BUSINESS TOAST OF THE TOWN

FOR RESIDENTS of every major market in Texas, Mrs. Baird’s means store-bought white bread. If you grew up anywhere near Dallas or Fort Worth, chances are it was the bread of your first peanut butter sandwich. It’s the bread that was stacked on a butter plate by the roast for Sunday dinner, the bread that a slice of bologna and a smear of mayonnaise went between in countless school lunch boxes or weekday picnics. It’s the bread your Grandma started buying when she stopped baking her own. And it’s the bread you left behind when you discovered the varied textures and flavors of whole grains, pumpernickels, sourdoughs, fresh bakery products and even maybe your own homemade.

But there still exists a nostalgic bond between Texans (even those who haven’t eaten a slice in years) and Mrs. Baird’s, a bond that is stronger than the one that exists between a nationwide giant such as Wonder Bread or other regional brands and their customers. First of all, there was the field trip to Mrs. Baird’s factory while you were in elementary school.

“We rode down in a bus from Decatur to the Fort Worth factory,” a female executive in her mid-30s recalls with a smile. “I don’t remember learning anything about how they make bread, but I do remember getting that cute little loaf when the tour was over. I loved it.”

The second part of the bond is the aroma. You’re driving north of downtown Dallas on Central Expressway (or west of downtown Fort Worth on Interstate 30), trapped in the 5 o’clock gridlock. Suddenly, the aroma of thousands of loaves baking at once cuts through the accumulated layers of auto exhaust. It drives the fumes away and makes the whole highway and the inside of your car smell like Grandma’s kitchen on baking day.

The third part of the bond between Texans and Mrs. Baird’s is formed through the continual showing of television commercials for the company. With a string orchestra subtly setting a mood of tasteful nostalgia, Vernon Baird narrates-in an authentic nasal North Texas accent-30,45 or 60 seconds of sunny, down-home goodness and “family pride.” In an age when other companies and products fall over themselves identifying with old-fashioned family values, simple pleasure and the good ol’ days, the unpretentious vignettes of Mother Baird baking and the eager sons loading the delivery wagon have etched themselves on the consciousness of Texas television viewers.

Madison Avenue couldn’t make up a story that good. There really was a Mrs. Baird, and she really did bake bread and send her sons out in a horse-drawn delivery wagon to sell it.

Indeed, while the television image of the bakery’s early days undoubtedly sells a lot of bread, it barely skims the surface of one of Texas’ most fascinating success stories. It’s a story of a family, which in the face of tragic circumstances not only survived but scored one of the Southwest’s most inspiring financial triumphs. In the case of the Baird family, hard work and perseverance paid off on a large scale.

Mrs. Baird, the woman who has been immortalized on hundreds of billboards, thousands of commercials and millions of bread wrappers, began life as Ninnie Henderson in 1869 in Trenton, Tennessee. She never talked much about her childhood, and few of the details have been passed down, even to her two surviving children, Roland and Hoyt Baird. What is known is that she was an orphan and that she learned to bake bread at an early age from an aunt who wanted to make sure that young Ninnie had a survival skill. At 17, she married William Allen Baird, with whom she eventually had 10 children, eight of whom survived infancy.

William’s background is even more obscure than Ninnie’s, and his character is all but unknown. Baird family records and recollections reveal that he was a man capable of hard work but one who was always compelled to sell out and move on. After bringing his family to Fort Worth in 1901, William started a number of small, food-related businesses, selling one after another as they became successful.

Ninnie Baird’s instincts were more stable. By 1908, she had begun baking extra bread in their small house a few blocks south of downtown Fort Worth and selling it to neighboring housewives. By 1911, when William died of diabetes, she had organized her four sons into a work force and had purchased (partly with cash she had saved, partly with baked goods) a large oven from the Metropolitan Hotel.

“It’s a hard thing to say,” recalls Roland Baird, who was 11 years old at the time, “but opportunity presented itself when he [William] died.”

