A look at Maine businesses

ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN MAINE: ESSAYS IN BUSINESS ENTERPRISE, edited by Stuart Bruchey, Garland Publishing Co., $47, 194 pages of text, 7 pages of index.

A reader who embarks on a literary journey expects some hazards, some obstacles, to be overcome. In this collection of papers written by students in a graduate history seminar, history itself bars easy access to the stories of 19th and 20th century business ventures in Maine.

Two of the most obvious problems here lie in determining the reliability of conflicting sources and in transferring statistics and other bare facts into a prose narrative that reveals the ambience of business enterprise in Maine over the past hundred years. The would-be historian must have a flair for writing as well as an imaginative, original gift for re-creating contemporary life and business realities. The best of these articles certainly reveal these abilities, while those which rely too heavily on numerical data sans explanation engulf the reader in a murky swamp of detail.

Nevertheless, for Maine history buffs or for students of the entrepreneurial spirit, this work is valuable and provocative. The students used original manuscript records from special collections in the libraries of Bowdoin and Colby colleges and the University of Maine, and company records of such disparate businesses as Baxter’s “Quick-Freeze French Fry” and the Hannaford Brothers Co. to put Maine entrepreneurship into its proper historical, socioeconomic and political contexts. Readers may draw their own inferences about the impact of luck, pluck, energy and sharp managerial skills on fledgling business ventures in iron and textile mills, shipbuilding, grocery stores, etc.

By far the best article is by Charles P.M. Outwin, “A history of the Hannaford Bros. Co. of Maine,” which begins at the company’s inception in 1883 and carries it through 1994, focusing on key decisions and actions taken by family members and later by corporate CEOs groomed by their predecessors for leadership. This essay is well-researched and well-written, revealing its author’s gift for detail, and a thorough analysis of this exemplar of Maine family businesses.

Outwin places Hannaford Brothers Co. in perspective, beginning with the legendary Arthur Hannaford, 22, driving a one-horse farm cart loaded with fresh produce from the family farm, to be sold in Portland, and following the firm to its present-day position in Maine commerce. Within six years after Arthur’s initial venture into capitalism, he and his brother Howard were listed in the telephone directory as “dealers of produce.” Brother Edward joined the partnership in 1894, while Arthur inexplicably sold out and left the business. Hannaford’s early success was in part due to the expansion of the population base in southern and central Maine. Despite the Depression, food shortages in World War II and the changing economy of the last 50 years, the company has flourished and diversified.

The backbone of the company’s resources are its Shop ‘n Save stores, and it was the first to combine groceries with prescription drugstores. This food giant is credited with pioneering efforts in management-worker relations, offering key personnel “princely” salaries, establishing a 40-hour workweek and introducing the first “team-oriented self-management system” to improve production.

A much smaller, but nonetheless intriguing enterprise — the Baxter “Quick-Freeze French Fry” company in Maine — offers less in the way of personal history, emphasizing instead the economic and national climate of the second World War. The choice of Maine as the site of said enterprise was natural, since in 1943, Maine produced more potatoes than any other state. Due to metal shortages in the war years which prevented use of canned goods, the need for wholesome vegetable products that could be transported easily to the fighting troops grew, and government contracts were offered to the first 20 businesses to follow their “Grade A” inspection and production system of frozen foods.

Baxter’s Snow Flake Canning Co. in Maine was the first to supply these products, but it did not become the “potato king” of the United States because Idaho and other Western states lured customers away with a cheaper, better-quality potato (assisted by “cheap federal hydropower and irrigation”). Baxter’s Corinna plant was destroyed by fire, and financial backing from the state was withdrawn.

Tom McCord, the author of this article, carefully compares the quality of Maine potatoes — the round white Katahdin — and Idaho’s — the large, high-gravity, low-sugar Russet Burbank — and the luck factor. Maine lost on taste, size, and quality, and because Baxter’s president never met Ray Kroc, the MacDonald’s mogul who made Idaho potatoes famous.

Finally, one finds an odd little article that successfully argues that the Campbell Bookstore in Portland found prosperity in World War II thanks to war-time shipbuilding, the paper pulp mills and the thirst for cheap paperback books. Since the German U-boats had sunk about 5 million tons of British merchant ships in 1941, America negotiated to deliver 60 10,000-ton ships by 1942. The influx of workers led to a hunger for cheap books. Other people also discovered reading as a replacement for movies and driving, which were impossible due to wartime rationing. Thus began the boom in bookstores across America. For the first time in history, paperback books saved paper while making quality books available to the troops and civilians, who read these voraciously.

This book also includes an exhaustive study of the Katahdin Iron Works, a human interest essay on Bates Manufacturing (textiles), as well as chapters on Hinckley Co. (wooden boat building), the Maine Central Railroad and a resort camp called Camp Merryweather.

Linda L. Labin is associate professor of English at Husson College.