The Eye Guy Remains ‘Frozen in Time’

FIRST COLUMN AS EDITOR OF FFA SPOKE OF GRAND JUNCTION

Editor’s Note: The following column is reprinted from the very first issue of Frozen Food Age magazine that I edited six years ago, September 2005, and it speaks to the grocery Thompsons of Main Street and East Hager Street in addition to the Hillmans and other Grand Junction families.

Being named editor of Frozen Food Age the previous month (August 2005) was somewhat the “pinnacle” of my business journalism career in New York. I had made it “up” to editorial management. From there it was sort of a non-stop, whirly-gig, ongoing roller coaster of writing, editing, traveling, speaking, pleading, begging, crying, ranting, raving and just plain surviving in the dog-eat-dog world of business-to-business (B2B) media over the course of the next 3 years and 3 months.

And like a captain of his ship, I went down with the "SS Frozen Food Age" as it was sunk by its own fleet commander (Cygnus Business Media) in late November 2008. Meaning: the company shuttered the magazine.

Much of my writing work from FFA is still housed in a few boxes in a friend’s apartment back in New York, but for some reason I held on to this very first column of nearly three dozen columns while relocating back to GJ in the spring; most likely because it addressed life in Grand Junction and my early-day connection to the grocery industry. As you probably surmised, Frozen Food Age covered the frozen food industry, but it specifically covered frozen foods at retail, a rather narrow niche of the overall grocery industry but a lucrative one (think $5.99 pails of ice cream and $4.99 frozen pizzas compared with 29 cent tomatoes and bagged baby carrots for $1.19 that have a limited shelf life, called “shrinkage” in grocery store parlance). FFs don’t shrink—they have a longer shelf life than other perishables (fruits, vegetables, dairy) but there are considerable costs for transport, storage and distribution.

Covering frozen foods at retail meant primarily addressing the relationship between the manufacturers (Birds Eye, Totino’s, Blue Bunny, etc.) and the grocery retail buyers and merchandisers (folks at Hy-Vee, A&P, Supervalu, Kroger, etc.). The former were the advertisers; the latter, readers. The fun part came in covering the next step in the shopping-at-retail continuum—the consumer. It was always a “check it out” moment when I would come across a print magazine ad in Better Homes & Garden or People or spot a 30-second TV commercial on a major network—usually for a product like Lean Cuisine or DiGiorno or the mighty ho-ho-ho Green Giant, a proud product of our neighbors to the north, Minnesota.

It was an interesting and challenging position. The people in the industry were respectful of our efforts in publishing Frozen Food Age and were just as disheartened as we staff members were when it was closed.


Well, anyway, I wanted to share this with the readers of Eye on Grand Junction, which was launched shortly after FFA was shuttered. Like I said, just think of Thompson family members from old GJ. Doesn’t have to big the Jack Thompsons but could be the big Morse/OJ/ Grandma “Hattie” Thompson clan of GJ and Rippey and environs or the Scotty Thompson and sons of a more recent GJ vintage. Either way, think warmly of a Thompson and hearken back to a pleasant memory of life back in GJ and eastern Greene County. Hello folks near and far, natives and newcomers alike: come visit us! Corner of Highways 30 and 144, Heartland, USA…we’ll put the coffee pots on and whip up some tasty pans of “bars” for nibbling.

“Freezing Point” column, September 2005, Frozen Food Age Magazine

From Fareway to Fairway and All Points in Between

Shortly after taking this position, I took a really close look at how pervasive the supermarket or grocery store has been in my life. Along with writing about food, I spent the last three years talking about it in meeting room discussions with Weight Watchers members. The topic of “what’s good to buy and where to buy it” came up often.

Yet my exposure to the grocery industry has been deeper, more pervasive. I grew up in a rambling, white frame house on the edge of small farm town of just shy of 1,000 people in central Iowa. The Thompson family, when they had about eight of their 10 kids, had lived in our house before they moved down the street to an even bigger house.

