The Time Mom Met Hitler, Frost Came to Dinner, and I Heard the Greatest Story Ever Told Read online

  The financial panic of 1890 drove A.L. back to Chicago, where he capitalized on what was a family acquaintance with George H. Swift. Swift brought the young Eberhart into the Swift meatpacking company, and over the next few years A.L. rose until he was a manager of Swift’s South St. Paul, Minnesota, branch.

  By 1900, A.L. had made a name for himself—he possessed energy, drive, imagination, and the hunger to live well. The late nineteenth century created an opportunity for many men to get rich. One of them was a New York–born German butcher named George A. Hormel. Any man with the ability to catch a wind as it blew—and with the vision to sail it cunningly—could make the prairie hum. George A. Hormel was one such man.

  By the time of my father’s birth, Austin, Minnesota, was humming. There, in 1894, Hormel had begun to build his dream of a meatpacking enterprise that could rival George Swift’s. He had assistance from his three brothers, but most especially, in 1900, he seduced A.L. away from Swift. Hormel knew a comer when he saw one, so he brought my grandfather aboard as a director and made him head of sales, and in 1901, they incorporated.

  Two years later, A.L. and his wife, Lena, celebrated the birth of their first son, Dryden. Then, in 1904, their second son, my father, was born; their daughter, Elizabeth, came a few years later. Everything was falling into place for A.L. and Lena. By the time my father was born, A.L. was on his way to becoming a wealthy man.

  A.L. could help people decide. Every business needs people to decide. A yes helps the business and the customer directly. A no may help the competitor, which in the end helps the business by forcing it to improve. But a maybe is death. A.L. was a no-maybes guy. And as it turned out, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

  Uncle Dry also became a salesman (stocks and bonds), as did his son, Bill (cosmetics). For a brief period in his forties, even Dad spent time as a salesman (floor wax). Unlike the others, though, Dad held on to his sales job only until something better came along. Unlike his father, Dad was not a no-maybes guy. Dad was a poet. Poets love maybes. A poet’s maybe is the linguistic and aesthetic well from which creative juices flow. If you want to find the home of a poet’s muse, figure out the location of that poet’s maybe.

  Soon after my father was born, the Eberhart family moved into Burr Oaks, an eighteen-room home (complete with a basement bowling alley, basketball court, and dance hall) that A.L. built for his growing brood and that dominated forty acres of fields, woods, and scrub between itself and the Cedar River. Many are the youthful adventure stories that Dad set there.

  In the melt days of early spring, Dad and his brother, Dry, would chop enormous cakes of ice loose from the river banks and launch them into the stream. They’d take big branches of downed trees aboard, and using these clumsily for oars, they’d try to maneuver their unsteady craft downstream. The river was cold, and though it was not deep in summer, in spring its current ran very high and fast with the snowmelt water, and once it entered the woods, its way was tangled with fallen trunks and rock outcrops. The goal was to ride the urgent current all the way to the falls . . . of course, when no one was looking—no parent, that is—for this was a daring and dangerous thing to do.

  When I was young and enthralled with the stories Dad would tell, the Cedar seemed to me to be as wild as Huck Finn’s river, and just as fine a place for a boy to lie on his back, adrift upon a raft, and to feel that the world is, indeed, awful purty.

  “Tell the one about the ice cakes,” I’d plead. Then I’d snuggle against my father, he of the scratchy face and pipe smoke. For I was little, and he was big, and I’d know the story would come out okay.

  As the boys float along, the day grows colder, and it begins to snow. And the trees close in. It’s darker. And the river runs faster now as it dips into the darkness of the forest. And there are—of course—the falls ahead. Not yet heard, but waiting, dark and toothed. Then, in the dark: a lurch. The ice cake hits a fallen tree, rides up a little, whirls, hangs precariously, and . . . cracks in half! Plunges into the stream. The boys are wobbling now, crouching, terrified. Another piece of ice breaks off. Water covers the top of the ice now. Now they’re sinking. And now they hear . . . is that the falls? It is! And now the falls are closer. And no one knows where they are. Faster the river runs, and faster. The falls are a roar. The ice cake whirls. Then, just at the penultimate moment, the boys spy a tree branch hanging low across the stream. Can they make it? Frantic work with the useless oars. Closer. Closer. The falls are a death trap about to snap closed. The boys crouch. They spring. They clasp. They sway. The ice cake disappears in a rumble of destruction. And there are the boys hanging by their armpits, shuffling sideways, immortal.

