The Kelloggs Read online

  Newspapers across the nation ran front-page articles screaming “Michigan Millionaire Races with Death Across the West” and describing the nonstop Pullman car express train specially arranged by Edward P. Ripley, the president of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway. Mr. Ripley, one account described, ordered “a pilot car…sent ahead to side-track through-trains onto spurs in order to speed the special train on its journey. It resulted in the fastest crossing [of the North American continent] ever made up to that time.”72

  Although he valiantly tried to recuperate back in Santa Barbara, Post grew increasingly despondent. On the morning of May 9, 1914, while rummaging through his gun collection, he located a .30–30 Winchester hunting rifle, “placed the muzzle of the weapon in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his toe, blowing off the entire top of his head.”73 Charley was just five months shy of his sixtieth birthday. An elaborate funeral was arranged back in Battle Creek replete with hundreds of mourners, both famous and ordinary, journalists, photographers, and newspaper tributes, but the tragedy failed to sadden or soften the Kellogg brothers. John called Post a wreck and gossiped to his friends how much money Charley made off his creations.74 The passive-aggressive Will made two trenchant observations about Charley’s death. Responding to the rumor that in his last years Charley had taken to referring to Will Kellogg as a “dirty yellow dog,” Will rejoined, “If so, everyone knows how a dirty yellow dog pays his respects to a Post!”75 More formally to the press, Will intoned, “I hope when I pass on that I will have done more for the town than Mr. Post ever did.”76

  Post Toasties advertisement, circa 1910 Credit 45

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  AT THE SAME TIME C. W. Post was building a cereal empire, Will Kellogg began planning one of his own. Between 1898 and 1905, Will steadily revised and improved the recipe for flaked cereals, including identifying its key ingredients and the precise amounts and ways to cook them. His employees fondly recalled that he had “an unerring judgment” in tasting and selecting the best food samples.77 It was this talent that turned his attention away from wheat and toward that most American of grains, corn.

  No dream inspired Will’s switch from wheat to corn. He made a determined and systematic search for flavor and texture, which required years of many trials and even more errors. Although corn was cheap, plentiful, and possessed a sweet, pleasant flavor, it proved especially difficult to tame into flakes. Initially, Will tried using whole corn kernels but the results were neither crunchy nor terribly toothsome. The large amounts of corn oil in the whole kernel ruined the toasting process and, once in the box, the flakes went rancid, especially if stored for long periods of time.

  He then experimented with hominy grits, a milled version of corn that typically uses a caustic agent, such as lye, to remove the kernel’s hull and germ. This was a definite improvement but it still failed to satisfy Will’s discerning palate. Eventually, he took to steaming the corn kernels open over a bubbling boiler of water and after removing and straining them applied a “long blade from a paper cutting machine” to free the corn kernel from its more oily hull and germ. He followed this by “cracking,” or grinding, what remained into “flaking grits.” To his infinite delight, the dough made from “flaking grits” was far easier to peel off the rollers and, with just the precise amount of “toasting,” the resulting flakes were crunchy, crisp, and golden-brown.78 His advertising men would later glorify Will’s flaking grits as “the sweetheart of the corn.”

  Will’s greatest breakthrough, however, was the realization that there were far many more healthy people who would eat and purchase tasty corn flakes for their daily breakfast compared to the relatively small number of invalids who bought and consumed only the blandest of “health foods” to aid their digestion. Unlike the doctor’s rather flat and tasteless wheat flakes, Will insisted that his corn flakes had to taste good.79 After too many bad batches to count, he finally determined the precise sprinkles of malt, sugar, and salt needed to give his flakes that nutty, corny, pleasing, and popular taste. Years later, Will’s son John Leonard recalled the argument that occurred right after John found out about Will’s culinary tinkering: “The Doctor…had a fit….He got after my father, and Mr. W.K. and the Doctor had a row about it, but Mr. W.K. kept on making the flakes with malt, sugar, and salt as the flavoring.”80 The test of time, and the sales of billions of boxes of Corn Flakes, has amply demonstrated that Will was right.

