Birdseye

by Mark Kurlansky

  Grace was interested in the possibility of applying Birdseye’s process to the production of paper from cane scrap in Peru. A number of countries in the world, such as the Philippines, were suffering from acute paper shortages. Grace found other potential markets for the process in Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Argentina, and Egypt.

  Grace’s Peruvian sugar fields produced half a million tons of sugar annually as well as molasses and industrial-grade alcohol. This still left mountains of crushed cane stalks, called bagasse, unused. Grace made paper with it, but it was a slow, inefficient process. It took six months to dry the bagasse enough to use it for papermaking. Birdseye’s process provided the possibility of using the bagasse immediately. Grace thought Birdseye could greatly improve the process and build it a new, 115-ton paper pulp factory that would be a model to sell to other countries.

  And so in 1953 Bob and Eleanor left their Wyndiecote by the sea in Gloucester and moved to Paramonga, in the mountainous, cactus-studded desert of southern Peru. Grace had fifteen thousand irrigated acres of cane field, its sugar mill, and its paper plant there. It owned the town of adobe houses on unpaved roads where nine thousand people lived, most of them descendants of Incas who took the edge off their hard lives by chewing coca leaves. At one end of town was a well-kept area of forty houses where Grace executives, North Americans and Europeans, lived. Grace built a school, a movie theater, a club, and a church there.

  Bob told a reporter from the Gloucester Daily Times, “Our own home is a single-story eight-room house, very strongly-made. It is well laid out, nicely furnished and has a large walled-in patio.” They planted gardens around it with daisies, zinnias, snapdragons, bachelor’s buttons, petunias, chrysanthemums, and a few crops such as parsley, lettuce, and several banana bushes. The front door was draped in fuchsia bougainvillea. The seasons barely changed, the temperature was usually in the seventies, and it could go years without raining.

  There were, as Bob put it, “a couple of drawbacks.” To avoid dysentery, all the water had to be boiled, the vegetables peeled, the fruit washed in disinfectant, even the milk boiled. But Bob and Eleanor weren’t doing this work. The native people were very poor and worked for very little. Laborers earned eight cents an hour, while skilled workers could command fifteen cents. Maids cost $5 a month, and a really good cook could command $15 a month. The Birdseyes hired Jacinto to cook, and his wife cleaned.

  This clearly wasn’t Labrador. But lest there be any doubt that in the minds of Bob and Eleanor this was their second Labrador, one of the first things they did after settling in was begin to raise foxes. These were gray desert foxes, two of which were found by a worker on the hillside above a cane field. They were thought to be the only survivors of an unlucky brood. The two were only a few weeks old and weighed four ounces each. One slept in one of Eleanor’s slippers, and another preferred a saucer. Bob and Eleanor knew how to care for foxes and were obsessed with the two, wetting their fingers with evaporated milk to feed them and giving them chopped raw meat, nursing them the way they used to when they depended on the survival of the foxes. One died, but the other, named Susie, became a center of attention. Bob and Eleanor would write pages of single-spaced typing to their children on Susie’s progress.

  When he got to Peru, he found the plant furnished with all the equipment he had requested. But it was still a quaint place of whistles and clanging bells and a nineteenth-century railroad that carried the cane in from the fields. Bob was working hard, up at 6:00 a.m., leaving for the plant at 6:45, working on his ideas until evening, sometimes as late as 11:00 p.m.

  Grace periodically sent Bob to Puerto Rico, where the company saw tremendous opportunities for Birdseye’s process. Puerto Rico at that time was an impoverished sugar-growing island. It produced mountains of bagasse and used it only as fuel to operate the mills. But Puerto Rico had American money from Operation Bootstrap, a U.S. government project to spend millions of dollars promoting industrialization on the island. Even though, ironically, part of that industrialization process was to move the Puerto Rican economy away from sugar, in the 1950s the Puerto Rican government was tremendously interested in Grace, which now had the best bagasse-to-paper process. Bob loved Puerto Rico—the flowering trees, green mountains, and blue sea. And, of course, he also reported that he liked the food.

