Judge Allgood and some of my friends and my wife, Dianne, tried to persuade me not to go to work for my father. I heard them, but I was so hurting in my gut, and so beaten down in my spirit, that it was all over but the shouting.
I worked there 4 years and was put into a number of different facets of Golden Flake's operation, including starting and building a new sales route from scratch in Louisville, Mississippi, where I spent six months, Sunday through Thursday night in a motel, and weekends at home in Birmingham, with Dianne and our daughter.
I was in Louisville when Dianne went into labor with our second daughter. Golden Fake had sent someone to ride with me for two weeks, to learn the route. He was leaving Louisville that morning, and I drove to the Greyhound station and caught him just in time. Then, off to Birmingham, I went, 180 miles of 2-lane roads. I reached the hospital in the nick of time.
About a month later, Golden Flake's vice-president pulled me out of Mississippi, because, my father told me, he was afraid I would drown if I stayed there much longer. He might have been right, if I hadn't already drowned by going to work at Golden Flake.
Although I was giving it my very best, how can you give something your very best, when you know you sold out? When you know you should have gone to Troy and tried on being a country lawyer, and if it didn't work out, you would have given Troy a chance. You wouldn't spend the rest of your life what if-ing.
When it got really rough while I was working for Golden Flake, I tried to get psychiatry to make me feel better. In hindsight, that was not too smart. I had caused the mess I was in. Only I could fix the mess. But that would be too simple to say. I had to turn it into a blind leading the blind field trial.
My third year there, they made me Director of Marketing and Advertising, which I figured was where lots of sons of the boss probably ended up. Yet, that was probably where I best fit in the company, perhaps because there never had been a Director of Marketing and Advertising, and that field actually interested me.
Golden Flake's advertising was handled by The Frank Taylor Advertising Agency since before Bear Bryant came to Tuscaloosa to coach The Crimson Tide.
Early this year, a big Crimson Tide fan told me that someone had told him that my father and Preacher Franklin, the sales manager of the Birmingham Coca-Cola franchise, had offered Coach Bryant a lot of money and his own Sunday afternoon post-game television replay show, if he would leave Texas A & M and come to Tuscaloosa and coach the Crimson Tide.
I told the big Crimson Tide fan that was not how it happened. It was after Coach Bryant came to Alabama that he promoted Golden Flake Potato Chips and Coca Cola on a Sunday afternoon TV show.
I later called the woman who had been Frank Taylor's girl Friday and asked her if she remembered that history. She said Frank was at Golden Flake and my father was pushing him hard to come up with something that would make more people buy Golden Flake potato chips. Frank was accustomed to leaning back and looking up and closing his eyes and getting ideas. He did that, and his eyes opened and he said, "Great pair, says the Bear - Coca Cola and Golden Flake."
When that was pitched to Coach Bryant, he said thanks, but said he did not eat Golden Flake Potato Chips and he didn't see how he could promote them. Someone then got the idea to give Coach Bryant lots of Golden Flake potato chips, to put on his football team's training table in the cafeteria where they all ate.
The rest is history.
As follows.
Coach Bryant's players didn't like taking salt tablets, but if they didn't take salt tablets, they were prone to heat prostration and passing out during football practice, especially during the hot months. The players gobbled down lots of Golden Flake potato Chips, which had lots of salt, and -viola! - they didn't need salt tablets any more.
Coach Bryant agreed to the television deal, for which he was paid something less than $100,000 a year, I think Frank's girl Friday told me. Coach Bryant told the TV audience why he was backing Golden Flake, and sales of Golden Flake potato chips soared in Alabama.
Later, Golden Flake and Coca Cola made much the same deal with Auburn's head football coach, Ralph "Shug" Jordan (pronounced "Jerden").
I came up with the idea of getting a pencil manufacturing company to put the Golden Flake clown's face on white school pencils, and Golden Flake manufacturing line works put the pencils in Golden Flake potato chip twin pack bags. Kids wanted those pencils and their mammas bought Golden Flake twin packs.
When Golden Flake started making its own corn chips to compete with Fritos, the rest of Golden Flake management must have thought, if the company route salesmen put the new corn chips onto Golden Flake racks in grocery stores and other outlets, the public would buy and try the new corn chips.
Nope.
Golden Flake's new corn ships sat on the racks. And sat on the racks.
