GE GE Aerospace

By James R. Hagerty 

Growing up in rural West Virginia, Winston Shelton had free access to his father's tools and a junk pile. With an older brother, he built a slingshot to fling apples at neighboring boys and converted a discarded washing-machine motor into propulsion for a toy wagon.

The U.S. Army refined his mechanical skills by sending him to Princeton University during World War II to study engineering.

After the war, he joined General Electric Co. and helped redesign washing machines, making them less likely to break down or let socks get sucked into drain pipes. He set up his own company in the late 1960s with a plan to build a better lawn mower. Then he discovered a more pressing need: Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets wanted larger and more efficient cookers.

His Louisville, Ky.-based firm, now called Winston Industries, developed Collectramatic pressure fryers, versions of which are still widely used. Col. Harland Sanders, founder of the chicken chain, praised the fryers and supported Mr. Shelton's business by cosigning a loan.

At the urging of his wife, Dolly, Mr. Shelton asked Norman Rockwell to paint a portrait of Col. Sanders. Mr. Rockwell said he was too busy but relented when the entrepreneur refused to accept no for an answer.

[ Read letters between Mr. Shelton's company and Norman Rockwell. ]

Mr. Shelton died April 15 at age 96.

In a memoir, he traced his inventive genius to having grown up with "so many junkyard machine parts and just a few store-bought toys." As a young man, he helped manage a sawmill owned by his father.

"You didn't call a mechanic back then, you did the job yourself," he wrote.

Winston Laverne Shelton was born May 3, 1922, in Lockwood, W.Va. During his early childhood, the family's house was lighted by kerosene lamps, and the toilet was outdoors. When Winston was about 4 years old, his parents opened a gas station and restaurant in tiny Two Run, W.Va.

His mother, Opal Dell Shelton, ran the restaurant, where pies were displayed in a glass case. "She taught us that when a customer came through that door, even if you were busy, you looked up and smiled," Winston Shelton wrote in his 2018 memoir. He also pumped gas in the service station run by his father, Naaman Shelton.

Winston thought about becoming a lawyer and enrolled at Glenville State College in West Virginia in 1941. In 1943, he was inducted into the Army. He expected to be shipped overseas to fight. Instead, the Army sent him to study for 18 months at Princeton, where he recalled spotting Albert Einstein, and then assigned him to the Army Signal Corps. He worked on radar and communications projects in New Jersey and California.

While in the Army he boxed as a middleweight and won 18 of his 21 bouts, he later recalled.

After Mr. Shelton earned an electrical engineering degree at West Virginia University in 1948, GE recruited him for its home-appliances business. The company was trying to improve its washing machines, which Mr. Shelton found were too expensive, complicated and prone to breakdowns. "When spinning the clothes, the entire unit literally danced across the floor," he wrote.

He was on a team that devised a simpler, more reliable washer, with two motors instead of five and one pump instead of two.

He met Hazel "Dolly" Crider, a Rider University student, in 1948 at an Arthur Murray dance studio in Trenton, N.J. For their first date, they went swimming at the Jersey shore. They married in September 1952.

One of the ideas he championed at GE came from his wife: a basket inside a washer to handle small loads of delicates, saving water and energy.

By the late 1960s, Mr. Shelton was frustrated with what he saw as GE's resistance to many of his engineering ideas. He left the company in 1969 to start a company with his older brother, Naaman Shelton Jr.

While tinkering with a new type of lawn mower that would pivot on an axis, making turns easier, Winston Shelton was hired to evaluate a cooking timer for KFC fryers. He saw a need for rethinking the design of chicken fryers. During pressure cooking, bits of chicken fell off and burned in the shortening, creating gunk and requiring workers to frequently interrupt their work to clean the devices.

Mr. Shelton's solution was a filtering system that let the crumbs sink into a cylinder mounted beneath the cooker. He recalled Col. Sanders's initial reaction to his Collectramatic cooker: "You've really got something there."

Other fast-food challenges presented themselves. Cabinets designed to keep food hot tended to dry it out. So Mr. Shelton invented what he called Controlled Vapor Technology, or CVap, to keep food hot and moist. Chefs found it also worked well for cooking meat and seafood.

One of his daughters, Valerie Shelton, is now CEO of Winston Industries. The company has manufacturing plants in Louisville and employs about 250 people. Aside from making restaurant equipment, Winston does contract manufacturing and makes prototypes for other firms. Its food-service equipment is used in 110 countries, Ms. Shelton said.

His first wife, Dolly, died in 1997. He is survived by his second wife, Joyce Fullerton Shelton, as well as three children, 10 grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.

Write to James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 26, 2019 10:44 ET (14:44 GMT)

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