  Initially, the annual sales of the Kellogg brothers’ Sanitarium cereal products amounted to a tiny fraction of what C. W. Post and the many other imitator cereal firms were selling on a monthly basis. Every time Will tried to do more with the business, his senior partner vetoed his suggestions. On top of the demoralizing work environment Will was forced to inhabit, the doctor vindictively refused to provide the office or factory space Will needed for the food company. Fed up and tired, Will abruptly told John he was leaving the Sanitarium to focus exclusively on the food business, of which he was an agent with a 25 percent ownership rather than merely being the doctor’s employee always at his beck and call.81 In August of 1901, Will cleaned out his desk and packed his few personal belongings with the intention of ending his association with the San.

  Although Will was determined to focus on the cereal business, a disastrous event occurred six months after he left his brother’s employ. It was a catastrophe of such magnitude that it pulled Will right back into the San. It took another two and a half years before he would finally be free from his brother’s daily humiliations, albeit not the psychic scars that irritated his neurons for the rest of his days. That disaster, which made front-page news across the nation, was the destruction of the Sanitarium itself. Nearly fifty years later, Will recalled the morning the Sanitarium burned to the ground with equal parts clarity and indignation:

  The Sanitarium fire of February 18, 1902, occurred six months to the day after I had discontinued working for the institution. Since Dr. Kellogg was not in town and since the sanitarium seemed part of my life work, I met with the members of the boards and offered to come back to work for nothing and board myself as long as my services were needed. The doctor returned late the day of the fire or the following day, and my offer was accepted….During the building of the new sanitarium building, I was given the job, in addition to my other work, of securing the money with which to pay the bills. It frequently happened that on Thursday or Friday the treasury was without funds but in one way or another I secured the funds so that the payroll was never defaulted. These two and one-half years which completed my work of twenty-five years with the San were the hardest years of my life, and no amount of money would tempt me to repeat those years.82

  7

  “Fire!”…and Cease-fire

  FEBRUARY 18, 1902, began as just another lonely shift for William G. Hall, the San’s night watchman. After checking the patient floors, dining room, and main lobby, he wandered down into the labyrinthine tunnels and machinery rooms burrowing beneath the complex’s main floor. The only sounds in the dank, steamy byways were the hot air of the hissing boilers and the echo of his leather boots striking the wood-planked floor.1

  Hall’s job that morning, as it was every morning, was to inspect every potential point of unwanted ingress—activities that were exceedingly rare within the borders of Dr. Kellogg’s peaceful, medical kingdom. Every thirty minutes, Officer Hall tested the electrical security devices situated along his route. The black metallic boxes, stuffed with wires, bells, and switches, were considered a modern-day wonder in the opening years of the twentieth century. Connected to a series of telegraph wire stations, the devices allowed Hall to communicate urgent messages from anywhere in the San to the “call boy” stationed at the concierge desk in the lobby. That morning, a tall, lanky young man named R. E. Moore was assigned to the desk but for some reason lost to history he did not respond to Mr. Hall’s test messages.

  At 3:30 a.m., Officer Hall worried that something was amiss with the alarms and ventured into the pharmacy,
situated to the rear of the Sanitarium’s main building, with the intention of making his way back to the main lobby. As he opened the door to the pharmacy’s basement, he “was terrified to hear the crackling of flames.” Taking only a few steps down the staircase, he was better able to connect the terrifying dots, a roaring fire consuming everything in its path. Hall ran out of the building and across the lawn, “only a few rods away,” to sound the alarm of the Battle Creek Fire Station No. 2.2

  Less than a minute later, Fire Chief W. Plato Weeks, a long-headed, balding man with intense eyes and jug ears, and Captain George L. Perry, stern in countenance and with close-cropped hair, hurried to the scene accompanied by several firemen. The fire had already spread to the point that flames were bursting out of the pharmacy building’s windows and the adjoining bathhouse.3 Chief Weeks ordered seven hose-men to flood the structures with water. The crew followed his command and soon extinguished what they presumed to be the source of the flames. A satisfied Chief Weeks gave the order to roll up the gear and return to the station with the hope of getting back to sleep.