  Ah, the thrill! And it might have happened. One can never really be sure with poets.

  My mother found an attractive, frontier, Tom Sawyer–ish quality in Dad’s tales of his Minnesota youth. Of course when Dad was young, the unfenced prairie no longer stretched from southern Minnesota all the way to the Rockies. But Mom, who grew up in cultured surroundings in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was nonetheless thrilled with Dad’s vicarious touches of the Wild West.

  My mother was a woman who loved to sing her way around the house as she swept and cooked, and a particular favorite was Bing Crosby’s hit “Don’t Fence Me In.” She and I would do the song together in the kitchen as she prepared onions, a slice emphasizing the end of each line—

  I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences [slice]

  And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses [slice]

  And I can’t look at hobbles and I can’t stand fences [slice]

  Don’t fence me in [sweep everything into the pot]

  I understood Mom’s delight at the idea that her husband, when he was a boy, might have ridden his cayuse all the way to the mythical spot where the West commences. Mom loved Dad’s frontier boyhood, just as she did his deeply expressed love of the history of his family.

  Family lineage, the dignity of earliest ancestry—these were very important to my father. He thrived on the meaning of being an Eberhart. Dad’s mythmaking imagination delighted in who we are. Westward drive was one of the meanings of the American Eberharts.

  But Dad had reversed the westward-pushing trend of our ancestors. While Uncle Dry settled in Wilmette, near Chicago, and Aunt Bunny (Dad’s sister, Elizabeth) married a Texas oilman and settled in Albuquerque, Dad turned back to the east—first for his college education, then even farther to England for his graduate work. Upon returning to the States, Dad cemented our family’s geography by making his living teaching at eastern universities and summering in Maine.

  Why this reversal, undermining as it did a major Eberhart meaning? Because everything changed for my father when he was seventeen.

  It was the fall of 1921. That was the time of the knockout punch. Dad’s family was smacked down onto the mat, and when Dad looked up and shook his head to clear his buzzing brain, he perceived that everything had changed. Everything he had known and trusted had changed to a wilderness of doubt and fear.

  CHAPTER THREE

  So what happened in 1921?

  To understand what happened, you need to know the three top men at Hormel. There was George A. Hormel, of course, whose dream it was to beat George Swift in business. There was A.L., his second-in-command, and there was Ransom J. Thomson, also known as Cy, who was comptroller and reported directly to my grandfather.

  In 1921, A.L. was at the top of his powers. He was well respected in the meatpacking industry for his business acumen, and he was well compensated by Hormel for his sales success. A big man with a big car was my grandfather, and he supported his family with self-confidence.

  Both Hormel and my grandfather were important men in the upper Midwest, and for a short period of time, Cy was too. Though he was still in his twenties, Cy was a friend of the governor, of senators and representatives, and of all persons of consequence in the region. He came to Hormel right after high school graduation and impressed George greatly with his drive an
d ambition.

  He did not begin to steal until 1911.

  Ten years later, in 1921, the story of Cy Thomson’s million-dollar embezzlement was a national sensation. There was a Robin Hood fascination about the thing, owing in part to the fact that he gave a lot of the money away. Also, there was the local horror that this man—this man!—known and liked by everyone, the benefactor of thousands, was a crook! How could that be?

  When Thomson returned after almost ten years in prison, many people stood him drinks, and clapped him on the back, and swore they had never believed in his guilt. His confession, they assured him, must have been a cover-up for the guilt of his superiors, one of whom was my grandfather, A.L.

  So how did Thomson work it?

