Fritos® Pie: Stories, Recipes, and More

Epilogue

◆ 173 S HoRTLy AFTER Dad’s death, the Frito Company board of directors and executives assembled to ceremoniously honor my father with the reading and presentation to my mother of this proclamation. When Charles Elmer Doolin organized The Frito Company in 1932 it employed four people, making a single product, in a single make-shift plant with sales at an annual rate of about one thousand dollars. Twenty-seven years later, the company and its related enterprises had grown to include twenty-one plants in eleven states and to employ three thousand five Epilogue My dad, Charles Elmer Doolin hundred people making and distributing Fritos, potato chips, and a number of other products throughout the nation and in foreign countries with sales at an annual rate of sixty million dollars. These simple figures themselves represent a surpassing tribute to Charles Elmer Doolin. They are the tangible evidence of his vision, courage, and faith, as well as his ability to set a course and to guide himself and others on the path to achievement. of equal importance was the love for him by his fellow man, his employees and business associates , earned not by worldly accomplishments alone but by qualities of character. At my local garage, the shop owner relayed the same thing to me in different words, the words of a former Frito employee, Jerry Martin who knew my dad. He said my father did not just hang the moon, but he was the moon to his employees. My mother, too, always glorified my dad. Everyone did. But I needed to know who the real man was. So I set off to find out, and to write this book. Nell Morris’s old scrapbook had given me a compass, but Mom, after dad’s death, being presented with the company’s heartfelt resolution honoring his service. She was later offered, and accepted, a place on the board. 174 ◆ EPILOGuE EPILOGuE ◆ 175 all the while I was writing, I longed for something more—a tangible connection to the work I was doing. Then, just as I was finishing the last draft, I found a lost Viewmaster photo—it seemed to appear magically at just the right moment. There I was, five years old, and Dad was putting a chef’s hat on my head and tying a red bandana around my waist. He was about to induct me into the experimental cooking that he was doing at home. Looking back now, I feel that he was handing off the torch to me at that very moment, giving me my charge to tell his story. Finding that photo at that moment in my work drew me back to where it all began. Suddenly, I was able to connect it all—the creativity and humor of my grandmother, the ingenuity of my father, and the homespun wisdom of my mother—to my own life and work as an artist. ■ Dad, handing off the torch to me. ...