Riding the Oprah Wave, Ready or Not

When Sam Greenberg got the call in the fall of 2003, he was sitting in his office at the East Texas purveyor of smoked turkeys his father founded during the Great Depression. A producer from was on the line to see if Greenberg would give 400 of his hickory-smoked fowl away to a studio audience. As they talked, Greenberg glanced out his window onto the sales floor and saw dumbstruck employees staring at him. One held up a sign that read: "Oprah's on line three."

Winfrey got right to the point. "Can you handle it? Can you get the turkeys out?" Greenberg recalls her asking, eager to make sure the flood of attention wouldn't overwhelm him. Greenberg said he would, knowing full well what an introduction to millions of Oprah's diehard fans could mean for a company with a dozen full-time employees. "We'll be fine," he said. Then Winfrey asked to be transferred to someone who could take her own order; turns out she'd been buying Greenberg's turkeys ever since receiving one as a gift.