  Before the firemen could put away even one hose, Weeks and Perry felt a violent rumbling beneath the ground on which they were standing. A few minutes after 4:00 a.m., that plot of land gave way to their weight and the two firemen were waist deep in a warm hole. After a bit of digging with his foot, Chief Weeks discovered an underground tunnel containing a tangle of steam pipes originating in the engine room and ending in the main building. The tunnel was five feet wide, eight feet high, and walled by long planks of timber. From the warming temperature of the muddy hole, Weeks realized that the “real” fire was blazing away somewhere in a distant portion of the underground tunnel.

  Chief Weeks called in the rest of the firemen in the department to fight what would be the worst conflagration of their careers.4 As swift as Weeks and his men were, however, the orders came too late. The fire had spread into the bowels of the residence halls, where 307 guests were sleeping. Although a brick veneer sheathed the outer walls, the San’s four main buildings were all composed of wood. Making matters worse, the San had recently installed the Otis Elevator Company’s newest rope-pulley-operated conveyances to whisk their guests to all six floors of the residence. The airtight, ironclad elevator shafts made for perfect flamethrowers to the upper reaches of the building.

  Just as Officer Hall discovered the fire, a “party of 18 or 20 couples” was returning to the Sanitarium from nearby Bedford. Their mode of transportation was a fleet of horse-drawn sleighs. One of the riders, Christopher J. Murphy, recalled hearing someone cry out “Fire!” at about 3:40 a.m. and they turned their sleds in the San’s direction to offer help. The men “piled out of the sleighs” to assist “the cripples and others unable to help themselves.” Mr. Murphy later told a reporter, “The screams we heard were horrifying. I never want to hear them again, nor see such a fire.”5

  The Sanitarium fire, February 18, 1902 Credit 46

  One of those people shouting “Fire!” was Joseph J. Kein. He and his wife, both San patients from Kansas City, Missouri, were slumbering on the east side of the main building’s fourth floor. Mr. Kein told a reporter that he first realized something was amiss at exactly 3:48 a.m., when “a peculiar thumping” awakened him and his wife. Upon opening the door to their room, they discovered huge plumes of black smoke wafting their way down the corridor. The Keins pulled their overcoats over their pajamas and bolted down the stairs, leaving all of their valuables behind. Along the way, they pounded on a great many doors, arousing those not already awakened by the clamor.

  The Keins were hardly alone in this mission. Nurses, doctors, and attendants worked as a team to get all 307 patients and another 100 staff members safely out of the building. “Here,” the Battle Creek Morning Enquirer opined, “were to be seen great acts of coolness, on the part of trained men and women, who with their strong hands did deeds never excelled, and as we doubt ever equaled.”6 The Battle Creek Daily Journal agreed. “There was no fighting for the escapes. Every person took his or her turn as it came, and the nurses and attendants stood near quieting those who were excited, and assisted them in every way.”7 Dr. Kellogg later explained how he had trained his staff to handle such disasters but even from the distance of more than a century, the calm demeanor displayed by everyone involved is remarkable.8 That so many “broken-down invalids” suddenly moved like lightning to escape demonstrates both the severity of the threat and the possibility of a psychogenic explanation to a number of these patients’ aches and disabilities.

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  ONLY ONE MAN DIED in the inferno. Abner Case was an eighty-seven-year-old farmer from Bath, New York, suffering from chronic dyspepsia. He had come to Battle Creek, accompanied by his wife and daughter, in search of a cure. When the fire broke out, the Cases were sound asleep in their suite of deluxe rooms on the main building’s fourth floor. Mrs. Case tried to stir her husband out of his discombobulated state but even after being awakened, the old man insisted on kneeling at the side of his bed and praying. Mrs. Case and their daughter finally gave up and fled for their own safety. The next morning she sobbed, “The last I saw of him he was sitting at the edge of his bed. Oh I feel so dreadful to think we came and left him. But they kept telling us to come and Mr. Case was crippled and couldn’t get on his feet alone…we hardly knew what to do.”9

  A San doctor named Howard F. Rand bravely made his way back into the burning building to help Case escape, but upon reaching the exit door the confused man ran back inside, perhaps to retrieve a carpetbag containing $1,100.10 A few weeks later, on March 5, a nurse and two “call boys” found the charred remains of a human humerus bone (the long bone in the upper arm between the shoulder and the elbow) in the ashen rubble of what was once the San’s north wing, near where the Cases were housed.11 The old man likely died of smoke inhalation and asphyxiation followed by a gory incineration.