I suggested to the sales manager and the vice president that Golden Flake promote the new corn ships by giving a free large bag of corn chips to anyone who bought a twin pack of Golden Flake potato chips.
In the past, Golden Flake had promoted its potato chips by attaching helium balloons on a string to potato chip twin packs. I had done that for a week in a grocery store in west Birmingham, when I was in high school. My fingers got really sore, blowing up balloons on a helium regular and tying the balloon's stems in a knot, and then tying balloons to a string and stapling the string to twin packs.
When the vice-president and I presented the buy one, get one free promotion to my father, he went kinda meld down. It would cost too much money! I didn't think to ask him how much money was it costing Golden Flake to stale out tons of out of date corn chips that were not selling?
The vice-president, who was very tight with money himself, said he agreed with me, it needed to be done. My father capitulated. We ran the promotions. Golden Flake corn ships started selling on their own. We ran more promotions. Golden Flake corn chips sold even better. We were finally competing with Fritos, but just barely, as they still had about 95 percent of the corn chip market, I would guess.
The thing was,100 pounds of whole potatoes yielded 11-15, or so, pounds of potato chips, because potatoes are mostly water and a very hot potato chip conveyer paddle cooker full of boiling vegetable oil drives out all of the water. Summer potatoes had less density than winter potatoes, thus a lower yield.
Whereas, 100 pounds of dried corn kernels yielded about 110 pounds of corn chips.
The early Americans learned, for corn to be edible by people, it needed to be soaked a good while in lime water. The lime breaks down the corn in protein so that the human digestive tract can use it.
At Golden Flake, dried corn kernels were soaked overnight in large vats containing lime water. By morning, the softened kernels were put into a machine that ground them into "masa", which is a soggy corn dough. The masa was then hand-fed into an extruder over a corn chip paddle conveyor vegetable oil cooker. The corn masa absorbed a lot of the oil, which accounted for the positive yield.
Potato chips accounted for about 60 percent of Golden Flake's total sales.
Fritos, Doritos and Tostitos accounted for about half of Frito-Lay's total sales,
I suppose you can do the $$$ math.
Corn chips were hugely more $$$ profitable than potato chips.
Much the same analogy applied to making tortilla chips, which Frito-Lay called Doritos and Tostitos.
Frito-Lay owned the lucrative corn and tortilla chips market in America and used that to out-advertise its competitors, and to buy shelf space in grocery and convenience stores where Frito-Lay had strong competition - such as Golden Flake in Alabama, middle Tennessee and the Florida panhandle.
It sure looked like unfair competition to me, but Golden Flake's real lawyers said we could not win it in court.
No dummy, my father bought a lot of Frito-Lay common stock, which kept going up. When Frito-Lay merged with Pepsi-Cola, my father made a lot more money off his Frito-Lay investment, As PepsiCo grew, he made even more money off that investment,
Golden Flake had a similar advantage with its fried cheese curls, which were made from corn meal and outsold Frito-Lay's Cheetos by a considerable margin. Cheese curls made up about 10 percent of Golden Flakes total sales.
By and by, I persuaded my father, his vice-president and the sales manager to hire a market research firm in Memphis, Tennessee, named Message Factors. The owner, Ty Ragland, and I became good friends.
Message Factors posed questions to a lot of people, and learned that people who eat lots of potato chips do not tend to eat lots of corn ships, and vice versa. So, I got Golden Flake to start offering buy one bag of Golden Flake corn chips, get another bag free.
Corn chip sales reached about 10 percent of total Golden Flake sales.
Fried pork skins were about 10 percent of total sales.
As I said earlier, cheese curls were about 10 percent of total sales.
Potato chips dropped to about 50 percent of total sales, and the rest of the sales was peanuts, popcorn, peanut butter and cheese crackers, and jobbed products, such as fake onion rings.
Jobbed products were not profitable, but were carried to make Golden Flake competitive with Frito-Lay's wider product range, and with Tom's and Lance, which mostly were vending companies and/or serviced small sales outlets.
In addition to being vice-president of marketing and advertising, I signed the weekly pay checks for all company route salesmen. Accompanying each paycheck was a spreadsheet of a route salesman's product sales the preceding week. I could see which route salesmen were trying to sell corn ships, and which salesmen were only half-trying. I sometimes wrote notes to them about that.
Big Brother at headquarters.
