The target audience for this essay is anyone that has a dream to be wealthy. You don’t need to have an advanced education to get there either. As outlined in the following article you can see how you too can have that sort of success. I don‘t want the reader to feel bored with just another story of some guy that made it from nothing, but to understand how anyone can make it. I would like this essay to be easy to read and follow so that if you where to stumble across it in search of success stories it would appeal to all. The audience needs to feel engaged and leave with the desire to go out and make their own fortune and success. I would like the reader to be able to make a simple of how to turn their dreams into a success story like Mr. Simplot did. I want them to also walk away with the desire to not be talked down form domineering people in their lives. So many times in life people make bad decisions because they were steered in the wrong direction. Had those individuals made the same decisions, but with different intentions maybe they would have been successful.
Fast Food the track to Success
The following is a little story of a simple man born 1909 in Dubuque, Iowa by the name of J.R. Simplot who now resides in the town of Aberdeen, Idaho population 2,000. Once you pass through the downtown streets, past the half dozen shops on Main Street, turn right at the Tiger Hut, and go across the railroad tracks about a quarter mile, we are there. Once you step out of the car it smells like someone’s cooking potatoes. The Simplot plant is a small facility, by industry standards, that operates 24 hours a day, 310 days a year, built in the 1950’s. This small plant process 1 million pounds of potatoes a day. Inside the building is a small army of workers in white coats and hard hats that keep the place running smoothly, monitoring the controls and checking the fries for imperfections. Just one year after his birth, Mr. Simplot moved with his father to Snake River Reclamation Project. Simplot’s father as described by Schlosser, a domineering man, became a homesteader that farmed. At the young age of 15 Simplot left home and dropped out of school to make it on his own. He did this by working nine-ten hours a day for 30 cents an hour sorting potatoes. He rented a room in a boarding house where he met some school teachers. He purchased interest-bearing scrip for them for 50 cents on the dollar that he sold for 90 cents on the dollar to a banker. From a very young age Mr. Simplot was a business man. With his profits he purchased a rifle, truck, and 600 hogs for $1 on the head. He then in turn sold the hogs for $12.50 a head the following year at the age of sixteen. With his knowledge of potatoes sorting he became a potato farmer.
In the 1920’s Idaho potato industry was just setting up. Mr. Simplot leased 160 acres that he farmed for Lindsay Maggart. Together the two purchased an electric potato sorter that they fought over. On a coin toss Mr. Simplot won the sorter and set up shop in a potatoes cellar in Delco. Within a decade he would go on to become the largest shipper of potatoes in the west.
In 1941 Simplot also shipped dehydrated onion powder he called “gold dust” to the US Army for the war effort. His dehydrating plant would then go on to become the largest in the world in 1942, all this done by the age of 36.
After the war ended, Simplot with his team of researchers invested heavy in the frozen food technology, betting that it would provide meals of the future. (Schlosser) This turned out to be the next pivotal moment in his wealthy making. The 1950’s would become know “the Golden Age of Food Processing.” (Historian Harvey Levenstein) By 1953 Simplot company started selling the new “frozen potatoes.” In 1965, several years later, he would go on to meet Ray Kroc. With nothing more than a
