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All his success, Sokolof says, cannot compensate for the one great tragedy of his life, the death in 1982 of his wife Ruth, after a 15-year struggle with cancer. "I don't cry easily," Sokolof says, but when he talks about Ruth, which he does incessantly, there are tears in his eyes and a tremor in his voice. In his spacious condominium, where he lives alone, he proudly shows visitors her paintings and clippings about her charitable work with blind children. "She made me a better person," he says.
Sokolof now spends some 80% of his working time on NHSA business, which he conducts largely by telephone out of his office at Phillips. These days his calls to food companies are immediately transferred to top executives, many of whom he knows by first name. Around 10 p.m., he drives home in his white Mercedes sports coupe, prepares his own low-fat dinner and labors over the work he has brought with him. Later he pedals furiously on his exercise bicycle while watching his favorite TV show, Jeopardy, taped earlier on his video recorder. Often he stays up until 2 or 3 a.m. "I find it hard to go to sleep at night," he says, "because there are so many things to do."
One of those things was to ensure passage by Congress of a strict food- labeling bill, sponsored by Democratic Representative Henry Waxman of California. When it appeared that the bill would be shunted aside last year, Sokolof paid a total of $650,000 for full-page ads urging Congress to adopt the measure. Then, concerned that Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah was delaying its passage by tacking amendments to the Senate version of the bill, Sokolof ran ads in the Washington Post, the Washington Times and all the Utah dailies. "Senator Hatch," the ads read, "please cease your attempts to alter and dilute" the bill. "If the Senate does not pass this bill, you will bear the responsibility." Hatch backed down, the bill was passed, and Waxman invited Sokolof to attend its signing in Washington. "This bill," declared Waxman, "is a tribute to Sokolof's tenacity."
That tenacity was evident again last weekend, as Sokolof worked far into the night preparing a full-page ad scheduled to run this week in major newspapers. The ad extols the virtues of McDonald's new hamburgers and advises Wendy's and Burger King that they too had better take the lean route. From deep in America's heartland, Sokolof is ready to strike again.