program, a nationwide search to find college students willing to live full-fourth dimension in a mobile wiener.
At that place accept been just over 400 hotdoggers over the past 31 years — including onetime Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who called his Oscar Mayer tenure in the early '90s "an easier job" than politics. "You're more than popular driving the Wienermobile than being speaker of the House," he claimed in a 2018 podcast interview.
By the numbers alone, more people have gone to space (currently 561 astronauts) than take learned how to parallel park a Wienermobile.
Parallel parking a 27-human foot hot dog — new models grew by iv feet in the mid-'90s — is exactly as challenging as information technology sounds. So much that hotdoggers must take a two-week driving course, chosen "Hot Canis familiaris High," before they're allowed to take a Wienermobile off the lot in Madison.
Wienermobiles have been involved in very few accidents. A bigger risk is avoiding sexual innuendo. It is, after all, a huge wiener, and the jokes practically write themselves.
Daniel Duff, a Syracuse grad, was a hotdogger betwixt 1994 and '95, and once gave Jon Stewart a ride effectually New York for his MTV testify at the time. Stewart asked to take the Wienermobile to the Lincoln Tunnel, with his producers insisting information technology was "just part of New York culture."
But when Duff watched the last broadcast, particularly the function where the wiener enters the tunnel, he saw his Wienermobile being used in a not-specially-subtle sexual context.
The publicity "wasn't at all what corporate wanted," Duff told The Post. "Only I see the humor in it. Back so I didn't. I thought I was going to be fired for sure." He wasn't, and he finished his Wienermobile tour of duty without incident.
Within the Wienermobile, there'south seating for half-dozen, and some of the chairs pull out to go daybeds. The ceiling is painted sky blue and the plush carpeting has decorative mustard and ketchup splashes. There's a hot-dog-shaped dashboard, gull-fly door with retractable steps, vox-activated GPS and a widescreen TV.
One matter the Wienermobile doesn't have is a grill or a fridge for storing hot dogs, much to the chagrin of some visitors.
'Everyone is happy to encounter you. You lot become a celebrity by proxy. That's a very powerful drug.'
"That'due south our No. i question, 'Where are the hot dogs?' " says Edwards, a 23-yr-old St. Louis native who graduated last twelvemonth from the University of Missouri. "We don't. But we take about eleven,000 wiener whistles in the back."
The existent upside of being a Wienermobile driver isn't simply how much of the country they'll see — they'll hitting 30 states by the time their run is over — it's the little perks that come with the job, like being able to use the Wienermobile for personal trips.
1 of Edwards' favorite memories happened in North Dakota final October, when a 90-year-erstwhile man asked to ride shot bun in the Wienermobile . . . while listening to Pinkish Floyd.
"He said it was the ane thing he wanted to exercise earlier he died," Edwards remembers. "How practice you lot say no to that?"
Even though Edwards and Rozman have been on the route just a few weeks shy of a twelvemonth, they still seem happy to be hither. "I thought I was going to teach fifth form this year," Edwards says. "Only so I discovered the Wienermobile and I thought: Fifth grade will always exist there."
He's non especially eager to become dorsum. He'due south decided instead to motility to LA and take a shot at acting. He and Rozman, a University of Wisconsin grad from suburban Milwaukee, have fifty-fifty applied to be on the reality show "The Amazing Race."
"It'south a long shot," he admits. "But the Wienermobile has given me hope that crazy things do happen."
A year driving a Wienermobile may not sound similar the all-time résumé provender, but Gelfenbien says it'southward only helped her. "There was one job interview I did, for a sports marketing firm, where I felt like they brought me in purely to hear about the Wienermobile," she says, calculation that she got the task.
Though Gelfenbien'due south Wienermobile days are long behind her, she yet thinks near information technology frequently. She wrote and starred in a one-woman show called "My Salvation Has a First Proper noun: A Wienermobile Journey," which premiered at the New York International Fringe Festival 10 years agone, and she'southward currently working on a memoir of the same name.
Gelfenbien says the Wienermobile saved her life, or at least her self-esteem, after a college experience that left her feeling bullied and directionless.
"When your whole job is but about putting a smile on people'south faces, it changes your worldview," she says. "Despite my parents' best efforts to make me exercise something else, anything else, I recollect it was the best thing that always happened to me."
The last time she was inside a Wienermobile was a year ago, and she still gets goose bumps when she sees it. "Remember that 'Seinfeld' episode where George pushes one-time people and kids out of the way to escape what he thinks is a burning business firm?" she asks.
"That's what I'm like whenever I see a Wienermobile. I volition push a kid to the ground to get to it."
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Source: https://nypost.com/2019/05/25/why-becoming-a-wienermobile-driver-is-harder-than-getting-into-harvard/
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