Dearest Eliana and Gehrig,
Good morning, my sweethearts. I woke up thinking about you this morning and
hoping you are having a fun time with your Grandma Vicki back and getting to
meet your Aunt Ruthie. Ruthie is the
second oldest of the four children from your Great Grandfather Dan and Great
Grandmother Ruby and, of course, she is Grandma Vicki’s sister. Her actual name is Ruth Evelyn but, early on,
family and friends called her “Ruth E.” or Ruthie. Kind of sweet, isn’t it? One of those things from your childhood which
just carries on the rest of your life and will always stay with you. You will have lots of those, I am sure.
When I was not too much older than you, our kindergarten
class from Henley Elementary in Darien , CT
went on a field trip up to Norwalk
Then people with full-length white smocks and rubber gloves
used large, long-handled strainers to lift the cooked chips out of the cooking
oil and place them on a long conveyor where they were sorted, by hand, before
they went under a bar which dusted a fine salt onto the still warm chips. The smell of freshly cooked potato chips and
their pungent oil filled the air and made our mouth's water. The chips then went into a bagging machine
and down another conveyor to a packing station.
The chips that were sorted out were only those which had
remained in the cooking oil too long and were a medium to dark brown. “Overcooks”, they called them. They were thrown on narrow conveyor belts
running near the edge of the large conveyor that carried the “perfect”, crisp,
light yellow chips, and sent down a chute into a large, open holding bin
waiting to be discarded. When we passed
that bin with those thousands of “burnt” chips, we were allowed to eat as many
of them as we wanted. I remember to this
day the taste of those warm, crisp chips with their dark, robust flavor and
extra crunchiness and being able to have an unlimited helping. It was like being in potato chip heaven.
Years later some snack food marketing guru came up with the
brilliant idea of bagging those “unwanted” chips and selling them at a
premium. Of course, had they asked
anyone of those six-year olds on the field trip that day, we could have told
them they were missing a new product opportunity and “Kettle Style” would have
been launched forty years earlier. This
story leads me to my Fourth Pearl.
Fourth Pearl
Make sure that at some point in your life you stand at the
edge of an ocean and put a large seashell to your ear and hear the waves
crashing inside. Climb a tree and look
down on the world from a different perspective.
Walk in a Texas
God bless you both, my darlings.
Grandpa Jud