  In Paramonga, Bob had taken to making the local ceviche with red peppers he described as “twice as hot as molten steel.” He thought it was a good appetizer to serve before a New England pot roast. He and Eleanor enjoyed drinking what they called “ginger con gin” until the summer of 1954, when Birdseye triumphantly announced his “most recent invention”—a coconut milk, lime juice, and gin cocktail.

  He was the same Bob Birdseye, always thinking of food and writing home to say what everyone was eating. On January 10, 1954, he wrote about a trip to the coast:

  I charcoal-broiled and we four adults consumed two chickens, and in addition sundry stuffed eggs, grilled toast, potato salad, bananas, beer, coke, lemonade and for roughage, large quantities of ever drifting sand. But today we varied our picnic routine by adding surf fishing for pejerreyes—large yellow-tailed scrumptiously edible smelt-like fish.

  He wrote that Eleanor was becoming proficient at catching the little fish on three hooked nylon lines, wading into the surf, a good kind of fishing for someone who gets seasick on boats.

  Bob was doing a lot of fishing—and was bird shooting with the shotgun that he managed to bring in from the United States. He also started riding horses again, something he hadn’t done since 1934 in West Gloucester. The terrain reminded him of the Southwest, where he’d ridden almost a half century earlier. One day fishing in about forty feet of water, he felt a powerful tug on his line and fought for thirty minutes to bring up what he thought would be an enormous fish, but it turned out to be a penguin. Once on the boat the penguin continued to fight until they tied his feet and rubber banded his sharp beak, as Birdseye said, “to keep him from filling up on Indians’ toes.” Billy the penguin became another household pet. Later Bob and Eleanor adopted a deer and a redheaded parrot they named Pancho, who couldn’t fly because he accidentally clipped a wing while hunting. There were also geese, ducks, squabs, and guinea pigs around the house, but most of them ended up being eaten. And the Birdseyes resumed their old habit of raising Rhode Island Reds for the eggs. They had a freezer, a fifteen-cubic-foot General Electric model, to keep a supply of meat for entertaining. Appropriately, the Birdseyes brought the first freezer ever to be used in Paramonga, where most people didn’t even have refrigerators. To the Birdseyes, having a freezer was important because it meant you could bring in food and not be dependent on what was available locally.

  Bob was still tremendously curious about everything and wrote page after page to his children about topics from local salt making, to the enormous and curious insects he saw, to Incan pots.

  Yet the Birdseyes, who didn’t speak Spanish, lived a tame and very Americanized life in their comfortable foreign community. In late winter 1954 two girls from Eastern Point, Dotty Brown and Sarah Robbins, traveling through South America, stopped off to see them in Paramonga. Bob was overjoyed because he had written to Sarah to make sure she brought him Lawry’s seasoning, which he loved to cook with, and she arrived with two bottles. This was a popular seasoning mixture from a Los Angeles–based chain of roast beef restaurants. It solved the problem of the local lobster. He missed his New England lobster parties. The local lobster was a freshwater crayfish with edible tails and claws that he thought tasted of mud and were “insipid.” Once he had his Lawry’s, he could make them appealing. He offered this recipe to his children, who, of course, didn’t have the crayfish. But Bob could never resist offering a good recipe: “Shell the tails raw; split as for ‘fantail shrimp’; treat with salt, pepper and Lawry’s; and sauté in butter.”

  Dotty still remembered more than fifty years later, “We were disappointed with dinner at the Birdseyes’—roast chicken, string beans, Parker House rol
l, lemon meringue pie. We could have been in Gloucester!”

  Bob had taught Jacinto how to make lemon meringue pie from an English cookbook. He also taught him to make coconut custard pie and sponge cake. The rolls he made himself. He also liked to make donuts. There was certainly an Americanness to their new adventure. But Dotty also remembered that they seemed very happy.

