Birdseye

by Mark Kurlansky

  As the market for frozen food grew, variety became the new problem. Retailers were complaining that there was not a wide enough selection of products. Birdseye established a partnership with a large farm in southern New Jersey, Seabrook Farms, to supply a greater variety of vegetables. Birdseye had been encouraging farms to become industrial, but Seabrook was already an agro-industrial operation, supplying produce for canneries. In 1911, Charles Seabrook had started Seabrook Farms as a model of modern agribusiness. An engineer, he built power plants and irrigation systems, so Birds Eye was able to have them wash, blanch, and cool produce for freezing in the new portable freezers. Lima beans, which had been a mainstay of the farm’s cannery business, were one of the early frozen-vegetable successes from Seabrook.

  Certain problem products were never conquered. Birdseye could not freeze lettuce without wilting it or tomatoes without ruining their texture, and frozen bananas were a disaster. But between 1932 and 1934 more than one hundred types of frozen foods, many of them processed foods, were developed. Most of them were not put on the market until the 1940s because of the lack of infrastructure and consumer interest.

  Tressler, the head of research, wrote about 1929, when the laboratory began its work, “This was the beginning of the depression but we did not realize it.” By 1933 General Foods realized it. It still believed in the future of frozen food and continued to aggressively market it, but the company had to cut its losses. It closed down the Gloucester operation, worked out of Boston, and did not return to Gloucester until the 1940s.

  Bob Birdseye went from president of the division to consultant. He continued to take an interest in the progress of frozen food and to promote it whenever he got a chance, whenever he was asked, sometimes without being asked. But his restless mind moved on to other ideas.

  Safe from the Depression, the Birdseyes had found the good life in their Eastern Point Wyndiecote. Don Wonson remembered the neighbors of his boyhood: “The house was like a showcase. Andy the gardener was always calling people over to see something blooming in the garden, fish pond with pussy willows, pond stocked with carp, goldfish, and some unusual fish and aquatic plants.”

  As soon as the Eastern Point house was completed, the Birdseyes built horse stables in West Gloucester. Gloucester is in effect an island cut off from Massachusetts because the strip of land connecting it, only a few yards wide, was dug through in the seventeenth century, enabling ships to sail from the north coast of Cape Ann to Boston without rounding the treacherous rocky tip off the cape. The town grew upon this island, centered on the perfect harbor. West Gloucester, the side on the mainland, was a more rural area where the wealthy retreated from the redolent drying fish in the hot summer months. There the Birdseyes owned five hundred acres of land and built not a little barn for horses but an elegant two-story riding stable with a long arcade. They kept fine Thoroughbred horses and rode with slim English saddles. Birdseye, who had lived on horseback in the Southwest and in the Bitterroot, was an expert horseman, and he taught his children. They galloped through the woods, went jumping, and even did some stunt riding. Bob liked to shoot handguns while mounted, which took some skill since the horse would lurch, alarmed by the pop of the pistol. They would often ride to Wingaersheek Beach, where Bob liked to ride up the sand dunes and get his horse to slide down on its backside.

  Between the Eastern Point mansion and the West Gloucester stables, Birdseye had reproduced his childhood with the elegant Cobble Hill brownstone and the farm on the North Fork of Long Island.

  The Birdseyes had bird dogs, Mickey the Irish setter, who greeted everyone but had to be muzzled because of his bad habit of nipping, and Jeff the sweet-natured Brittany. Bob took his dogs duck hunting in South Dakota every year. He loved hunting and taught the whole family to shoot, sometimes taking them with him on hunting trips. He was an outdoorsman. At first he looked too small and mild for the part, but then there were those large hands and the weather-beaten face.

  The Birdseyes joined the snobbish Eastern Point Yacht Club, and the children learned sailing. They frequently entertained. Bob was remembered as extremely open and casual, Eleanor as a little more formal and reserved. Bob loved to cook, and they had dinner parties in their large formal dining room with thrilling sea views. He specialized in what he liked to call “lobster feeds,” during which he would triumphantly emerge from the kitchen sporting an apron and chef’s toque and carrying an enormous platter of steamed lobsters.

