[1][2][3] Marotta, who conceived the idea for the Mr. Coffee machine, developed it with his business partner, Samuel Glazer, to replace the slower, more challenging percolator for use in homes.
Marotta, who was responsible for much of the company's marketing as chairman and CEO, recruited Joe DiMaggio to appear in a series of Mr. Coffee television commercials.
[2] However, Marotta enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II just before spring training and never played professionally for the Cardinals.
He soon partnered with a friend, Samuel Glazer, a housing and mall developer, whom Marotta had known since high school.
[1] However, a credit crunch in 1968 made real estate financing much more difficult to obtain, which hurt Glazer and Marotta's business.
[1] Marotta and his partner sought to replicate a coffeemaker based on the drip coffee makers utilized in restaurants and other commercial establishments, but not available to consumers.
[6] He spent approximately three years "searching for 'a mechanical means of controlling the time and temperature of the water' in a coffeemaker," according to his October 1979 interview with Forbes magazine.
[6] Glazer and Marotta hired two former Westinghouse engineers, Edmund Abel and Erwin Schulze, to design a drip coffee machine for household use.
[1] Glazer and Marotta headed Mr. Coffee's parent company until 1987, when North American Systems was acquired by a securities firm in a leveraged buyout worth $82 million.