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By the time he was 16 in 1936, Sam Perricone was picking and packing lemons in Corona and Riverside and then hauling them to Los Angeles in his small pickup truck to sell at the Grand Central Market.
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My dad also was the first person to package oranges in plastic bags for retail consumption," said Perricone's son Joe, recalling family excursions to his father's groves in Redlands to pick and bag oranges to be sold in retail stores in the late 1950s.

"He'd have us all go down there; there might be two or three carloads of us on a Sunday," he said.

He said his father joined in picking, too — as did his grandmother and aunts.
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When Perricone began selling lemons at the Grand Central Market in the 1930s, son Joe said, "most of the people with the stands were Japanese."

When Japanese Americans were put in internment camps during World War II, he said, "my dad and my uncle Tony took over two of the stands and managed them until the war was over and gave them back to the original owners. That's the kind of person he was."

On a summer morning in 1974, a man in Ohio bought a package of chewing gum and the whole world changed.

At 8:01 a.m. on June 26 of that year, a 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum slid down a conveyor belt and past an optical scanner. The scanner beeped, and the cash register understood, faithfully ringing up 67 cents.

That purchase, at a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, was the first anywhere to be rung up using a bar code.

Today, trillions of beeps later, what was once a novel technology with uncertain prospects is so widespread as to be almost invisible. It informs nearly every aspect of modern life, providing a means for people to buy and sell things, couriers to track packages and airlines to locate (in principle, anyway) lost luggage.

This transformation, industry experts say, is largely because of the work of one person, a supermarket executive from Massachusetts named Alan L. Haberman, who died on Sunday at 81.

Mr. Haberman did not invent the universal product code, or U.P.C., as the most prevalent type of bar code is formally known. But it is to him that its sheer black-and-white ubiquity and familiar graphic form are primarily owed.
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By all accounts, he spent years afterward cajoling manufacturers, retailers and the public to accept the strange new symbol, which resembles a highly if irregularly compacted zebra. His efforts helped cement the marriage between the age-old practice of commerce and the new world of information technology.
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John Allan "Jack" Stewart's agronomy work took him from the cranberry bogs of Maine to rice paddies in Asia, from famine stricken areas of South America to drought-ravaged Africa.

"He went everywhere he could to help improve the conditions of the land," said his daughter, Nancy Penne. "He'd be out in a field with a farmer one day and the next day attending a global conference of experts in the field of agriculture."
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During the 1960s, Mr. Stewart worked with Norman Borlaug, the plant scientist who won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for his work breeding high-yielding crop varieties that helped to avert mass famines and dramatically increase food production in Latin America and Asia.

"They were part of an international project to develop fertilizers to help grow rice," said his wife of 62 years, Velma.

Nationally known cookbook author Marcia Adams died early Saturday after being hospitalized since Thursday. She was 75.

Adams was famous for her prize-winning cookbooks that featured Amish and Midwestern recipes and her popular PBS cooking show that aired on stations around the country.

She also wrote two books and produced a PBS documentary about her successful 2001 heart transplant performed at Lutheran Hospital.

Doritos Inventor Dies at 97, Will Be Buried With His Beloved Chips - http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/doritos-i ... ips-135249

Not just buried, they will be sprinkled on his grave!

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When Lagasse was a boy of about 9 or 10, he used to sit and watch De Costa in the kitchen of a restaurant she owned at the time in nearby Swansea when he visited with his family, Bates said.

Lagasse included many of De Costa's recipes in his cookbooks, although she was never afraid to scold him for fiddling with her ingredients.

"He put a recipe for her St. John's kale soup in one book, but she said he put in too much salt, and called to yell at him,"
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Lucky squirrels.

In 1940 at the age of 22 Paulucci created his first thriving commercial enterprise, growing bean sprouts in northern Minnesota. By 1944 that operation had morphed into the Chun King company. Canned chow mein was the first of many products that Paulucci brought to grocery store shelves and American kitchens.

"Here was an Italian Immigrant from Northern Minnesota putting together Chinese food in cans, at least what Americans thought was Chinese food," said Hy Berman, professor emeritus in history at the University of Minnesota.

"And he sold it! I mean, it doesn't make sense! It makes absolutely no sense, but he was very persuasive."

Irvin Moehling's great-grandfather was one of the first farmers in Des Plaines, and Mr. Moehling was recognized as its last.

"Irv was our city's last connection to a Des Plaines family with strong agrarian roots," said Dan Wilson, the alderman for Des Plaines'
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"He was born in this house and he died in this house," said his wife of 17 years, Beverly. "His father was also born in this house and died in this house. His great-grandparents bought this house in 1865."