For the next 10 years, Mrs. Baird and her sons put every ounce of energy and effort into the bakery. By 1912, they were operating a retail shop as well as a bakery, and six years later they had moved into the wholesale business as a supplier to the early grocery store chains.

“We had to work to get along,” Roland says, remembering that he dropped out of school at the age of 14 to work full time as a baker. “The whole family had to work. It was normal back then.”

Gradually, through the late Teens and early Twenties, Mrs. Baird’s company moved out of the realm of the small, family operation and into the ranks of the larger, more professional companies. Ninnie Baird went into active retirement in a handsome two-story brick house on the newly developed West Side, and the actual work of baking and delivery passed from her and her sons, who moved into executive positions, to hired laborers. With the economic growth during the Twenties, the Baird family found its business transformed from a small retailer making and selling its product in rented facilities into a factory owner and retail distributor.

For all its steady forward motion and prosperity, the Baird family isn’t a likely subject for a thrilling family saga. Ninnie Baird moved one last time, in 1935, to a fashionable Parkside neighborhood, but she continued to do most of her own housework and even some yardwork. Her main interests centered on the family business, family members, the small Southern Baptist church she attended on College Avenue (close to her original neighborhood) and Baptist charities such as orphanages and the Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary.

Her sons, meanwhile, took up rich men’s pursuits such as ranching, fishing in Canada and Colorado and airplanes. While Ninnie Baird contented herself with church and a businesswomen’s club for social activities, her daughters, daughters-in-law, granddaughters and great-granddaughters made their debuts and joined the Junior League. Quietly, in a fashion that family members themselves describe as “low-key,” descendants of the hard-working bakerwoman from Tennessee made their way into Fort Worth’s country club- and cotillion-centered society. Today, Ninnie Baird’s descendants figure prominently in exclusive social sets in both Dallas and Fort Worth.

AS FOR THE business itself, it remains a remarkable example of a large company held entirely in family hands. Ninnie’s second son, Hoyt, now 87, still goes to his Fort Worth office every day, while his son Vernon (the same Vernon of the television commercials) keeps a close rein on the business as chairman of the board.

In a business that has always been competitive and is still as cutthroat as ever, Vernon keeps a tight clamp on the information going out of the company. While he answers his own phone and is friendly to inquirers, he is reluctant to discuss business matters or to allow associates within the company to be interviewed. “Mrs. Baird didn’t raise a damn fool in the bunch,” a relative not involved in the company said recently. Apparently, Vernon Baird wants to make sure no one makes a fool of himself or the company.

The reticence to discuss company policy or plans even on the most general level is not, however, exclusive to the management of Mrs. Baird’s. In the rapidly changing and volatile market for the most basic and necessary of all human foods, the sellers of baked goods are consistently tight-lipped and unwilling to reveal their views of what lies ahead. Although off-the-record comments by bakery officials in the Dallas area indicate that Mrs. Baird’s is a giant on the Southwestern scene, it is a relatively small concern compared to some of the corporate giants whose bakery divisions are eager for a larger share of the Texas market. For now, this market resembles a contest of David against several Goliaths. We can be sure that David-in this case, Mrs. Baird’s-has a sling shot and several stones within easy reach. David is certainly not letting on how many stones he has or exactly where he is going to aim them.

Still, certain aspects of the business are a matter of public record. The most recent issue of the Bakery Red Book lists Mrs. Baird’s as the 39th largest baking company in America, producing $75 million worth of goods in 12 factories, employing 3,000 workers and serving 550 delivery routes, all within the Southwest. The Dallas plant provides 250 jobs locally; other production centers are in Fort Worth, Victoria, San Antonio, Houston, Austin, Abilene and Lubbock-with Fort Worth, Victoria and Abilene each boasting two plants. Fully 68 percent of the production of these plants as a whole is regular pan-baked bread, with the remaining percentage divided among cakes, fruit pies, and, in South Texas, corn and flour tortillas. The company admits, with some pride, to being the largest family owned bakery in the nation.