Most of them knew I had run sales routes, and I was away from my family lots of nights. I spent time out of town riding with division and regional sales managers in their territories. I met their route salesmen and their customers. I helped them stock shelves, not just Golden Flake racks, in new grocery and convenience stores, to maintain good will with those customers.
The sales force viewed me as their friend in the company. I had been where they were. I was trying to help their product inventory sell better, with in-store promotions and fresh TV and advertising, especially in Nashville. I took up for route sales men, when management was being unfair with them.
For you see, Golden Flake management, starting with my father at the top, expected every Golden Flake employee to die for the company. The company came first, always.
Even so, the people in the Birmingham plant and warehouse saw my father every day. Most of them had known him for years. They loved and trusted him. He gave them a profit sharing plan for when they retired. They had secure jobs, if they did their part. Because of my father, they repeatedly voted not to go union.
The cooks and production line workers knew me from when I worked beside them during summers. I had worked in the warehouse, driving forklifts and physically loading over the road trucks. I had painted yellow stripes on the large asphalt parking lot in boiling summer sun. They knew me from time I spent in the plant after I went to work there full time, when I wrote cooking procedural manuals for corn ships, popcorn and fried pork skins. They knew me from coffee breaks in the company lunchroom.
I was not some son of the boss, who was not getting his hands dirty. The plant, warehouse and sales force employees saw me as their future boss. They had no clue how tormented I was in my gut, and in my soul. No clue.
We had management meetings every Monday morning, where we discussed stuff going on.
For a few weeks, I had watched a steady decline in our fried cheese curl sales. So, at a Monday morning management meeting, I asked, "What's wrong with fried cheese curls?"
You'd have thought I had accused them of having sex with Frito-Lay route salesmen!
I said, what's going on? Look at the numbers, we all get printouts of each Friday.
They were big on numbers.
The vice-president was big on numbers. He told the production manager to monitor fried cheese curl production, to see if we were doing something there to cause fried cheese curl sales to decline so much, which was indisputable.
The next Monday morning, the production manager said he had watched the fried cheese curl production cycle, and it was the same as it always had been.
Fried cheese curl sales kept declining, I kept bitching about that.
About two months later at a Monday morning meeting, the vice-president said the production manager had something to tell us.
The production manager didn't look so happy. He said he had spent the night at the plant, watching the production of fried cheese curls. The night crew had increased the amount of a chemical called "C-3" in the cheese formula. Increased it by about 10 times.
Now, we all knew C-3 was the secret ingredient in Golden Flake fried cheese curls, which caused the public to much prefer them to Frito-Lay's Cheetos.
We all also knew that a very little dab of C-3 was plenty, and more of it was exponentially not a good idea.
Yes, exponentially.
For, doubling the amount of C-3 increased its potency ten-fold. And, increasing C-3 ten-fold, was actually increasing its potency 100-fold.
The first time the production manager had observed fried cheese curl production, he had only watched the morning and afternoon shift, but not the night shift, when a great deal of fried chess curl "seasoning sauce" was made from cheddar cheese concentrate.
I wanted to fucking scream!
Maybe that was the first "message" that I should leave Golden Flake and try to practice law in Birmingham?
The perhaps second "message" came before too long.
I was assigned to befriend Henry Holman, the son of the founder of the Jitney Jungle grocery chain headquartered in Jackson, Mississippi.
In this way, I met Henry and a doctor friend of his shortly after my father pulled me out of Mississippi. Golden Flake flew Henry and his friend, and Golden Flake's sales manager and me to my father's lovely home at Islamorada in the Florida Keys. We fished for two days, and Henry agreed to let Golden Flake replace Wonder Potato Chips in Jitney Jungle stores,
My next assignment with Golden Flake was to spend two weeks in Jackson, using a Golden Flake route truck to put Golden Flake products into Jitney Jungle stores. Then, I was back in Birmingham.
From time to time, I flew to Jackson, usually on Southern Airways, to see Henry and play 4-wall handball with him at the local YMCA. Twice, I went with Henry and his doctor friend and their friends to the Louisiana gulf coast, to fish for speckled trout and redfish. When I spent the night in Jackson, I had dinner with Golden Flake's division manager stationed there.
Henry was to be honored by being inducted into the Nucomen Society. He sent me an invitation. I flew to Jackson and attended the ceremony in the conference room of a hotel. Henry gave a remarkable speech about his and his father's company, and then I wandered around, talking with people.
