But not that day, it seemed, as I bounded eagerly into the barn. That day, I found my father’s lithe, agile frame leaning over a workbench, a newspaper spread open before him and a scowl fixed to his face. “Overnight success?” He barely nodded in my direction, his body remaining hunched over the journal. “They call me an ‘overnight success’？ There was nothing fast about it! It was work, work, and more work!” Papa slammed a fist down on the paper. I stepped beside him and scanned the offending article, immediately understanding my father’s sour mood. The piece was just one of the many that sought to compare Papa to our Battle Creek neighbor and erstwhile friend, Dr. Kellogg, painting Papa less as a worthy and respectable rival and more as an opportunistic interloper who had piggybacked on Dr. Kellogg’s success—a narrative that I knew to be patently false. And one that rankled Papa more than anything else he could read.
Years earlier, when Dr. Kellogg had laughed Papa off the premises of the San, refusing to hear him out or consider partnering with him for a mass-market breakfast cereal, denying him any blessing or any of the San’s formidable resources, Papa had set up his own shop on our modest parcel of farmland just outside of the Battle Creek downtown. There was nothing interloping about it—Papa had developed his homegrown experiments from scratch. Sure, Dr. Kellogg had come up with a few bland recipes of wheat and bran and dry corn mixes that he’d been foisting on his patients in the San dining hall; but the doctor had never even considered the idea of mass-producing tasty breakfast foods and marketing them to the public. What about the millions of folks who couldn’t afford to stay at the San and pay for the dubious privilege of Kellogg’s spartan therapies and bland menus? Only Papa had asked that question; only Papa had set to work to find an answer for them.
Besides, anyone who’d ever suffered through a meal at the San knew that Dr. Kellogg’s original recipes were so flavorless as to make the idea of mass marketing them seem laughable. Papa had created his recipes not only to be healthy, but also with widespread appeal at the fore. C. W. Post wasn’t a carpetbagger at all—nobody had taken on America’s outmoded breakfast habits the way he had. Nobody had even thought to do it, nor had anybody had the smarts or the drive or the ingenuity to pull off such a feat.
Now, ten years later, Grape-Nuts was the most popular cereal in the country, and Postum was the unrivaled replacement for coffee. Our days of worrying about money were long behind us. But Papa was still fueled, perhaps even more so than in the past, by a savage drive to succeed. He’d believed that there was a reason his life had been spared, and he believed it more with each passing day. “More, more, more!” was his daily driving hymn—he was always scouring our world for the next thing that someone had labeled “can’t be done.”
Because Papa had needed space for his experiments, we’d moved out of Mrs. Gregory’s home to the farm where we now lived, just east of town on Marshall Street. The property had the old white barn where Papa now worked, and behind that a sprawl of cornfields and apple orchards, with low-lying hills in the near distance that grew thick with berry bushes and white oaks. We had stables and horses, and in the back of the barnyard there was a chicken coop, with egg-laying hens that Papa told me it was my job to name. Having just studied ancient Rome in school, I decided to give them all proper matriarchal names of the empire—Lavinia, Portia, Flavia—and I enjoyed feeding them each morning.
I loved having the space to roam out of doors—when Leila allowed—but my favorite place was the barn, where Papa worked with his staff. There, Papa and his team, which now involved my Uncle Cal, would let me help by putting the hot glue on the labels of the Postum boxes, or counting out the orders as we loaded up crates for delivery. I loved being near Papa as he called his excited commands to his right-hand man, a local guy named Shorty Bristol. I would jump up and down on the massive storage drums filled with the uncooked ingredients. Oftentimes Papa, Uncle Cal, and Shorty would let me rake the oats and bran as they warmed over the roasting trough, or sample a fresh batch of Grape-Nuts to give my approval. The whole place buzzed with an excitement that here, our work had meaning, and I breathed that in, along with the familiar scents of the cooking fires and the cooling cakes of just-roasted bran and wheat berries, the bubbling molasses that steamed in the tall cylinders.
But on that spring day, as Papa crumpled up the newspaper and tossed it into the nearest fire, I could see that he was not interested in my playing around in his barn or sampling the latest batch of cereal. That day it seemed he had quite a few other things on his mind. “Enough of that rotten ink,” he declared, rolling up his sleeves as he turned his focus toward me. “Not going to let that poison stick. We Posts never stay down for long. We always get back up to go another round. Now, how are you, Budgie?”