  Judging from the amount of film he shot of sunsets over the harbor and whitecaps spraying over the dark crests of the granite boulders, Bob must have loved these views. He seemed to love Gloucester. He cooked seawater down to salt and carried that salt in a vial wherever he traveled. Despite the stiffness of his writing, Bob was a sentimental man.

  He tried to take care of Eastern Point, preserving its bird habitat. He persuaded the government to build a seawall in a nearby cove to protect Niles Pond from storms. He raised animals behind his house. He had chicken coops with long runs for Rhode Island Reds, the same species he and Eleanor had raised in Labrador. They also raised big fluffy chinchillas. Bob would sell the pelts and freeze the meat.

  Buffalo Bill’s Wild West was a never-forgotten romance. Bob was still an avid reader of Henty adventure novels and kept rereading his favorite, Redskin and Cowboy, as well as the western novels of Owen Wister, famous for his 1902 The Virginian, and the western stories of Bret Harte. He also enjoyed going to movies to see westerns or staying home to play Chinese checkers, a game for which he had a near-fanatical passion.

  Bob was a curious figure in Gloucester, famously an inventive genius who did odd things that regular people would not understand. When rats invaded his melon patch, he stood on the terrace and shot them with a handgun. He was always trapping or shooting or freezing something as though he were still surviving in a frontier. Children would ask him what he was doing, and he would always eagerly explain. He would even take them to his kitchen or his basement to show them an experiment he was working on. “If you were curious, he would explain how and why and when. He took the time,” said Don Wonson. This was a lot more exciting for local kids than a man giving out candy.

  His daughter Eleanor, when interviewed at age eighty-two in 2005, recalled early childhood with Dad, learning how to dissect animals in the Persian-carpeted living room. She also learned how to skin mice and how to cure skins. He would often involve his own children in his experiments. Sometimes the experiments were for no particular purpose other than to satisfy his own curiosity, such as when he got an idea for a new way to make potato chips and enlisted the family in potato-chip making. His wife, Eleanor, too, when she did not run out of patience, was enlisted in kitchen experiments.

  While his kids were learning to be yachtsmen at the Eastern Point club, he preferred to go fishing on his rugged forty-foot, wooden-hulled, open-deck power launch, the Sealoafer. If he caught something interesting, he would try freezing it. He saw whales and dolphins, and after trying to freeze them too, he started to become interested in them. As was the family tradition, he had someone film him at sea. There was the small bald man with glasses, dressed in a sweater and dress shirt and tie, walking out on a narrow plank over the bow of his boat with an enormous harpoon, which, like Queequeg in Moby-Dick, he would raise up and hurl into the side of a six-foot shark or a porpoise or a whale.

  Was he wearing the tie for the camera or the fish? Birdseye never lost the family habit of dressing for a law office. What he would do with these animals is not certain, but as his neighbor Lila Monell pointed out with the starlings, when Bob got an animal, it usually ended up frozen or eaten, or both. Caught in 16-millimeter black and white is the same Bob Birdseye of the Bitterroot, a relentless predator. In one sequence he is harpooning porpoises, and then there is a scene with a dozen or more lying on the beach, some wriggling, some raising their heads and opening their mouths as though to cry out. Hunting marine mammals was legal in the 1930s.

