WHEN Murray Lender talked about bagels, as he did all the time, he could wax philosophical. A bagel, he said, was a paradox. Shiny-brown and crispy on the outside; chewy and soft on the inside. Boiled, then baked. The personality was complex, since that hole-in-the-roll was never the same shape twice. But the sheer deliciousness was simple. He liked his warmed, though on TV ads he would demolish them toasted, the butter just melting, with an irresistible crunching sound. Close your eyes, munch a Lender's bagel, and you were as near as you could get to heaven without seeing the Pearly Gates. Everything, he proclaimed, was Better on a Bagel. Cream cheese and lox, for sure. But why be Jewish about it? Why not spread this "Jewish English muffin" with jelly, pâté, peanut butter, Swiss cheese - bacon, even? And why stop at breakfast, when you could lunch and dine on them too? Tasty, satisfying, convenient, and at a bargain price! What's not to like? Behind the patter was a giant vision: to bagelise America. The family firm in Baldwin Street, New Haven (Poppa, Momma, himself, three brothers) was baking as fast as it could go by the 1950s, but still not making much money after 30 years. Over hellish Saturday nights and Sunday mornings they would produce 3,000-6,000 dozen bagels, stirring the heavy dough, rolling, shaping (that expert twist of the fingers, slap on the table), boiling, baking. The wondrous smell brought in crowds. But bagels were still seen as a local, ethnic, weekend edible. Mr Lender wanted to sell bagels all week, and all across the country. From 1955, working full-time on no salary, he began to buzz with good ideas. Put six bagels in a plastic bag to give them a three-day life, rather than seven hours. Sell them in grocery stores to create an all-week, everyday demand. Tickle those gentile taste buds with onion, egg, cinnamon "n" raisin flavours. Even better, pop them in the walk-in freezer his father already had, and make them last so long that you could ship them everywhere. Pile them in the frozen-food cabinets with the juice, and there was breakfast ready, oven-fresh, from the east coast to the west. Frozen bagels were slippery little critters; Mr Lender had the idea of pre-slicing them, saving both the nation's fingers and its early-morning time. He fell so deep in love with freezing that he managed in 1984 to get March declared Frozen Food Month, became chairman of the National Frozen & Refrigerated Foods Association, and sported its penguin symbol ever afterwards, on his tie or lapel or on his socks. His marketing ploys, on a tiny budget, became legend. In 1956 he went to the Catskills to put Lender's frozen bagels into the best hotels, snaring the Jewish holiday trade. Then, with just six employees and a bakery in a garage, he went knocking on the doors of Kraft, Maxwell House and Minute Maid to suggest cross-promotions. Their national-brand coupons on his packaging, his coupons on theirs. The giants hardly knew what a bagel was; but one look at this gleeful, owlish figure (a bag of bagels under one arm, a toaster under the other), and everyone signed up. Sales soared. The ethnic barrier tumbled, he thought, when he sold 50 cases of frozen bagels in Arkansas. The Sales-rep Cantata Still the stunts kept coming. For St Patrick's Day he made green bagels saying "Erin go Bragh" and "Shalom." For one G7 summit he made bagel-heads of world leaders, with a lipsticked one for Margaret Thatcher. Oval bagels were sent to the Oval Office, and a man-sized one greeted Johnny Carson on "The Tonight Show." When the world's biggest bagel (714lb) was baked in 1998, Mr Lender planted a kiss on it. By this time sales of Lender's bagels, growing from 1965 to 1996 by double-digit leaps every year, had long been too huge for Murray and his brother Marvin to manage. So in 1984 Murray had arranged a "marriage of the century" with Kraft, striding down the aisle with a six-foot "Len Bagel" to plight his troth with "Phyl," or a Kraft Philadelphia Cream Cheese. It was all a far cry from the days when little Murray's job had been to count out 12 bagels and thread them on twine, for his brother Hymie to hang on shop doors. He thought he was bound to be a baker. Very early, though, he became the family's salesman: theatrical, sporty, sociable, and with skills picked up at the kitchen table, where his mother Rose would urge coffee and cake on anyone who ventured by. He was also the most competitive of the brothers, always pushing to expand and modernise. When eating got healthy, Lender's bagels did too: all-natural, whole-grain, and "with more complex carbohydrates than a whole bowl of cereal!" One ad, which featured him lounging on a supermarket shelf, was an echo of how he had spread the word in the early days, handing out bags of bagels in shops. When a cruel stroke robbed him of speech in 1998, he found he could still compose cantatas for sales reps to sing. And he could play the drums. He did both joyously. Much of the money he made from bagels was given quietly to charities, but his name was publicly attached to a children's playground on the site of his father's old bakery. You could have almost as much fun there as he had all his life, tirelessly turning America into Bagel Nation.