A man approached me and introduced himself as the Frito-Lay sales manager. I told him who I was, and he said he knew who I was. We chatted a little while, then he asked me how Golden Flake pork skins were selling? I was startled, because our pork skins were leaping off the racks and there was no explanation for it.
I told him that. He said their pork skins were doing the same, which surprised me, because Golden Flake pork skins tasted better and far out-sold Frito-Lay pork skins where Golden Flake was dominant.
The fellow said Frito-Lay did market research to see if there was a reason for the jump in pork skin sales. There was a reason. A Dr. Atkins had written a book about a low carbohydrate fast weight loss diet. His book was leaping off book store shelves. One of the snacks he had recommended for his diet was pork skins.
No shit?
No shit.
When I reported that at the next Monday morning management meeting, it was like I had accused them of having sex with Frito-Lay route salesmen. No way a doctor's book had anything to do with it! We just had great pork skins!
I said, well, Frito-Lay doesn't have great pork skins and theirs are leaping off the shelves, too.
No way, the Frito-Lay man lied, came back at me.
I wondered why the fuck would the Frito-Lay guy lie? And, why else would Golden Flake skins suddenly be leaping off the shelves for no obvious reason?
In management's defense, I was a mess. My marriage was falling apart. I clearly was unhappy and stressed out. But through all of that, my mind seemed not entirely to have taken leave of its senses at Golden Flake.
While talking with my father in his office one morning, he raised the topic of marijuana being a terrible thing, I said, I used it sometimes, and it wasn't a terrible thing, He said, that was what was wrong with me.
I said, not hardly. Marijuana's no more terrible than booze. For example, the screwdriver you drink driving to work every morning, and you leave the cup in the holder beside your window of the car in your private parking p;lace, and you leave the window down, and every Golden Flake employee who passes your car smells the vodka.
My father said, that's just an eye-opener. I said, vodka is a drug, just like marijuana is a drug. He said vodka isn't a drug. I said, yes, it's a drug.
We never discussed marijuana again, but many years later, I would hear that he and his friends smoked it down at his home in Islamorada.
That aside, we decided to open routes in Atlanta, about 140 miles east of Birmingham.
Atlanta had been the Lay's Potato Chip Company headquarters. Lay's potato chips had not done all that well in Birmingham, but with Fritos, Lay's was a formidable competitor. After Lay's and Fritos merged into Frito-Lay, they were an even more formidable competitor.
Now it was Golden Flake's turn.
Golden Flake already had sales routes almost to Atlanta
The next logical step was ... Hot Lanta!
The sales manager decided we needed a hot shot Atlanta advertising agency to help Golden Flake enter the Atlanta market. He one, its name now escapes me, and we drove over to Atlanta to meet them.
They seemed to fall in love with me. Like, where did this guy come from? How could he be working at Golden Flake? I liked them, too.
Until...
They told us that Golden Flake packaging was way out of date, and for us to enter the Atlanta market, we needed to have modern (fancy) packaging.
I thought that was dumber than dirt.
I thought an advertising agency was supposed to take the client where it found it, study the client and the market, and come up with something new, like Frank Taylor had repeatedly done, to cause more sales for Golden Flake.
I told the new ad agency that changing our packaging was not on the table. The sales manager agreed. The ad agency guys looked like their balloons had been popped.
They came back with another pitch. A Golden Flake Gobble Monster, like something from Sesame Street, would gobble whole packages of Golden Flake products in commercials on Atlanta television stations.
Actually, this was an oblique attempt to get us to change our packaging, but they didn't pitch it that way.
I drove the first Golden Flake route truck to Golden Flake's newly-rented warehouse in Atlanta. The truck was stuffed with metal sales racks, which new route salesmen would need to put Golden Flake products into smaller outlets. The grocery and convenience store chains had their own shelving.
Before going to the warehouse, I drove the route truck to the Frito-Lay plant and circled around the parking lot out front, to fire a shot across their bow.
The road traffic inside Atlanta was horrible even back then.
Back in Birmingham, I said at the next Monday morning management meeting, that Atlanta road traffic was horrible.
Golden Flake required all its route salesmen to go to their warehouse every evening, before going home.
Golden Flake used 10-foot route trucks. Frito-Lay, Toms and Lance used 12-foot and 14-foot route trucks. (The route truck in the photo above is 14 feet.)
