Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man

by Mark Kurlansky

  Copyright © 2012 by Mark Kurlansky

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.doubleday.com

  DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  this page–this page constitute an extension to this copyright page.

  Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor

  Jacket photograph courtesy of Pinnacle Foods. Birds Eye® is a registered trademark of Pinnacle Foods LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kurlansky, Mark.

  Birdseye : the adventures of a curious man / Mark Kurlansky.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Birdseye, Clarence, 1886–1956. 2. Frozen foods industry—United States—History. 3. Inventors—United States—Biography. 4. Businessmen—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  HD9217.U52B575 2012

  338.7’66402853092—dc23

  [B]

  2011044891

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53588-5

  v3.1

  To the memory of Linda Perney.

  The best of friends, who always listened and laughed

  but left too soon.

  To be perfectly honest, I am best described as just a guy with a very large bump of curiosity and a gambling instinct.

  —CLARENCE BIRDSEYE, The American Magazine,

  February 1951

  Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect.

  —SAMUEL JOHNSON, The Rambler,

  March 12, 1751

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Preface

  Prologue: A Curious End

  Chapter 1: A Nineteenth-Century Man

  Chapter 2: Bugs Begins

  Chapter 3: Bob Goes West

  Chapter 4: Ticks

  Chapter 5: Frozen

  Chapter 6: Freezing

  Chapter 7: The Idea

  Chapter 8: The Deal

  Chapter 9: The Magic

  Chapter 10: The Inventor

  Chapter 11: Beyond the Sunset, and the Baths

  Illustration Insert

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Illustration Credits

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Preface

  I never met Clarence Birdseye, who died shortly before I turned eight years old in 1956. I never met any of his seven siblings nor his wife, Eleanor. I met only one of his four children, the eldest, Kellogg, whom I interviewed when researching my book about cod. His grandchildren were all very young when Birdseye died and know little of him. I did interview two surviving sisters-in-law and numerous people who had known him.

  The work of a biographer often seems to resemble that of a detective, chasing down clues. Birdseye left a scattered and incomplete record. There is no autobiography or memoir. Surprisingly, the only book Birdseye has left us is a small volume on gardening, which was mostly written by his wife. Huge help was provided by one of the grandsons, Henry, who had more than twenty unopened boxes, which, once he was easily persuaded to open them, revealed a few treasures, including numerous letters from Labrador and Peru. Another grandson, Michael, had a few pieces of the puzzle, such as a collection of his patents and some lost magazine articles. Kellogg, the son, had eight leather-bound handwritten journals from Birdseye’s time in Labrador, which Kellogg’s widow, Gypsy, donated to Amherst College. They show a great deal about his quirks and interests as well as activities but were not laid out in a way to give a later historian a clear picture of events.

  Birdseye’s colleagues and collaborators wrote about him. Birdseye wrote numerous articles about himself and his ideas. But the subject himself is not always an infallible source either, especially a man like Birdseye who had an image of himself that he wanted to promote—a very American image of a lot of audacity, not much intellect, and a pioneer spirit. The first and last of these were largely true, the second manifestly not. There are many brief articles on the life of Clarence Birdseye, some written in his lifetime, some at the time of his death, some later. Most of these articles say the exact same things—some true and some not, often with incorrect dates. Unfortunately, these articles appear to have been the source for more articles, and so often the errors are repeated. There are at least forty encyclopedias and dictionaries that contain entries on Clarence Birdseye ranging from general, to business, to inventors, to food. But these too are full of errors and conflicting information.

  When I decided to write this book, I had already written about Birdseye in three of my books—the history of cod, the history of salt, and the history of Gloucester. It was time to separate myth from truth and find out who this man with the funny name who changed our way of life really was.

  Undeniably, Birdseye changed our civilization. He created an industry by modernizing the process of food preservation and in so doing nationalized and then internationalized food distribution. Birdseye was among the first to talk about that internationalization. In a speech at Montreal’s McGill University in 1943, he predicted the postwar world when he announced, “Tomorrow the industry will become truly international.” And he was right. This facilitated urban living and helped to take people away from the farms, so that by the early years of the twenty-first century, for the first time in human history, the majority of people on earth lived in an urban area. This would have been no surprise to Birdseye, who often spoke of how improved food preservation made urban life possible.

  For many people a major issue is the internationalization of food distribution. Birdseye greatly contributed to the development of industrial-scale agriculture. He even worked with farmers to make their products more suitable for industry. But unlike people today who have grown distrustful of big business, for Birdseye, a product of the zenith of the Industrial Revolution, “industry” was always a good word, without negative connotations. Today’s locavore movement—the movement to shun food from afar and eat what is produced locally—would have perplexed him. Why, Birdseye would have wondered, would you want to be limited by local production when the food of the world is available? What would he have thought to see that in his hometown of Brooklyn and his adopted home of Gloucester, there are open-air markets selling local produce when consumers could go to a supermarket and buy the food of California, France, and China for less money? It would have made little sense to Birdseye to prefer small artisanal farms with low and inconsistent yields to the miracles of agribusiness.