  They kept thinking of Labrador and making comparisons. Shortly after arriving, Bob wrote:

  Shades of Labrador! There a common winter meal consisted of salted capelin (a smelt-like sea fish) bread and tea. This noon I watched Indians eating the same fodder—whole salted raw anchovies, bread and chica. The later is the water in which dry red-kernelled corn has been boiled, and may be either unfermented or as heady as a good applejack.

  About the time Dotty and Sarah visited, Bob and Eleanor met a group of Christian missionaries working throughout the region from a large organization, the Summer Institute of Linguistics, that would later become very controversial in Latin America. Birdseye was not uncomfortable with Christian missionaries, having a close Labrador friend, Wilfred Grenfell, who was one. However, he noted in a letter:

  Mother and I couldn’t help contrasting the pioneering of this group in what only five or ten years ago was about the wildest area in the world, with our early experiences. Even in the summer it took us from two to three weeks to get from any large city to our Cartwright headquarters; in winter a 1200-mile trip by dog team was our only means of leaving Labrador. These folks pass from Iquitos on the Amazon to Lima between breakfast and lunch. We had no communication with the “outside” from November 15 to June 15. These people have constant radio communication with Lima, Rio de Janeiro and the United States. Our nearest doctor was 250 miles away by dogsled. They have a resident doctor, a hospital, 3 schools, a postman at their headquarters. We used wood-burning stoves and kerosene and melted snow for our winter water supply. They have a central power plant, refrigerators, electric stoves, and even the remotest outpost has its generator and two-way radio. Ho, hum! The world, even the jungle, does move doesn’t it?

  Bob believed in change and could see that there is no going back.

  In the spring of 1954 Bob and Eleanor returned to the United States for almost two months. Bob had patents to register and meetings with the Grace company in New York. They had children and grandchildren to see, Gloucester to check in on, and Henry and Ernestine’s wedding in Albuquerque. It was like one of those trips home from Labrador—a little business, a little shopping, and family gatherings. As evidence that they were having a second Labrador, while in New York Bob phoned contacts he hadn’t used since 1910 at the American Museum of Natural History and arranged for them to ship him taxidermy equipment and materials so he could send them bird specimens. When he returned to Paramonga, he killed four types of doves and several other birds and froze them until the package arrived from the museum. In the next six months he killed and preserved sixty bird species and preserved forty mammal hides.

  Late in 1955 the Birdseyes left Paramonga, abandoning Susie the fox they had so coddled, and Billy the penguin, and Pancho the parrot. They might have preferred going home to Gloucester, but Bob had work in New York with the Grace company. They rented an ample and well-furnished apartment at the Gramercy Park Hotel opposite leafy Gramercy Park.

  Dotty Brown came by to see them and thought they did not seem as happy as they had been in Peru. But when Kellogg and Gypsy visited, Gypsy was struck by how excited Bob was about his new enterprise. In his two years in Peru, Birdseye had learned how to accomplish what had been a nine-hour process in only twelve minutes. Now he was eager to market it around the world. He also retained an interest in his earlier projects, especially freezing. When the Gloucester Daily Times interviewed him on his paper process, he took time to caution Gloucester and its fish producers that it was essential to maintain a high level of quality in frozen fish sticks because it was the kind of product that could easily decline. “I believe the big danger to it is a drop in quality standards, which can kill a good thing almost overnight. This is not a new idea by any means, but it still holds true.”

  Back from Peru, he was still driven by his native enthusiasm, even though at age sixty-eight he looked thin and uncharacteristically frail. Some old friends such as his early partner in freezing, Isaac Rice, believed that Bob had ruined his health on the Grace project in Peru. He certainly hadn’t lived the sedentary life his doctors had prescribed. But the doctors may have been wrong. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, when Birdseye was struggling with angina, not much was known about the heart or heart disease. Today people with Birdseye’s diagnosis are told to keep active and exercise. Exercise, it turns out, releases nitric oxide, the same result as taking nitroglycerin, which opens up oxygen supply to the heart.

