LTHForum.com

So, shouldn't we say Marie, RIPtide?

BY JOSH SHAFFER - STAFF WRITER

RALEIGH -- Bill Hoover played with food.

For most of his 94 years, he lorded over bubbling beakers in his basement lab, dabbling in cocktail sauce, fiddling with cheese spread, burrowing to the essence of sweet potatoes. Over his long career, most of it at N.C. State University, you could taste Hoover's work in Carolina Treet barbecue sauce or any number of three-bean salads.

But Hoover, who died in Georgia this month, deserves a golden-brown monument on the National Mall for his greatest invention, a treat nibbled by many a coach-seated air traveler: the honey-roasted peanut.

"He was very good," said Jesse Brown, a colleague at NCSU who is now retired from food science. "He would lay awake at night, from 4 a.m. till daybreak, coming up with ideas until dawn."

Hoover's patent for honey-roasted nuts, granted in 1987, describes a messy, old-style method of glazing legumes.

Pre-Hoover the nuts were coated before roasting, losing both color and flavor.

Hoover-style nuts get roasted first, then coated with hot emulsified liquid when their temperature measures at least 160 but no more than 350 degrees. That way, they're not as sticky, and they stay fresher longer.

"Every mother crow thinks her baby's blackest, but he was pretty incredible," said his daughter, Kathy Boyhan in Texas. "Anheuser-Busch bought the patent and paid my dad some royalties. It was pretty profitable."

In the world of food science, Hoover stacked up higher than a triple-decker sandwich, but in his mind he was always a farm boy with a Ph.D.

He grew up in Wrightsville, Ga., the youngest of 13 children, and he had to sit out the sixth grade to work the family farm. Food science was just an extension of a childhood spent pulling dinner out of the ground.

In his lab, he made goodies taste better, look nicer, last longer.

He turned his family into guinea pigs, feeding them samples. Boyhan lived a lab rat's life as his daughter, enduring so many experimental sweet potato patties that she swore off eating the starchy orange tubers until she turned 40.

Their house on Merwin Road, with its basement lab, was a shrine to the science of snacks.

"This man was doing things with soybeans before anybody knew what an edamame is," she said. "One year, he was the North Carolina 'yambassador.'"

His laboratory, his rules

It sounds like a whimsical occupation, tinkering with peanuts, looking for the recipe George Washington Carver missed. But Hoover was deadly serious about food research to the point of being strict. You did things his way in his lab.

Once, a member of the Mt. Olive Pickle Co. family arrived wearing a beard. No beards in the lab, Hoover told him.

Not that he was humorless. When Hoover retired from NCSU in 1982, after 25 years, he shunned the conservative, straight-laced ceremony being planned for him, explaining that he wouldn't attend any retirement dinner without a bar.

Hoover died quietly in Georgia, without fanfare, Feb. 8.But snack-lovers owe him tribute, and when they dip their hands into the can and pull out a flavorful, nonsticky nut with just the right color, they might roll it around on the tongue a bit longer and consider the professor in Raleigh who worked so hard to make it dazzle.

Thanks for sharing this. I would have never seen it. The author of the obituary seems destined for other writing adventures. It was an awesome piece about an awesome guy.

He didn't seek the spotlight, but when Frank Buckles outlived every other American who'd served in World War I, he became what his biographer called "the humble patriot" and final torchbearer for the memory of that fading conflict.

Buckles enlisted in World War I at 16 after lying about his age. He died Sunday on his farm in Charles Town, nearly a month after his 110th birthday. He had devoted the last years of his life to campaigning for greater recognition for his former comrades, prodding politicians to support a national memorial in Washington and working with friend and family spokesman David DeJonge on a biography.

Cathy -

I'm confused - why were flags at half-mast this weekend? I noticed that one at the Winnetka fire station was on Sunday, and I've been wondering ever since. Thanks for any clarification.

The death of Mr. Ferrero delivers a blow to Italy's biggest chocolate maker. Although the executive shared the title of CEO with his brother Giovanni, 46, he was widely regarded inside the halls of Italian finance as the company's top manager. Mr. Ferrero was also viewed by bankers and analysts as a modernizing force in a company known for its insular management—a style that helped it hold onto secret candy recipes over the decades but hampered its efforts to grow through big acquisitions.