  Birdseye loved food, loved to cook, and wrote, thought, and talked about eating much more than most people. He was what would be called today a foodie. But he was a nineteenth-century foodie, a foodie in reverse who ate wild local food and artisanally made products, the food of family farms, but who dreamed of making food industrial. It can and probably always will be debated whether this is a good thing. The real argument is whether in changing our eating habits, Birdseye made life better. He personally had no doubt that what he was doing was improving life, but that is largely because he considered his frozen food to be fresh. The idea still exists in the odd commercial oxymoron “fresh frozen.” An increasing number of people today ask what this phrase means. How can it be fresh if it is frozen? The claim is that it was preserved in a fresh state. When Birdseye was developing fast freezing, the product seemed remarkably fresh when compared with the existing preserved foods—slow frozen, canned, salted, or smoked.

/>   My grandfather was a tailor, and he hand made all of my father’s clothes. And so my father grew up dreaming of someday owning a factory-made suit. We are all more reactive against the conditions we inherit than we realize. In the postindustrial world we have become anti-industry, and it is useful and fascinating to get to know a man of vision and imagination who genuinely believed in industrial answers to life’s problems. To understand Birdseye in the context of his times, we need to grasp that people who are accustomed only to artisanal goods long for the industrial. It is only when the usual product is industrial that the artisanal is longed for. That is why artisanal food, the dream of the food of family farms, caught on so powerfully in California, one of the early strongholds of agribusiness with little tradition of small family farms. Birdseye came from a world that was becoming rapidly industrialized, and yet one in which food production was lagging behind and still mostly artisanal.

  Birdseye was a naturalist, fascinated by every mammal, reptile, insect, and plant he ran across. But he was not an environmentalist and did not think about the effects of urbanization, industry, and agribusiness on habitat. He was interested in increasing the catches of fishermen, not in the issue of overfishing—a concept that seems never to have occurred to him.

  It seems certain that were he alive today, he would see things very differently—and would turn his inventive mind to solving today’s problems. Birdseye was a man who kept up with new developments and always wanted to know the latest.

  Solving problems was his primary interest. He was a rare and original man who lived in the forefront of his times, operating through imaginative thinking, skilled hands, and great daring. He was a wonder then, and he would be a wonder today.

  The lobster boats made in Deer Isle, Maine, in the 1940s and 1950s were cumbersome vessels with rounded wooden hulls that made them roll in the slightest swell. Even on a flat sea they were hard to direct, and a steady course could only be achieved by spinning the wheel far to starboard, then, when the bow started to shift, spinning it back far to port. If it was done right, the result could be a straight line, but this was not easy to accomplish. Heading into the wind was impossible, so the boat had to be steered at angles like a tacking sailboat.

  In 1956, Sarah Robbins had just bought such a boat and kept it by her home in the old fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts. She had not in the least mastered the stubby thirty-five-foot craft when she offered to take her friend Clarence Birdseye on his last adventure. Though Birdseye was more than a generation older, their friendship had been inevitable. They both lived on the fog-swept opening of Gloucester Harbor, an area called Eastern Point, and they were both self-taught naturalists. She had bought the lobster boat to aid her in bird-watching, an interest she shared with Birdseye.

  Birdseye, a tiny man, smaller than many of the kids in the neighborhood, with a bland, gray appearance and the dull nickname Bob, was a source of endless fascination in affluent Eastern Point. It was not just that he was famous. Or that he had lived a life of adventure and was full of stories about the Rocky Mountains and the Southwest at the beginning of the twentieth century and the wild frozen frontier of Labrador before World War I. It was that he seemed to be interested in almost everything and knew a great deal about most of it.

  “If I see a man skinning a fish, for example,” he wrote about himself in 1951 in The American Magazine, “a host of questions pop into my mind. Why is he skinning the fish? Why is he doing it by hand? Is the skin good for anything? If I am in a restaurant and get biscuits, which I like, I ask the chef how he made them: What did he put in the dough? How did he mix it? How long did the biscuits bake? At what temperature? When I visit a strange city, I go through the local industrial plants to see how they make things. I don’t care what the product is. I am just as much interested in the manufacture of chewing gum as of steel.”

  Birdseye died with more than two hundred patents to his name on more than fifty ideas, and though the obituaries called him “the father of frozen food,” his inventions ranged from a whaling harpoon to electric lightbulbs. A few of his inventions changed the course of the twentieth century. But it is almost as telling to know that when this enthusiastic and insatiably curious man died, his final mourners were not the captains of finance and industry with whom he worked, nor fellow inventors and thinkers, but the children who grew up in his neighborhood.