  Once he was released from prison, Thomson wrote a memoir of about seventeen thousand words in which he sought to do three things. One, he addressed young men and warned them not to do what he had done. They must not find themselves “sinking into the quicksand,” as he called it, of crime. Two, he explained that the embezzlement was really the fault of the Hormel organization because the Hormels had given such a young man as he was such ready access to the company’s enormous funds (in 1920, Hormel grossed about $30 million). So, really, the incautious Hormels ought to have expected something bad to happen. And, three, he described how the embezzlement was done: he kited checks.

  As Thomson said in his memoir, it was all so foolishly easy. The money was coming in so fast and moving around so fast, that no one except himself—and he did all this in his head without ever writing anything down—no one except himself could keep track of it, certainly no auditor. The downside for poor Thomson personally, though—and he bemoaned this in his memoir—was that he was losing sleep while trying to keep the accounts straight in his head.

  The other downside was that he could never—not ever—take a day off. The entire community admired Thomson’s attendance record at Hormel. What an employee this man was! He was tireless. He was faithful. He was always there with a ready answer anytime anyone asked a financial question. And every single day, after Thomson’s Hormel work was done, he traveled the two hours to a spot next to the town of LeRoy, where he had laid out and was building his experimental farms and his entertainment park, Oak Dale. Every day, he oversaw its gargantuan growth.

  Of course, the truth was that Thomson could never dare to miss a work day at Hormel because he couldn’t risk someone else opening the mail.

  Thomson’s first theft was this: he stole $800 from a woman in South Dakota who mailed a check to the company to purchase eight shares of stock. Thomson issued the stock immediately. Then he placed her funds “in transit,” as he said. That same $800 was still in transit ten years later when Thomson was finally found out.

  The whole Cy Thomson story was—and remains—fascinating, in a fascination-with-depravity kind of way. For ten years, Cy Thomson was one of the biggest men in the upper Midwest. His Oak Dale enterprise was so famous that it attracted as many as thirty thousand eager visitors each weekend, at the cost of one dime per head.

  So eager were the visitors to come to Oak Dale that the famous Oak Dale Trail was carved out of the prairie. The Trail led travelers the 350 miles from Chicago, or the 180 miles from Minneapolis/St. Paul—to Oak Dale. Thomson published brochures and maps of the route, with notes suggesting stops at such-and-such a hotel, or restaurant, or campsite, or mechanic along the way. The cost to advertise in the brochure was to pave a section of the Trail. Each business that paved the Trail received a special Oak Dale Trail sign. Therefore, Thomson’s customers experienced a smoothly paved road maintained at the expense of the advertisers (with frequent brand-name signage), and reassuring accompanying notes in the travel guide, which, among other enticements, listed the locations of all the most comfortable bathrooms along the nearly 530 miles of the Trail.

  Why, the travel experience was as much fun as being at Oak Dale itself!

  Cy Thomson began his experimental farms with Single Comb White Leghorn chickens and then branched out to Duroc hogs. But how to attract more customers? Beyond offering a tour of his barns—principally fascinating to the men of the visiting family—Thomson knew that he needed to attract the wives. The answer was Oak Dale Park.

  As he did with everything, Thomson made the park grand. It had a pavilion dance hall decorated by the finest artist from San Francisco, with room for one thousand dancing couples and lit by two thousand electric lights. Famous bands such as Guy Lombardo, Lawrence Welk, and Red Nichols and His Five Pennies all played at Oak Dale. Even Thomson’s tennis courts were lit for nighttime play. All you had to do was put a coin into the slot, and the lights came on for as long as the timer ticked. If you wanted more time, you just added more coins. The simplicity was brilliant. Cy provided the lights. His customers paid the electric bill.

  There were gymnasiums for children, wading pools, swings and slides, all surrounded by a fence so weary mothers could relax in the assurance that their little charges could not wander off.

  And of course, there was also a large outdoor swimming pool.

  I can imagine the Eberhart children at Oak Dale. There’s my father—I can see him now—standing on the edge of the big swimming pool, which was a bright sheet of water, with all his friends in it, beckoning.