In 1980, she [Ruth Law] went to the housewares show at McCormick Place and struck up a conversation with a wok manufacturer, Norman Ng.

At the time, she had taken some cooking classes but had no other experience in the food world. She bought a wok and a cleaver and a Chinese cookbook on her way home.

Shortly after their meeting, Ng asked her to do a cooking demonstration at a Cleveland cooking show for a crowd of more than 2,000.

"Her encounter with Norman was the beginning of her career," said her son. "Taking classes led to teaching classes. Her touring Asia led to leading group tours to Asia that she created and promoted. She made all of the travel plans, made the reservations and wrote the brochures; and I stuffed the hundreds of envelopes to be mailed to her contacts."

In 1980, she was approached by Contemporary Books in Chicago to write a Chinese cookbook titled "Dim Sum—Fast and Festive Chinese Cooking."

Cathy2....so true, life turns on a dime. Have you ever thought what you would like to see in your own obituary?

"Mama Marie," as she was known to patrons and employees alike, could be found at the Near West Side's Pompei Bakery at 5 o'clock most mornings, making sure things got started right.

Throughout the day, and up until December, she would bounce all over the restaurant, at 1531 W. Taylor St., greeting diners as they came in, chatting with those gobbling down her namesake meatballs or back in the kitchen stirring the sauces that she helped create.
...
she was crowned queen of the Catholic Youth Organization Grape Festival
...
While Mrs. Davino's husband ran Jut's, the tavern next to the bakery, she worked in the telegraph department at the Union Pacific Railroad. After the tavern closed, her husband, who passed away in 1988, became a driver for the Chicago Park District.
...
And in the restaurant, Mrs. Davino wasn't afraid to tell dawdling customers to make room for diners who needed to eat, said Frances Bartilotta, 88, a longtime friend.

"She'd tell it the way it is," Bartilotta said.

The digital imaging device, called the charge-coupled device, or CCD, allowed engineers for the first time to store a visual image in digital form, revolutionizing photography and a host of other fields. CCDs are at the heart of smartphones, camcorders, telescopes, supermarket bar-code scanners, fax machines and scanners, among other electronic devices.

Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation "Digital photography has become an irreplaceable tool in many fields of research," the Nobel committee said in its prize announcement. "The CCD has provided new possibilities to visualize the previously unseen. It has given us crystal clear images of distant places in our universe as well as the depths of the oceans…. These inventions may have had a greater impact on humanity than any others in the last half-century."

All of that from a simple brainstorming session whose goal was actually something entirely different.

In the fall of 1969, Boyle and his co-laureate, George E. Smith, both of them at Bell Laboratories, gathered in Boyle's office after lunch to think about ways to develop a new memory device for computers. Within an hour, they had come up with the rudiments of the CCD.

They took advantage of the photoelectric effect, which won Albert Einstein the physics Nobel in 1921. In short, when light strikes a small piece of silicon, it knocks electrons out of their orbits. If the silicon has been formed into small photocells, or pixels, each cell acts as a well that captures and holds the electrons for an extended period.

Boyle and Smith's key breakthrough was devising a way to read out the number and location of electrons captured in each well in an array of pixels. In a 10-by-10 array, for example, the data are converted into a chain of electron concentrations 100 pixels long. This can be converted back into visual information.

Within a year, they had given up on their memory device and produced a digital camera. Two years later, Fairchild Semiconductor of San Jose produced the first digital camera with a small (by modern standards) 100-pixel-by-100-pixel photo sensor (10,000 pixels total). The camera went into production a few years later. By 1975, Boyle and Smith had also produced a working video camera suitable for television.

How satisfying it must be to him.

When McDonald's was looking to make changed to the sliding windows used in its drive-thru service in the 1970's, founder Ray Kroc turned to a manufacturing company run by two brothers.

"We kept tweaking the designs until they were just right," said Mr. Radek's son, ... "We knew how important this deal was."

Mr. Radek and his brother developed three designs to work with various styles of McDonald's franchises. Though some of their designs were replaced as technology evolved, the basic components of their work are still in place."