I said, enduring Atlanta drive time road traffic 5 days a week to get to their warehouse is too much to ask of new Golden Flake route salesmen. They will tire of that and quit. We will be spinning our wheels over losing route salesmen. With 12-foot trucks, our route salesmen in Atlanta can get by with going to our central warehouse 2-3 times a week.
That went over about as well as my saying management was having sex with Frito-Lay route sales men.
I wondered how they did not see the obvious?
About two weeks passed. I was in the assistant sales manager's office. On his desk was a requisition order for 12-foot route trucks. I asked what that was about? He said, for Atlanta. I said, but you said that wasn't going to happen. He said, we always planned to use 12-foot route trucks in Atlanta.
Chi, Ching.
A few days later, I went to my father's home and told him that I was sorry, but it wasn't working for me to be at Golden Flake, and I was going to resign. I didn't say, if I don't leave, I am pretty sure I will die.
My father was not happy.
The Atlanta advertising agency went into apoplexy and tried to talk me out of it.
Long-time plant employees came into my office at Golden Flake, crying, begging me not to leave.
The Mississippi regional sales manager called me long distance, begging me not to leave. He said I was the only reason he was still with the company.
I told them that I was sorry, but I had to leave.
One of the Birmingham management team came to my office and said he understood why I was leaving. I said perhaps he should leave, too.
He had been watching and listening. He was really smart, but he had many years invested in Golden Flake, and deep down he hoped to run it some day. But he never would.
I found a local law firm that agreed to take me on. The lawyers were from across the tracks. They cared nothing for Mt. Brook.
The Atlanta advertising agency gave me a going away party and a Mickey Mouse pocket watch, on the back of which was engraved, "To Sloan Bashinsky on his retirement at age 33."
Some time passed.
My father called me about joining him and Golden Flake management and the Atlanta advertising agency for lunch at a popular Chinese restaurant in downtown Birmingham. The ad agency was going to present its Atlanta advertising program. My father said he needed to know my thoughts. I said, sure.
The ad agency tried to wow us with its ads for Republic Airways, which had been Southern Airways. Republic had only one class of seats, whereas other airlines had first class and economy.
Republic TV ads depicted other airlines' economy passengers as chickens stuffed in the back of an airplane, while people in first class were treated like royalty by pretty female flight attendants.
I said, the problem with Republic's ads is, Republic treats all of its passengers like chickens. And, nobody knows when, or if, a Republic flight will even take off, and if it does take off, when it will arrive at its destination.
The ad agency said, yes, there are some problems with the client. I said the problem is, you ignored what the client is and does to its passengers. And, you are doing the same thing with your Golden Flake.
Golden Flake went with the gobble monster gobbling heaps of bags of Golden Flake products on Atlanta TV stations for quite a while. Which cost Golden Flake a lot of money.
Then, the Atlanta ad agency did some market research, to see how the gobble monster was doing. Most of the people surveyed were familiar with the gobble monster, but they could not remember what it had gobbled.
Over lunch on a later day, my father asked me if the senior partner in my law firm was the son of the guy with all those funny ideas at the University of Alabama Medical School in Birmingham?
The guy with the funny ideas was the dean of the medical school, who had grown it into a huge medical complex that had caused the University of Alabama in Birmingham to expand into the city's largest employer.
I replied to my father, something like, the guy with all those funny ideas made the University of Alabama in Birmingham Golden Flake's largest Birmingham customer.
Many years later, after I had stopped practicing law and was starting to write books, I took it upon myself to go into several Birmingham grocery stores and look at the Frito-Lay display. Specifically, I went to look at Doritos and Tostitos. Doritos were triangle shaped and Tostitos were round shaped. Otherwise, they were pretty much the same product.
Golden Flake had decided to only make a round tortilla chip, which was selling pretty well. However, the the Frito-Lay route salesmen servicing the grocery stores I surveyed, were giving Doritos 5-times more shelf facings, than they were giving Doritos.
So, I wrote up a memo to Golden Flake management, reporting what I had seen in the local grocery stores. I said Golden Flake was doing a really good job promoting and selling round tortilla chips, but the real money (market), according to the Frito-Lay displays, was in the triangle-shaped tortilla chips, and perhaps that should add that to Golden Flake's product line.
They thanked me, and then they added a triangle-shaped tortilla chip to the product line.
My father came to Golden Flake after his father and his father's brother-in-law bought it.
I almost was born into Golden Flake, and yet it was a long time before I knew how that actually came about.