  Cannonball!

  Cy Thomson made all of this pleasure available to the upper Midwest during his ten short years of success. But Thomson’s time was running out. In late 1920, an auditor from Minneapolis made a sudden appearance at Hormel, demanding to see the books immediately. The only mention of my grandfather in Thomson’s memoir comes when Thomson convinces the auditor to go out with Mr. Eberhart for a round of golf and a luncheon at the country club before he sits down to the books. Had the auditor not joined A.L. during that morning, though the books would have looked fine on examination, the auditor would almost surely have noticed that Thomson was personally short by roughly $200,000 that day. But he did join my grandfather for a round of golf, and in that time, Cy managed to doctor the books in his favor.

  Then in late April 1921, the Shawmut Bank in Boston wrote to Thomson asking why Hormel’s cash position, recorded at slightly over $1 million, did not actually have $1 million of cash in it. Thomson was able to deflect the bank’s concern by his usual subterfuge. However, the end was near. In early July 1921, the Shawmut wrote a letter directly to George Hormel in which it demanded a thorough examination of the company’s books. Hormel gathered the directors and called Thomson into his office.

  In Thomson’s memoir he makes the exculpatory point that he did not really have the heart and soul of a thief—after all, it was the fault of the Hormels that he had had such ready access to their cash. And he proves his innocence of true thievishness to his readers by describing his thoughts during his perp walk down the hall to the office of the boss.

  A real thief, Thomson avers, would have had the guts to concoct some alibi during that minute-and-a-half walk. But Thomson—obviously to himself not a real thief—merely opened the boss’s door and before anything else could be said, blurted, “Gentlemen, it’s all over; the jig is up.”

  One hour later, he wrote the last entry he would ever write in the company’s general journal, an entry charging R. J. Thomson with $1,187,000—the exact total of the money he had embezzled during the ten years since he took $800 from an investor in North Dakota.

  And in those days a million bucks counted for something.

  Thomson cooperated with the lawyers and the accountants who were brought in; he showed them where every stolen dollar was. He signed over to Hormel every property he had ever bought with stolen funds, most of which Hormel liquidated quickly, and then Hormel turned to A.L.

  One of A.L.’s principal assets was his stock position in Hormel. A condition of his contract provided that if danger to the company were dire, he could be forced to sell it back to the company for a fraction of its value. The embezzlement created such a condition. Meanwhile, the banks wanted a clean slate. No cha
rges were brought against A.L. related to the embezzlement. However, the bankers, and perhaps Hormel himself, wanted Eberhart gone. Grandfather had shared an office with Thomson, and there were those who felt he must have been aware of what transpired, or at the least, that he had failed to exercise due diligence. He was, after all, superior to the crook. He was second in command at Hormel. It had been his duty to keep a sharp eye.

  Too, A.L. was not a Hormel. This was a family company, after all, and my grandfather was not part of the inner circle, whatever his value and skills. The company had just been dealt its most dangerous blow, and it was fighting for its very existence. It needed to concentrate on what was most precious. Eberhart, for all his good qualities, was not indispensable. And in any event, the Hormels could get their stock back, cheap.

  How badly, in the end, was Hormel hurt? By September, Thomson was in Stillwater prison serving a fifteen-year term. Oak Dale Farms and the Oak Dale Park were owned by Hormel. A.L. Eberhart’s stock position was restored to company control. And Jay Hormel, son of George, is reported to have said to the mayor of Le Roy that the embezzlement, which was a national media circus fueled by its Robin Hood appeal and carried in 1,300 papers across the United States, provided a bonanza in free publicity.

  A.L. was in his midfifties at the time. He had worked for Hormel for twenty-one years. He was a man at the height of his powers. He was well respected by his peers elsewhere in the industry, and that proved to be a good thing. After my grandfather was let go at Hormel, George Swift, creator and president of Hormel’s principal competitor, Swift Foods, handed him a blank check—literally: a signed check with no amount written in—and told A.L. that anything he needed was his.