Fritos® Pie: Stories, Recipes, and More

Chapter 5 Cattle and Corn

Here is one of the Brahma bulls Dad used to produce a herd of crossbred Brangus cattle. These were more drought-hardy cattle for the Texas climate. E VEN THoUGH my father is best known as the premier founder of the Frito Company, he had his finger in many pies, and he was an active, creative, and wide-ranging entrepreneur . Hybridizing corn; cross-breeding cattle (Brahma bulls with Black Angus cows, producing a hardier cross-breed of Brangus cattle for sale), developing, selling, and finding new uses for cold-rolled sesame oil; and developing experimental hog and cattle feeds from byproducts of his other ventures—these were Dad’s interests along with the snack and fast food businesses . Interesting that Dad was in the cattle business, since he and our family followed a vegetarian diet. My mom told me that the cattle operation kept the Frito Company afloat in some of the early years. There were Frito Farms all over Texas. My father personally owned all of them (at least at the time of his death; at one point Chapter 5 Cattle and Corn 68 ◆ ▼ Dad driving a newly acquired “Bush Hog” at the Rio Vista farm he and my Uncle Earl co-owned the Rio Vista Farm) and used them to develop products for his businesses and to raise cattle and hogs. According to the Frito Bandwagon, “the motivating factor for establishing the farms was cultivation of the soil, for from soil grows good corn.” The Rio Vista, so named because the Nueces River ran ◀ Dad with a shed full of grain at the Rio Vista Farm in January 1955 CATTLE AND CORN ◆ 69 Our governess Verna Johnson with my youngest brother Danny on the banks of the Nueces River at the Rio Vista farm. My sister and I are in the background. through it, was the first of the Frito Farms. It was a 1,200acre experimental farm where cattle were raised and corn and sesame plants were grown. The Doolin family owned the Rio Vista in the early 1940s and probably earlier, and as I have mentioned , my grandfather and his second wife, Miss Ferne, worked there as foreman and bookkeeper. Another Frito Farm was in Poteet. When we went to the Rio Vista to see my grandfather Coleman and his family, we would stop at the farm in Poteet on the way. Peanuts grown for their oil were the main crop there; at that time peanut oil was included in the vegetable oil mix used to fry Fritos. The peanuts grown at Poteet were also used in the company’s Efsees peanut butter cracker sandwiches and in bags of salted peanuts. After July 1953, the Frito Company had a subsidiary in San Antonio called the Texas Vegetable oil Company, which manufactured cooking oils such as corn, peanut, and sesame oils, from the nuts and seeds of plants Dad grew on his farms. (When I arrived in 1962 at a boarding school in Switzerland in a huge Cadillac limo with a driver, which Mom had arranged to take my sister and two of my brothers and me to our various schools in Europe, my fellow students made the assumption that, being from Texas, I was an oil heiress—little did they know the oil was cooking oil.) 70 ◆ CHAPTER 5 Here are cattle feeding on Dad’s experimental pellets. One of his recipes incorporated mesquite. The Texas Tavern Canning Company, which was part of the Champion Foods Division, was located in Seguin. We often stopped in Seguin to visit the canning company before stopping at the farm in Poteet—Poteet and Seguin were both in the San Antonio vicinity. It was an eight-hour drive from Dallas to the Rio Vista ranch, when you drove straight through. My siblings and I fought most of the way, and when we stopped at the canning company in Seguin we groaned with boredom, although it was a relief to get out of the car and breathe some fresh air. When the farm in Poteet had some peanut crop overages, John Middleton, vice president of the Texas Vegetable oil Company , bought young dairy cattle to fatten on the leftovers. Eventually the cattle took over and replaced the peanuts and other crops—guar beans and soybeans were also grown experimentally at Poteet in the early years—and the experimental farm in Poteet became a small feedlot. (These days, the town...