  According to the Birds Eye
company official history, he started working with the International Whaling Commission, a group that tried to monitor whale migration to promote more rational hunting of them. But that organization did not exist until after World War II, and he was whaling from 1934 to 1938. Supposedly he was tagging finbacks, after the blue whale the second-largest animal that has ever lived on earth, with a heavy four-inch aluminum harpoon of his own invention. Aside from this machine, which still exists in the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, there is disturbingly little evidence that he was tagging and not just killing. To insert the harpoon, he invented and patented the kickless, handheld whale harpoon. Typical of Birdseye, it looks as if it was handmade in a basement, which it probably was, and combines medieval technology with pragmatic inventiveness to solve his problem, an effective way to single-handedly plant the harpoon. The invention owes a lot to the crossbow. It has an aluminum rifle stock and a thick tube of black rubber to propel the harpoons. The rubber is stretched back by the turning of a large steel cogwheel with a hand crank, and a trigger releases it to fire the harpoon. It was much more efficient than throwing the harpoon spear-like, although Birdseye seemed effective enough with the old technique. Limited in its applications, the tool never caught on, and there is a record of only one ever being built. But it served him well at sea for four years. According to Bob, he harpooned fifty-two finbacks. There is also film footage of him using the harpoon gun to hunt sharks, and he may have found other uses. In the film footage he appears to be killing and not tagging.

  He had a number of ideas that were not developed. One winter he was in Galveston, Texas, and he watched the commercial fishermen landing red snapper. They were hand lining, dropping a baited and weighted line many fathoms to the coral reefs on the ocean bottom. Then, when they got a bite, they quickly reeled the line up on their circling two thumbs the way hand liners have been fishing for centuries. Birdseye thought that there must be an easier way to do this. But when he talked to fishermen, they told him, the way fishermen often do, that they had always fished this way and it worked, so they were not interested in changing.

  This was absolutely contrary to the Birdseye creed. Birdseye always said, “Just because something has always been done in a certain way is never a sufficient reason for continuing to do it in that way.” Birdseye believed in change, believed in the constant updating and improvement of ideas. “Change,” he asserted in his 1951 American Magazine article, “is the very essence of American life.” And he frequently stated, “There is always a better way of doing almost everything. Today anything which is twenty years old is, or should be, apt to be obsolete.”

  So despite the protests of fishermen, Birdseye worked on the automatic reel: a device installed on the side of a boat that lowered a baited steel cable to depths greater than one hundred fathoms. When a fish bit, it set the hook and hauled it up to the surface, and even landed the fish on the deck.

  Birdseye boasted, “The gadget does everything, in fact, except mix a mint julep for the fisherman.” Birdseye thought he was onto the next big idea. He thought it would revolutionize commercial fishing because in one day the device could catch as many fish as three fishermen. He predicted that it would “make more sea food available, and increase fishermen’s earnings.” Like most people in the 1930s, Birdseye had no concept of overfishing. He never developed the device, and no one ever used it. Had it become a tool to revolutionize commercial fishing, its destructive power would be unacceptable in today’s overfished ocean, and doubtless some would be calling for it to be banned.

  Of greater success and far more impact was his work with lightbulbs. Birdseye noticed that reflectors were placed behind lightbulbs to illuminate displays in shopwindows. “I didn’t know the difference between an ohm and a kilowatt,” he said. “But it seemed to me there was no reason why the bulb and the reflector should be separate units. Wouldn’t it be simpler and cheaper to build a lamp which would contain its own reflector?”

  And so he formed the Birdseye Electric Company, a lightbulb company providing more jobs in Gloucester. His 1935 patent 2,219,510 for a reflecting electric lamp was one of his most important. Designed for working areas and window displays, his lightbulb with the built-in reflector has become a fixed idea in lighting. He also designed more intensely glowing filaments for more efficient lighting, and heat lamps for keeping food warm, another idea still in use. He also manufactured neon bulbs in the shape of the old radio tubes, with a decorative figure inside that would light up—flowers, animals, religious symbols, and occasional advertising such as his bulb in which the RCA logo lights up—all rare and very collectible today.

  Birdseye developed ideas and used them to create a company, and then he would sell the company. That was what he did with frozen food, and in 1939 he sold the Birdseye Electric Company to the Wabash Appliance Corporation of Brooklyn on the condition that Birdseye Electric would keep its own name and personnel. Birdseye and Wabash continued until 1945, when Sylvania bought them out and continued producing Birdseye bulbs.