  When Josephine Swift Boyer was a child in California, her family spent summers at their home on Eastern Point. Like a number of girls in the neighborhood, she took up an interest in birds. When she found a dead rail, a rare specimen for Gloucester, she wanted to keep it, and not knowing what to do, she went to the curious Mr. Birdseye. Not surprisingly, he turned out to be a skilled and experienced taxidermist. He had the right tools and chemicals, and he showed her how to open it and rub it with preservatives and stuff it. The girls, now older women, still remember what delicate and skillful hands he had. Josephine’s sister, Lila, said that her clearest memory of him was his fine hands. A reporter from the New York Post, interviewing him in 1945, wrote that he had “powerful hands,” which is a surprising feature for such a small man.

  A family man with four children, he liked helping and talking to young people. “He was very pleasant and easy for a youngster to talk to,” said Nancy Ellis, who also knew him as a girl growing up in Eastern Point.

  “He was a character,” Lila said. “You couldn’t help being fascinated by him.” He was always building strange things in his large, high-ceilinged basement, or in the kitchen, or even on the lawn of the stately seventeen-room mansion he had built. He was a hunter and was known as a man who would shoot, freeze, dehydrate, or just eat almost anything. Lila, who loved birds and, even in her old age, nursed wounded ones back to health, recalled a strange contraption on Birdseye’s lawn. “It was for capturing starlings. That elegant house, and he sat by the pillars ready to pull a string and catch the starlings. We always thought he was going to eat them, probably fast frozen, taste tested for some experiment. In any case we knew they were goners.”

  Birdseye’s wife, Eleanor, was more reserved. But she had been with him for more than forty years, from Labrador to Peru. She too had great curiosity and boundless enthusiasm and a sense of adventure that she probably inherited from her father, one of the founders of the National Geographic Society. Dotty Brown, an Eastern Point girl who knew the family well because she was a close friend of Henry, one of the Birdseye sons, said of Clarence and Eleanor, “They were a devoted couple … They were interested in everything. Everything was grist for his mill. He had to know how things grow and what their name is. He didn’t just sit around reading the newspaper. Mrs. Birdseye was a little shy, but Mr. Birdseye was outgoing. You couldn’t be shy and find things out. He was always asking questions.”

  Birdseye once said, “Enthusiasm and hard work are also indispensable ingredients of achievement.” Perhaps he had too much of both, for he developed a heart condition and often ignored doctors’ advice to ease up. On October 7, 1956, Birdseye died of heart failure in his New York City apartment.

  Birdseye had requested that he be cremated and that his ashes be scattered past the breakwater where Gloucester Harbor opened to the North Atlantic. It was for this purpose that Sarah Robbins’s clumsy Deer Isle lobster boat had been called into service. Sarah was at the wheel, desperately trying to steer a straight course. Eleanor Birdseye stood formally at the stern with Dotty Brown and Lila Monell. At the bow was the son Henry Birdseye, holding a white ceramic urn with the ashes of his father inside. Sarah managed to stay off the granite blocks of the breakwater and sail out of the harbor opening and hard aport to the open Atlantic, following the route, albeit with a few more curves and zigzags, sailed by hundreds of thousands of Gloucester fishermen since the town became a fishing port in 1623.

  Of the four children, Henry was in many ways the most like his father. He too was described around Eastern Point as “a character.” He spent a great deal of time at the Eastern Point Ya
cht Club and like his father loved to amuse people with great stories. They used to call him Birdseed. Also like his father, he had a bent for science and borrowed a corner of the basement laboratory to build his own chemistry lab. Like his father, he had an entrepreneurial side and became an expert scuba diver, operating a salvage business around Gloucester Harbor. During World War II, he was a decorated soldier in the Pacific and later became an avid flier, geologist, and amateur astronomer.

  But Birdseed at the bow did something unexpected in front of his mother and old friends. He ceremoniously tossed the white ceramic urn into the gray-green Atlantic without opening it to scatter the ashes. The problem was that it did not sink. It floated and bobbed like a white lobster buoy.

  “Break it, break it!” Dotty and Lila shouted hoarsely, trying to get his attention without Mrs. Birdseye noticing from the stern. If the urn was left to float, it would surely wash onto one of the popular beaches along what was called the Back Shore. Who would find it? What would happen to it? Would this be one of those slightly weird local stories in the Gloucester Daily Times?

  “Break it!” Dotty shouted again, handing him the boat hook while Lila retreated to the stern to keep Mrs. Birdseye occupied. Sarah turned her wheel wildly, trying to bring the boat about to give Henry a shot at the urn. He poked at it, but it didn’t break, and she had to make another pass. Turning circles in a boat that will not head into the wind is no small task. But the urn would not break. Meanwhile, Lila was chatting with Mrs. Birdseye, hoping she did not notice her son jabbing at the sea. Finally, Henry was able to get the right angle to crack the urn with a blow from his hook, and the last of Clarence Birdseye drifted into the tide like plankton.

  Had Clarence Birdseye been there in the flesh observing all this, he probably upon landing would have hopped into one of his three cars, driven downtown to a hardware store to buy a few things, and retired to his basement to build either the fast-breaking funeral urn or the quick-sinking one and then would have patented it, certain that in the future millions would end their days in a Birdseye urn. That’s who he was, a man who observed how things worked and figured out how to make them work better.