The most recent expansion of the company’s market came with an entry into eastern New Mexico in 1981-the first attempt ever to sell Mrs. Baird’s outside of Texas. Expansion has always been cause for caution with the Bairds: One family acquaintance, who declined to be identified, reports that the Baird company existed for many years without it borrowing money for expansion. “They just don’t take risks,” he says.

This cautious manner is an attribute the Bairds inherited from Mrs. Baird herself, but it caused one serious crack in the unified family facade, which occurred in 1954 when the third son, Roland, sold his and his children’s share of the company.

“It was a struggle to get the other brothers to move forward,” he says. “I took the company into Dallas in 1928 [the first expansion outside of the Fort Worth area ], and I had a hard time getting them to go along. I took the company to Houston in 1938, but I had to argue with my older brothers the whole way. They wanted to go to Beaumont or Orange or Port Arthur-anywhere but where the people were.

The friction really started when we moved to Abilene. I handled all the advertising and was spending $2 million a year in Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston. Abilene is a smaller market and meant greater spending per capita. When the trouble began, I suggested that I’d ’retire’ and the other brothers went along. I explained to my children that my influence would leave the company with me, and we all agreed to sell all of our shares.”

After Roland left Mrs. Baird’s, he remained an active force for many years on the Dallas business scene (most notably as a director at Mercantile Bank). He eventually retired to his ranch at Johnson City, where he still lives with his wife. His son, Roland Jr., founded and operated an independent bakery in Phoenix, Arizona, and is now active as a supplier of baked goods for hotels and restaurants in Las Vegas, Nevada. As the only Baird son to leave the family business, Roland has felt regret, but he has also gained insight unavailable to those who stayed in the fold.

“I know it hurt my mother that I left the company,” he says. “But during the years afterward, when I was living in Dallas and she in Fort Worth, I drove over to see her every other week or so. You know, it was the first chance I ever really had to visit with her and get to know her. I guess the business got to be bigger than we were.”

The hardest financial time the family run company faced came, ironically, with the first expansion of supermarket chains during the late Thirties and early Forties. Mrs. Baird’s, other bakers and the chains (principally A&P and Safeway) became locked in a price war, with bread prices dropping as low as 5 cents per loaf. The supermarkets, eager to draw new customers, used bread as a “loss leader’-an item sold at less than cost in order to draw customers who would either spend money on high-profit items or develop the habit of shopping at supermarkets. Mrs. Baird’s aces in this high-stakes poker game proved to be the company’s reputation as a family business, its customer loyalty and its ability to deliver a fresh product to the stores. Despite a period of selling bread below the cost of production (during which the company’s cautious borrowing policies proved wise), the Baird brothers stood firm, and they brought the bakery into the continuing era of prosperous coexistence with the supermarket chains.

Early in June 1961, Ninnie Baird died in Fort Worth at the age of 92. Despite her reticent manner, those who knew and worked for her still remember her as one of the kindest and most remarkable women they have ever known. “She wasn’t well-educated, and she wasn’t really a businesswoman,” Roland Baird says of his mother. “But she held the family together in tough times.”

The company she left behind had long since outgrown her ability to lead it, but today, 23 years after her death, it still bears the stamp of her personality. It’s still a family business, with one of the young boys who watched the bread dough rise and who drove the delivery wagon still active as the chairman of the executive committee.

And it’s still a very conservative company in terms of the product it sells. In grocery stores where more and more shelf space goes to gourmet, pseudo-gourmet and health-oriented products, Mrs. Baird’s continues to focus on a sweet, fluffy white bread of the sort that appeals most readily to young children. Even the whole-grain products it has eased into are decidedly light and close to white bread in texture, while the pies and cakes are definitely lunch-box and vending-machine fare.

It’s a cautious approach to selling bread, a family oriented approach. But it’s an approach that the pretty young widow who woke up on a cold December morning some 70 years ago with eight hungry children would undoubtedly have approved.