  In any event, it seems unlikely that Birdseye would have followed doctors’ orders, though he tried to. He was a bit like Theodore Roosevelt, army colonel, naturalist, rancher, who as ex-president couldn’t stay home and went on an expedition in 1914 in search of an unknown river in Brazil. He charted the river but so damaged his health that he never recovered. When the former president, aged fifty-five, was asked why he did such a foolish thing, he said simply, “It was my last chance to be a boy.” Birdseye would not have passed up his South American adventure for the same reason.

  From New York he assured Time magazine, “Still other ventures are afoot, and the days are not long enough for me to take advantage of all the opportunities I see.”

  On October 7, 1956, at the age of only sixty-nine, Clarence Birdseye died of heart failure in his apartment at the Gramercy Park Hotel. He had asked that rather than sending flowers to his funeral, people contribute to an Amherst College scholarship fund. He never forgot how it felt not to be able to finish your college education because you ran out of money. He asked to be cremated and have his ashes scattered in the place he loved, the sea off Gloucester.

  Eleanor lived more than twenty more years. She sold the house in Gloucester and moved to Albuquerque, where Henry and Ernestine lived. She took the Labrador snowshoes with her. Ruth moved there too and got a job in the secretive research of the Sandia National Laboratories, where she was not permitted to and never did reveal the nature of her work. Eleanor studied Indian culture at the University of New Mexico and became an avid scholar, hiking to sites and ruins around the state. In 1972, Henry, an experienced pilot, was flying back to Albuquerque with five other geologists when his plane for unknown reasons crashed into a mountain in the Gila wilderness. All six died. Five years later, in 1977, at the age of eighty-eight, Eleanor died. Kellogg died in 2002, Ruth in 2003, and the daughter Eleanor in 2008.

  When Bob Birdseye died in 1956, frozen food had already become a multibillion-dollar international industry. It had been developing in Britain since the end of World War II. The year Birdseye died, Giovanni Buitoni started the Italian frozen-food industry with frozen lasagna and ravioli. He had begun in the United States in 1950 and had done so well he decided to take the business back to Italy, where he sold his pasta through gelato dealers.

  Eleven years after Bob Birdseye’s death, he became a fictitious British character, Captain Birdseye—the respectable white-bearded old salt in a naval uniform, portrayed by actors, who promoted frozen food. Few British people even knew that there really was a Clarence Birdseye, a bald man with glasses, who had started the industry.

  Today frozen food is, much the way Birdseye imagined it becoming in the 1920s, a major international business. Asian frozen-seafood exports alone account for billions of dollars in sales. Every country in the world that has a food-export business is in frozen foods. It is an essential part of modern living.

  If Clarence Birdseye were to come back today, after, no doubt, telling us what everyone had been eating in the otherworld, he would probably be perplexed by some of the concepts of the modern world such as the endangered species list, the whale hunting ban and marine mammal protection, limits on overfishing, the organic food m
ovement that shuns pesticides and antibiotics, the virtues of eating locally grown foods. Many of his ideas about industrialized food are not loved today.

  But in many ways he would find the world he imagined and helped build. He would be gratified to see his reflecting lightbulbs in common use. Though he is not remembered for it, it was one of his most successful inventions. Poor sugar-producing countries do get paper from sugar bagasse. It is, as he predicted, a world in which food transcends geography and climate: any food is available anywhere at any time of year. Frozen food is commonplace, a large part of stores and supermarkets and other retail food outlets, and many people keep their food in a home freezer, place it in their home microwave, and prepare their dinners in a few minutes.

  But perhaps the more important thing about Clarence Birdseye was his ability to live life as an adventure. Curiosity is the one essential ingredient to an adventurous life. Isn’t an original life one of the greatest inventions?

  Camp Venustus in the Bitterroot in 1910. Left to right: Willard V. King, Paul Stanton, Clarence Birdseye in three-piece suit, and Robert Cooley. (illustration credit 1.1)

  Birdseye looking happy in fur in Labrador, circa 1912. (illustration credit 1.2)

  Wilfred Grenfell with his team of dogsleds, 1912. (illustration credit 1.3)