I have no idea how old I was when I first learned about the famous Minnesota scientist and inventor Alex P. Anderson, aka Puffed Wheat Anderson. My dad told me about him when he was eating a bowl of cereal, you know, the one that gets shot by guns. Or does Quaker no longer use that line? They sure did when I was growing up. He listened to it a dozen times in half an hour when he used to listen to Sgt. Preston of the Mounties when he was six years old. Naturally, I wondered if he was a relative. He wasn’t, but he couldn’t imagine how shooting rice or wheat with a cannon could make them puff up.

I thought about that again when I was shopping at Byerly’s, a local grocery store, and stopped by the cereal section. I decided I wanted to find out how to do it, so when I got home, I immediately Googled Anderson. He was unprepared for the fascinating story surrounding his life and accomplishments. Or the marketing history of the Quaker company, for that matter.

It seems that Alex Anderson might have been famous for an entirely different reason. According to a Minnesota Public Radio interview with Robert Hedin, Anderson’s grandson, Goodhue County Master Alex was the young man who instructed Jesse James’s gang on how to get to Northfield, MN. Those of you who are unaware of his popular story may not know that robbing the Northfield bank was the biggest mistake Jesse made. Two of its members were killed by locals and things got so hot that the rest of the gang were lucky enough to escape alive. (An even more interesting coincidence from a personal point of view, is that the gang camped at the point at Cedar Lake near Annandale. Our cabin on the lake was just a couple hundred yards down the shore from where they cooked a meal. and licked their wounds before returning to Missouri.)

Hedin says Anderson included an account of the fateful encounter in an essay on Silurian fossils. Alex was also interested in phrenology and could tell you your personality by feeling the blows on your head. Although he was a fine poet and memoir writer, his greatest achievement was inventing a way to break down the starch in grains by subjecting them to intense heat and pressure, greatly enlarging the grains in doing so. To do this, he devised a large wooden pistol. Albert Lasker, one of the early advertising geniuses hired by the Quaker company, explained the process. The lab must have been thirty meters long. The alleged pistol was actually an overheated drum with its muzzle covered. When it reached the correct temperature, the workers removed the cover with a pulley. The grains exploded and flew violently, expanding to eight times their original size in the process. Hedin puts it in a more colorful way. “It made the lab sound like a battlefield, smell like a bakery and look like a snowy winter morning.”

Satisfied with his invention, Anderson decided to show it off. Puffed rice made its first appearance at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. A small success as a novelty, it also caught the eye of an anonymous Quaker cereal company executive in the process.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, cereal was considered a health food and the Quaker company saw a virtual gold mine in the Anderson process. They were right, but for the wrong reason. After buying the rights, they spent a considerable amount of money advertising the product to the Japanese. The puffed rice was normal rice, they said, but many times bigger and it took less to fill you up. Better yet, it was delicious. The campaign turned out to be a total failure. Lasker proved that the Americans were the right target, so to speak, and under his tutelage, “firearm shooting” became a household word. No one needs to be reminded that the Quaker company survives to this day by selling the same products.

Anderson died in 1943 after donating his home to the Red Wing School District. Turns out, he became a patron of the arts. Now it is a haven for writers and other artists. The Kiwanis hold regular gatherings there, having residents sing at dinner reading Shelley and William Blake. But that is not all. If you like modern art or improv jazz, you will find someone with those talents at Anderson House. I wonder what Jesse James would have thought of all this.