J.R. Simplot, who turns 83 next month, owes his tough-as-a-boot frame to Idaho's rugged desert. He credits World War II with making him rich.
"Without it, I don't know where I'd have been," Simplot said, from behind a wide desk 13 stories above downtown Boise.America's entry 50 years ago into a war that took the lives of 292,000 GIs isn't a joyous memory for Idaho's foremost industrialist.
But it added intensity to an already-entrepreneurial zest for action that bubbled over inside a four-room schoolhouse in Declo 68 years ago.
Geography and numbers had been strengths for the rough-and-tumble farmboy. But he disliked reading and writing, and, anxious to grow up, he quit school at 14. That same year, he packed his bags and left home.
Simplot's first stop was the old Declo Hotel. To pay his dollar-a-day tab, he sorted potatoes during the day and unloaded coal at night.
Extra dollars came from lining irrigation canals with rock. The money went to buy warrants from teachers who also lived at the hotel. Declo teachers sometimes were paid with promissory notes, or warrants. Simplot paid 50 cents on the dollar for them.
At 17, he bought 700 hogs when there was virtually no market for them. Simplot fed the animals a mixture of horse meat, potatoes and barley. And while his neighbors were laughing, the market blossomed. Simplot sold his hogs for $7,800.
He spent the money on three teams of horses, farm equipment, a used Star Durant roadster and some potato seed. He leased 120 acres and went into the potato farming business.
As World War II drew near, Simplot's star was rising. Officially, there still was no J.R. Simplot Co., and the frozen french fry that Simplot would later ride to glory was still unknown.
But, at 32 years old, he owned some 30,000 acres of farm and grazing land and 33 potato warehouses scattered from Blackfoot in the east to Vale, Ore., in the west. And he was shipping potatoes and cull onions by the carload out of Nampa.
Simplot was also drying onions and sending onion powder and flakes to a Chicago spice and dried-mushroom manufacturer.
The onion-drying plant he had assembled in Caldwell was one of only a handful of primitive vegetable drying plants in the United States. Simplot said he cleared $50,000 during its first month of operation.
"The first good money I made was running that onion plant prior to the war, prior to the army getting involved, anyway," Simplot said.
Fifty years ago, in the spring of 1941, Simplot got a visit from a Col. Logan with the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps. Logan had heard about the onion drying plant and wanted to see it.
"They apparently sought him out. They were looking for food that was nutritious, lightweight and had a long shelf life. Apparently, they knew war was imminent," Simplot spokesman Fred Zerza said.
Three months before Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Japanese, Simplot opened a potato drying plant in Caldwell. Some employees date the formation of J.R. Simplot Co. to that time, although official papers establishing the privately held firm weren't filed with the state until 1956.
Zerza said Simplot apparently realized that if he could figure out a way to dry potatoes, which are 80 percent water, there would be a tremendous demand for them by the military. He pulled his key people together, and they figured out a method.
Within a year, Simplot was the largest producer of dehydrated potatoes and onions in the United States, Zerza said.
During the war years, Simplot shipped 33 million pounds of dehydrated potatoes and 5 million pounds of dried onions a year to the armed forces.
In fact, the plant produced a third of the dried potato products bought by the military during World War II, Zerza said.
"I think we delivered a lot of potatoes during the war, and we learned a lot in Idaho because of it," Simplot said.
The conflict led to major advances in potato seed, storage and fertilizer technologies that Idaho used to become America's premier potato-producing state, he said.