  By 4:40 a.m., flames were shooting out from a number of windows on all the floors in the main building. One floor above the Cases, Mrs. H. C. McDaniels of Eldorado, Arkansas, awoke to a noisy ruckus outside her room. Her husband was initially too weak to get out of bed, but, unlike Mr. Case, he somehow managed to make his way.12 Upon opening her door, Mrs. McDaniels saw nothing but darkness as she heard shrieks, shouts, and cries of fear from every direction.13 This shutdown of electric light may well have saved some lives. An attentive custodian quickly cut off all the power to the San’s flammable knob and tube electrical circuits to prevent a secondary source of fire.

  Mr. and Mrs. McDaniels, literally, ran into a nurse in the dark corridor. The nurse pointed them toward the rear of the building where they could descend via the fire escape. Mrs. McDaniels and her husband groped along in the pitch-blackness until they reached a window. Directly below, she saw flames shooting toward her. Terrified that she would never be able to hold on to the hot metal fire escape, Mrs. McDaniels jumped to a landing some ten feet below, with the intention of reaching first the rooftop of an adjoining building and, ultimately, the ground. This hastily made plan may have saved her life but it shattered her right femur (thighbone). Fortunately, a fireman named LaVerne Fonda hoisted her over his shoulder and slid “over the edge of the roof to the ladder.” Fonda then went back up to retrieve her husband and bring him to the ground as well.14

  Later that morning, Mrs. McDaniels recuperated in the bedroom of Mrs. Lucy Kelsey, whose home stood a mere two hundred feet from the Sanitarium, across Lincoln Street, but was somehow untouched by the flames. Mrs. McDaniels complained of a sticky attack of catarrh, or post-nasal drip, from the smoke inhalation but freely admitted she was “lucky to have got out of the great fire so cheap as that.”15 A few days later, she added to the price of admission by giving Captain Fonda a $50 reward for saving her life.16

  With the exception of Mrs. McDaniels’s broken leg and the death of Abner Case, the only other injuries involved three Battle Creek firefighters: Fireman Henry Lucas fell from the ladder, wrenched his back, and was
badly bruised; Assistant Fire Chief Fred H. Webb also fell from a ladder and suffered bruises but no fractures. Most seriously, Fireman Arthur Robinson fell from a window onto the burning roof. It took more than fifteen minutes to retrieve him. He inhaled too much hot, black smoke and severely scarred his lungs.17

  Considering the speed with which the fire spread, the wooden complex never really had a chance. The climax of the disaster occurred when the main entrance of the San was engulfed in flames and its seven-story, balconied wooden tower, topped by a copper cupola, plummeted to the ground. Hindered by spotty water pressure, the firemen simply could not get enough water to where it was most needed. Vexing the fire department’s every attempt to strategically place their ladders was the tangle of electric and telephone wires surrounding the buildings. By the time the firemen were able to safely move their truck close enough to raise an aerial crow’s nest, it was too late.18

  At 5:20 a.m., the fire spread across the narrow street. Some flaming embers caught wind and set fire to Mrs. Clara F. Salisbury’s two-story frame house on the corner of Barbour and Lincoln Streets. Clara was the proprietor of a “hygienic corset firm” and ran a boardinghouse for those San patients on a budget. Next door to the Salisbury house was Mr. and Mrs. Bert Woods’s barber and hair dressing parlor. The couple lived above the shop by night and tonsured the heads of San patients by day.19 The flames spread to their home at 6:00 a.m. and quickly consumed their two-story A-frame bungalow.20