Oscar G. Mayer, 95, retired chairman of the company that bears his name, died Monday at HospiceCare Center in Fitchburg.

He was the third Oscar Mayer in the family that founded Oscar Mayer Foods, once Madison’s largest private employer. His grandfather, Oscar F. Mayer, died in 1955 and his father, Oscar G. Mayer Sr., died in 1965.

Mayer retired as chairman of the board in 1977 at age 62, shortly after the company recorded its first $1 billion year. The company was later sold to General Foods, and is now a business unit of Kraft Foods.

Ironically, although Mayer had, perhaps, the most famous name in Madison, many local residents didn’t even know he was a real person. The company long used a midget, “Little Oscar” as its spokesman and the real Oscar Mayer, a tall, dignified and courtly man, rarely sought publicity.

He lived quietly in Madison and in his California winter home and, until very recently, could be spotted dining with old friends in one or another of the city’s country clubs.

Mayer is the second high-level former executive from the company to die this year.

Robert M. Bolz, 86, died Jan. 19 of pneumonia at Capital Lakes Health Center after several months of poor health. Bolz retired as vice chairman of Oscar Mayer Foods in 1980.

Although Mayer held the highest office in his company and was considered largely responsible for building it into the nation’s largest provider of processed meats, Mayer took great pride in his humble beginnings.

Oscar Mayer got its start in Chicago and purchased a slaughtering plant in Madison in 1919. Mayer joined the Madison operation in 1946. Madison became the company’s corporate headquarters in 1955.

When I was very small, I can remember hanging out in my grandfather’s meat market in Chicago and visiting the small sausage factory on the same block,” he said in a 1973 interview.

After leaving Harvard University for health reasons, Mayer joined the family business in its Chicago accounting office in 1936.

“There were three accountants in the office and I was the flunky, making out payroll accounts by hand,” he said.
“I’ve always felt I might have a little better understanding of what people in our plant have to do because I did it myself — I’ve always seen our employees as individuals and I respect the hard work they do.”

He also was a fierce guardian of Oscar Mayer’s reputation as a good corporate citizen.

For years, as “Little Oscar” toured the country in the famed Wienermobile, he would hand out small hot-dog shaped whistles to children. Then, a physician warned the whistles could be caught in a child’s windpipe. Even though the company had distributed millions of whistles without an incident and even though other physicians assured its manager the whistles probably wouldn’t cause harm, Oscar Mayer immediately junked 2 million whistles.

In 1975, when the late Walter Frautschi, owner of a local printing firm, led a drive to raise money to renovate the old Capitol Theatre into what became the Madison Civic Center on State Street, Mayer proposed a matching grant to help kick it off.
The Oscar Mayer Foundation, press reports said, “surprised city officials ... with the announcement of a $250,000 contribution for the Madison Civic Center.”

The Civic Center’s main theater was named the Oscar Mayer Theatre as a result.

Today, the Civic Center has been incorporated into a new arts center, the Overture Center, built with a $205 million gift by Frautschi’s son, Jerry. Oscar Mayer joined the younger Frautschi at ceremonies renaming the theater, now the home of the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, the Capitol Theater.

Mayer was a low-key but active participant in any number of civic and charitable activities.

He was the general chairman of Madison’s first United Givers campaign in 1950, was a director for Meriter Hospital and the Meriter Foundation, the YMCA, the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance and the Madison Chamber of Commerce. He donated a wing to the Attic Angels retirement apartments.

Mayer’s first wife, Rosalie, died in 1998. In 1999, he married Geraldine Fitzpatrick.

Public visitations are scheduled from 4 to 7 p.m. Thursday and Friday at Cress Funeral Home, 3610 Speedway Road.