I had an older brother and sister and they, along with all the Thompsons, Gannons, Rowles, Dobsons and a sprinkling of Kerseys, Kennedys and a few other families, were the students of St. Mary’s Academy, which was just down the street from where we lived. St. Mary’s and the rectory were just across the street from the Thompsons. St. Brigid’s, our beautiful old brown brick church with the soaring steeple, was in the next block to the east and the cemetery was on a slight rise behind our church and school “campus.” I was the last of two students to enroll in St. Mary’s, which, regrettably, closed after my one and only year there.

It’s a heritage I take very seriously, however, as I was the last of a continuum of students from 1888 to 1962. For many of its years, St. Mary’s was a girls-only high school and many of the girls boarded in local homes, as they did in ours, which was then owned by Rose Bridget “Aunt Bridgie” Gannon. We are just the second owners in the house’s history, which dates back to the early days of St. Mary’s.

Looking back, I guess the Thompsons owned the local Foodland on Main Street. Ownership doesn’t seem like the right word, though. The Thompsons were the Foodland. Jack ran the store, Faye took care of the house and all those kids, plus her two brothers and her younger sister who came to live with them, and she was also the gatekeeper to the church and the activities going on there. All 10 kids worked “up at the store” during their high school and college years and all went on to college and then some.

I remember how my mom kept “suggesting” that I go speak to Jack about becoming a box boy up there, but I resisted. Too shy. Look at me now!

We were close to the Thompsons through church, school and the neighborhood, but our truly close friends were the Hillmans. My best friend was Dave Hillman, a year older than me and a grade ahead in school. His parents, Doris and Rolland, were my parents’ best friends and Rolland was a meat-cutter at the main Fareway store over in Boone, about 20 miles east of Grand Junction, my hometown.

Years later, while a student at Drake University in Des Moines, one of my classmates was Scott Beckwith, son of the owner and grandson of the founder of the Fareway chain.

Because I had gone to college with Scott Beckwith of the Fareway Beckwiths of Boone, Iowa, and a close family friend had spent his entire working career with the main store in downtown Boone, I was always on the lookout for the other Fareway stores, which was then a small chain of about a dozen stores in Iowa. One newspaper job took me to Storm Lake in northwest Iowa where I shopped my first Fareway store. It was no frills but it still had the signature meat counter just like the main store in Boone and was closed on Sundays.

The Fareways (and the Beckwiths) are still out there flourishing. Since my time in Iowa in the early 1980s, Fareway has expanded into Illinois and now has 80 stores. A web site covering grocery history architecture, www.groceteria.com, notes that Fareway has recently opened two stores in Omaha, one across the street from a Wal-Mart.

My move from Iowa to the Carolinas in the mid 1980s exposed me to a whole new group of supermarkets: Kroger, Winn-Dixie, Harris-Teeter and Food Lion. I remember the excitement while living in the growing coastal community of Pawleys Island in South Carolina when the new A&P supermarket plaza opened. With the memory of our recent hurricane on the Gulf Coast, I distinctly remember shopping at Pawleys A&P just before (provisions I eventually took to an overnight shelter) and after Hurricane Hugo hit the South Carolina coast in September 1989.

Of course, that was then. Then was Jack Thompson dying much too early from a heart attack and no successive owner ever having the knack and know-how that he had. It was a great store. Sadly, Grand Junction has not had a supermarket in many years.

And this is now. Now is shopping along the “Miracle Mile” of Broadway on the Upper West Side of Manhattan—the Whole Foods Market in the glitzy new Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle to Citarella at West 75th Street to Zabar’s at West 80th.

In between is Food Emporium at Lincoln Center, a Gristede’s in the lower level of the architecturally stunning Ansonia, between 73d and 74th, and of course, New York’s very own Fairway, “Like No Other Market,” at 75th and Broadway.

These same three stores—Fairway, Citarella and Zabar’s—have been included as a side excursion at the Fancy Food Show in New York. And with good reason: they are a “foodie” heaven.

So if you are coming into the city on business or pleasure sometime soon, give me a call. I would love to show you my incredible neighborhood of stores.