Mr. Moehling, who put farming on hold for nearly four decades while he worked as a mechanical engineer and leased his property to tenant farmers, returned in the early 1990s to tend to the land that his ancestors had settled at the end of the Civil War.
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By the late 1990s, Mr. Moehling had sold off all but 2½ acres of his family's once-sprawling farm, keeping the original farmhouse, a barn, and smoke and milk house.

Must let my brothers know of Jeno's passing. They should have bought stock in his company during their pizza-roll fueled adolescences. Seriously, they ate them EVERY DAY!

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Kerr had served as president, chairman and chief executive of Kerr Glass Manufacturing Corp., the company famous for its mason jars for home canning, from 1967 until the early 1980s. His father, Alexander H. Kerr, founded the company in Portland, Ore., in 1903 and moved it to Los Angeles in 1920. The elder Kerr died in 1925, and Kerr's mother, Ruth Kerr, ran the business until her death in 1967.

Bill Kerr was known in the glass container business for developing the twist-off bottle cap and then taking the unusual step of sharing the innovation with other glass bottle manufacturers. He had concluded that glass manufacturers as a whole could then better compete with aluminum can makers, who had gained an edge with the pop-top opening.
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Mr. Bacon toyed with the idea of studying culinary arts at Le Cordon Bleu but instead took a position as head of the company founded by his father, Bacon's Clipping Bureau, a press clipping service.
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In the 1960s, cocktails were still the drink of choice for sophisticated Americans, but wine was starting to make inroads.

"People knew that if they were ever going to have dinner with Jackie Kennedy, they better know what color wine to drink," Rice said.

Taking to his hobby with great zeal, Mr. Bacon went on to hold leadership roles in the Commanderie de Bordeaux and the Society of Bacchus. In 1990, he was named Chevalier du Merite d'Agricole by the French government for his knowledge and dedication to the appreciation of French wine
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The designer of popular home appliances, including the Stir Crazy Popcorn Popper, has died.

Richard “Dick” Smith, 82, died Monday while walking his dog near his West Bend home.

Smith, who lived in West Bend since 1956, retired as manager of manufacturing at the West Bend Co., after a career there as a design engineer.

Among the products Smith developed for West Bend were the Stir Crazy Popcorn Popper and the Water-Wheel Humidifier, both considered revolutionary designs.

“He was proud of having figured out how to save costs on manufacturing by using standard parts, such as the coffee-can lid in the popcorn popper,” said his eldest son, Richard H.E. Smith II of Palatine, Ill....

Born in central Thailand's Pichit province to a Chinese father and a Thai mother who reportedly sold fruit and ducks to survive, Chaleo died the third richest man in Thailand.

Chaleo started a small company, T.C. Pharmaceuticals, in the 1960s and formulated an energy drink prototype a decade later called Krathing Daeng, or Red Bull in English.

The drink became popular among truck drivers and other blue-collar workers throughout the country, but it remained a local phenomenon until Chaleo met Austrian entrepreneur Dietrich Mateschitz.

Together, the pair modified Chaleo's initial formula and founded the international Red Bull brand.

Viki” Kalinowski was only 22 when she bought a store in Harvey with $1,800, some of it from poker winnings sent home by her husband, Gene, an infantryman in the Pacific Theater in World War II.

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Her dream was for her husband to be his own boss. “She didn’t want him to work in a factory after the war,” her daughter said.

The shop at 157th and Lathrop grew from a little mom-and-pop operation into a one-stop grocery where just about everybody in the neighborhood dropped in just about every day.

Factory workers from Whiting Corp. stopped in at lunch for Mrs. Kalinowski’s homemade chili, soup and Sloppy Joes. The store sold 300 “he-man” sandwiches a day, stacked with ham and beef on onion rolls and rye. On Fridays, the men could cash their paychecks and pick up a six-pack. At Valentine’s Day, they could find boxes of candy for their wives. In December, they could go to Kalinowski’s to buy a real Christmas tree.

But the meaty foundation of the business was Kalinowski’s pork-and-beef sausage, based on a recipe Gene obtained from his Polish-born mother, Kazmira. Viki made the kielbasa.

At its Polish sausage peak, Viki’s Certified Foods and Kalinowski Sausage Co. sold about eight tons a week — fresh and hickory-smoked. During the holidays, demand jumped to 20,000 pounds

In the mid-1960s, Mr. Kouris ventured into the restaurant business and opened a series of fast-food sandwich shops called the Lunch Pail that dotted the bus route on Wilson.

He closed the shops after about 10 years to focus on Zephyr, as well as his up-and-coming hot dog stand.

“He was very particular” while developing his restaurants, Green said. “He wanted to get everything just right.”

Byron’s Hot Dogs opened in 1975 on Irving Park Road near Wrigley Field, and soon after, business boomed. At one point there were five stores; two remain open.