Rice-A-Roni co-inventor dies

Vincent DeDomenico ~ 1915-2007

NAPA, Calif. -- Vincent DeDomenico, co-inventor of Rice-A-Roni, whose catchy TV jingle paid homage to San Francisco and made the pasta dish known to every baby boomer, has died. He was 92.

DeDomenico died Thursday with his wife, Mildred, by his side, his family said. He had kept working until the day before his death.

Along with his brothers, DeDomenico, the son of Italian immigrants, created the packaged side dish of rice and pasta for their San Francisco-based family business. "The San Francisco treat" became known in the 1960s through TV commercials that featured the city's cable cars.

In the 1930s, he and his brothers were running their parents' pasta business in San Francisco's Mission District. They got to experimenting in a test kitchen with recipes combining long-grain white rice, broken pieces of vermicelli and chicken broth. The dish evolved from a recipe one of their wives had originally gotten from a landlady.

"It was a struggle," DeDomenico told the San Francisco Chronicle last year. "Times were hard, and I knew if we were going to make any money, we were going to have to come up with something else."

Rice-A-Roni, as it came to be called, became a national brand in the 1960s. The brothers sold the Golden Grain Macaroni Co. to Quaker Oats in 1986 for $275 million. By then the company also included such products as Ghirardelli Chocolate.

In later years, DeDomenico bought 21 miles of railroad track in Napa Valley and several vintage passenger cars, creating a tourist attraction called the Napa Valley Wine Train.

"He was a dreamer," said Mildred DeDomenico, 87. "He always had all these plans. He'd write them down on pieces of paper. He was a man who could never retire."

Born in San Francisco in 1915, one of six children, DeDomenico went to work for his father's pasta company as a salesman while taking night business classes at Golden Gate College.