  After several years of flooding the U.S. patent office with lightbulb inventions, Birdseye returned to freezing. In 1939 he came out with an important new invention, the gravity froster. It was to be his last important contribution to frozen-food technology. The gravity froster, in one sense, was a complete departure for him. While his idea had always been to freeze food in convenient retail packages, this freezer was for individual pieces of food that the producer could then package. This was an industrial freezer that did not take up a large amount of floor space in the plant, was portable, and could freeze loose products without drying them out. Loose vegetables were fed into the top of the froster and sent around originally ten extremely thin stainless steel plates—by 1941 twenty plates—with a liquid ammonia refrigerant. Scrapers removed frost from the plates and deposited the moisture on the vegetables until the pieces came out frozen at the bottom. The machine had enormous capacity, and one worker could operate four machines at once, because the produce moved through the machine automatically. A twenty-plate freezer could freeze eighteen hundred pounds of fresh peas in an hour. It could be used anywhere because of its excellent insulation. Previous freezers needed to operate in a cold room.

  The machine was tested in the summer of 1939 in Gloucester, freezing peas, lima beans, oysters, and sliced strawberries. Then a Boston-based consortium of New England investors, Gravity Froster Corporation, was formed and leased the machine to an ever-expanding list of frozen-food companies.

  In 1930, eighty thousand pounds of food were sold frozen. By the mid-1940s, ten times that much was being sold every year. Frozen food grew, as Birdseye always said it would, from a curiosity to a major industry.

  There was still the problem of infrastructure. The industry was struggling to get enough well-insulated refrigerator trucks for shipping to its growing market. And there was still the problem of image. Birdseye and other advocates of frozen food were a major force in pushing Congress into its 1938 revision of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act. Birdseye felt that the standards of the 1906 law were not nearly stringent enough for the frozen-food industry. From the outset frozen food had suffered from a reputation for low quality. Birds Eye had introduced high standards, and it was thought that the only way the industry could grow, as new frozen-food companies were being created, was to make sure that all frozen food had these high standards so that the public would start associating frozen with quality. Birds Eye now had competing frozen-food companies, and many of them were willing to offer inferior products to keep the price down. This caused Birds Eye to lower its prices and mass market frozen food.

  But Bob always understood the risk of lowering quality to lower prices. The 1938 law increased penalties, had a longer list of harmful commodities, had tougher rules about mislabeling and adulterating, and required a list of ingredients on every product’s label. It has remained the underpinning of product safety in the United States.

  There were still resisters, those who insisted fr
ozen food was inferior. And some old arguments persisted.

  Birdseye realized that after the war the opportunities for frozen food would be tremendous. World War II ended the resistance. A shortage of metals led to a decline in canning, which caused many people to try frozen food for the first time.

  The war changed the way Americans ate, and the biggest difference in American eating was that during the war women left the kitchen for wartime jobs to do their part. Many were not going to go back or at least not full-time. And so a trend began in the 1940s that has continued ever since of looking for easier and quicker ways to prepare meals. In 1951 a survey in Science Digest found that 41 percent of American housewives preferred frozen food to either fresh or canned because of its convenience. Another huge change was the growth of supermarkets, which gave a great deal of their ample space to frozen food. By 1950, according to the American Frozen Food Institute, 64 percent of American retail food stores carried some frozen food.

  But for Birdseye it was not enough to be the guru of the last big food idea, he wanted to be master of the next. Birdseye was convinced that the next important food idea was dehydration. He wondered if dehydrating—extracting water—more rapidly would have a similar result to freezing rapidly.

  He began his work on dehydration in his kitchen with a coffee hotplate hung upside down from the ceiling with a plate of bread cubes placed a few inches below. Then he brought in a favorite piece of Birdseye equipment, an electric fan, to blow on the bread. With both the heat and the air blowing, he stirred the bread with a spoon. The combination of heat, stirring, and air, he concluded, dehydrated faster than the standard technique of blowing hot air. There were other techniques. Pouring milk on a heated stainless steel drum dried it. Fish meal was produced, and dried beef for World War II soldiers was made by placing the food inside a heated drum.