In this Thanksgiving season I would like to sing the praises of my father ”“ a man who started his business just before the Great Depression, died almost 50 years ago but built a business that thrives today in the same location in Southern California, having survived multiple recessions and the continual blandishments of Kraft Foods, Smuckers and other hefty suitors.
Crosby Winfred Magnusson, known as Win, was the eldest son of a retired college president in St. Cloud, Minn. When his father retired, the family moved to California and bought an orange grove in Garden Grove, then a dusty town just beyond the Los Angeles County line, now the home of the Crystal Cathedral. My father had spent a year in the army just as WWI ended, another year in college, then knocked around Southern California for a time doing odd jobs ”“ film splicing in Hollywood, hod-carrying on a construction job and delivering milk. About this time he devised a plan for his future ”“ that in five years he would have a business, a house and a wife. He was about 24 years old at the time.
Living next to an orange grove, he became troubled by the waste he saw around the trees. Oranges that hit the ground are not saleable in California. The chemical reaction in the orange creates a very bitter taste on the portion touching the earth. Being a frugal sort, my father, using the uncontaminated part of the orange, began to develop a recipe for orange marmalade, stirring up the whole mess on his mother”™s stove. With his sister he delivered his first successful batch to fruit stands on dusty roads. To his delight, he found that his new product had sold out in a few days. Back to the kitchen to ramp up production. My father”™s new product had found a market.
It wasn”™t long before he got a substantial order from Safeway Stores, a major grocery chain. By this time it was clear the enterprise had grown past the family kitchen. Win and his father, the professor, then built a corrugated tin factory just beyond the house ”“ zoning wasn”™t an issue then ”“ Â and production really took off. King Kelly Marmalade Co. was born, the name coming from the 1880s baseball Hall of Famer Michael “King” Kelly.
In 1929 just before the crash, he married my mother. On their honeymoon night they moved into a house they had built in Bellflower, about a half-hour away from the factory. In the depths of the depression, however, he could not afford to live in that house so the family, now including my sister and me, moved to a makeshift apartment on top of the factory for a period of time. In spite of the disastrous economy, his business continued to grow. The low cost of marmalade made it popular during hard times. In the mid-thirties the Garden Grove factory became completely inadequate for the growing business and a new building was constructed behind the Bellflower house, some of the original building still in use today. Photos taken in the late thirties show a prosperous-looking family that now included four children, my mother dressed quite elegantly and a new car in the background.
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Then came World War II and near-disaster struck. To control prices in wartime, the Roosevelt Administration initiated price controls, setting the level on one particular day. As it turned out, the day chosen was in the midst of a King Kelly Marmalade sale. There was deep anxiety in my family at that point, my father flying to Washington to plead his case and subsequently losing. So his sale price became THE price throughout the war. Nonetheless, he sold so much marmalade during the war that the feared disaster never occurred. The plant ran round the clock. I could wake up in the middle of the night and see the lights and sounds of the factory and the smell of marmalade being cooked, the plant churning out its contribution to the war effort. In fact, a few former employees, now Marines serving in the South Pacific, told my father after the war that it brought tears to their eyes when they saw the familiar King Kelly logo on a No.10 gallon can.
Understanding the initial process of marmalade-making will help the reader appreciate the enormous changes that occurred after the war. Up to that point the whole orange had to be purchased just to use the peel which necessitated great rivers of orange juice flowing down the sewer. The first step in marmalade making was to “speck the peel,” that is, remove any imperfections with a knife; very labor intensive. Over the years various improvements were made in the system to make it less labor intensive. However, when Bird”™s Eye Frozen Foods opened for business in the region a major change occurred. Since Bird”™s Eye only wanted the orange juice and my father only wanted the orange peel a perfect partnership emerged with King Kelly winding up with Bird”™s Eye”™s “garbage.” Within a few years another breakthrough came along. Instead of using Bird”™s Eye”™s peel year round, my father realized that it was better to get the peel early in the season as there were fewer blemishes. He would buy enough peel from Bird”™s Eye to meet a year”™s worth of marmalade production, shred and parboil the peel and can it in large containers.
He soon realized that he could do even better with the process by canning enough peel to sell to all his competitors ”“ among them the aforementioned Kraft Foods and Smuckers. They were happy with the improvement in their bottom line and King Kelly had a higher profit margin helping his competitors than he did making his own marmalade. As a teenager I was treated to a brief lesson in the economics of the marmalade business following a shopping trip in which I showed him a mohair sweater I had just purchased. His response: “I had to sell 1,000 jars of marmalade for you to buy that sweater.” Lesson learned.
By the fifties my father had become bored with making marmalade as his only activity and began writing a column as a part of a King Kelly ad on the cover of a commercial publication in Southern California. The letters he received in response to his homespun observations of daily life delighted him in his final years. In the summer of 1958 he died suddenly of a heart attack while on a family vacation in San Juan Capistrano. He was 58 years old.
In spite of the change in the public”™s interest in breakfast, the company still survives in the same location, the home I grew up is now the company office. On the death of its founder, the company was sold to another family and is now run by John Bowen, who has incarnated the same collaborative spirit with his employees my father developed over the years ”“ an intense loyalty and caring connection to all of them as well as their families. It remains a non-union shop because the employees have always been paid better than the union could assure them. King Kelly Marmalade Co. is a small business that could be a model for a commercial enterprise today.
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