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06/15/2005
Bortrum Wins a Clambake
Last week’s column concerned a fishing net and a weaker
headrope designed to avoid trapping dolphins, porpoises and, on
rare occasions, a whale. Coincidentally, two days after posting
the column, I saw an article by Mary Pemberton on AOL News
about a 20-foot humpback whale calf in the waters south of
Juneau, Alaska. The calf has a piece of gill net entangled in its
upper jaw. Its mother, Whale 525, first identified by researchers
back in 1979, accompanies the calf. The Coast Guard and
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are
monitoring the pair and are debating whether or not to try to
disentangle the calf from the net, a dangerous operation under
any circumstance. It would be even more risky if the mother
takes offense and attacks the rescuers.
The two whales belong to a group of whales that summer in
Alaska and winter in Pacific near Hawaii, where the calf was
probably born last winter. Back in Hawaii, they’re having their
own problems. Some unknown marine organism in the Keehi
Lagoon there has been stinging members of canoe clubs. The
clubs engage in canoe races and, prior to starting the races, the
canoes are held in position by swimmers known as “holders”.
The holders are those most affected by the stinging, which has
been quite painful and repeated. As yet, the culprit hasn’t been
identified but there are lots of suspects, including tiny stinging
sponges or jellyfish so small as to go unnoticed.
Here in New Jersey, the past week saw our own frightening
marine incident when a young fellow was bitten by what is
believed to have been a great white shark. Apparently, this was
the first such incident with a great white in Jersey waters in 30
years. The incident brought to mind the time over 30 years ago
when I was in Hawaiian waters at Magic Sands beach on Maui. I
was peacefully paddling around when some sea creature of
considerable bulk bumped into me. That was the last time I set
foot in any oceanic marine environment! Regular readers will
know, that I now prefer early morning walks on beaches
bordering such bodies of water.
I do enjoy dining on the fruits of the sea and a favorite restaurant
here at our local mall is Legal Sea Foods, a chain of over 30
restaurants along the Eastern Seaboard. I first encountered a
Legal Sea Foods in Boston many years ago and believe the chain
had its start in New England. In the past, when on Marco Island,
I’ve often written of the red tide problem that often plagues the
waters along the Gulf coast of Florida. I had not known that
there was a red tide problem up north off the coasts of New
England until I saw an article this past week by Rick Hampson of
USA Today posted on AOL News.
The algae responsible for New England’s red tide are of a
different type than those causing Florida’s red tide. The New
England version doesn’t seem to affect swimmers, who in
Florida suffer from coughing and respiratory distress. The
Yankee version makes shellfish unfit for human consumption but
reportedly doesn’t harm the shellfish, which clear it out of their
systems when the algae blooms disappear. The algae also don’t
affect lobsters, shrimp or fin fish. The seriousness of the current
situation is demonstrated by the finding of as many as 40,000 red
tide cells per liter of seawater; a reading of only 200 cells per
liter is considered toxic!
The resulting shutdown of clamming operations from Maine
down to Massachusetts has caused the governors of those states
to declare states of emergency. Thousands of shell fishermen are
unemployed and the red tide may spread even farther down the
coast. The USA Today article quotes the director of quality
control of Legal Sea Foods as saying that they are getting
uncontaminated shellfish from Canada, New York and here in
New Jersey. He predicts that if the situation doesn’t improve,
“supplies will start to dwindle and price will skyrocket.”
Would you believe that on Monday (June 12), after starting this
column, I got a phone call from Legal Sea Foods? The young
lady cheerily wondered when I wanted to receive my clambake!
I had forgotten that we had eaten lunch there some time ago and
they had a box into which my wife and I dropped our names for
something. I won! I told the young lady that I really wasn’t
prepared to set a date, so I’ll get a gift certificate with hopefully
more details as to what a clambake by mail consists of. Who
knows? If the price of clams goes sky high, maybe I could get
rich auctioning it off on eBay.
Well, I’ve run out of marine related material. Let’s turn to
something earthier - fertilizer. John Steele Gordon is one of my
favorite writers for American Heritage magazine and in the
June/July issue he has an article titled “Horace Hagedorn’s Little
Miracle”. He writes about how the American economy has given
rise to more fortunes than any other economy in history. We all
know about the likes of Bill Gates, Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan
and the huge enterprises they spawned. But Gordon is concerned
here with those who come up with solutions to problems of lesser
importance but still amass a fortune with familiar products. This
was the case with Hagedorn, who died this year at 89.
According to my trusty 1962 World Book Encyclopedia, man
first started to plant things to eat back in the later years of the
Stone Age, at least as early as 6,000 years or so BC. This may
not be current thinking, but my World Book speculates that
humans stumbled upon some defective plants that didn’t open to
shed their fruits and could be propagated. This meant that our
early ancestors could plan their harvests and not have to eat their
produce on the run, so to speak. Carrying this theme further,
could humans also have stumbled on some defective animals that
lent themselves to domestication, as opposed to their normal,
ferocious cousins?
Whatever the case, it’s not hard to imagine that those prehistoric
farmers soon discovered that crops grew more bountifully in soil
containing waste from their domesticated animals – the first
fertilizer, manure. Fast forward to the mid-twentieth century and
farmers were savvy individuals, aware of the chemistry of
manure and more advanced fertilizers. Plants need about ten
different elements to grow to their full potential. The three
fundamental elements are carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, which
come mainly from the air (carbon dioxide and oxygen) and
water. Almost all of a plant consists of these three elements,
combined through photosynthesis to make the plant. Most soils
contain iron, magnesium and sulfur in some form or another.
Some rich soils may also contain calcium, phosphorus, nitrogen
and/or potassium. If not, some sort of natural or synthetic
fertilizer is required to supply the missing elements, some of
which are needed in only trace amounts to promote growth of the
plant.
After World War II, spurred by the GI Bill and the federal
government’s guaranteeing of mortgages, developers such as
William Levitt, of Levittown fame, embarked on building
affordable housing in suburban locations. Levitt built over
17,000 homes in four years on Long Island. The houses sold for
about $8,000 and typically sat on a plot of land 60 feet by 100
feet. With all those back yards, new homeowners, many brought
up in the city, naturally wanted to grow something. Enter
fertilizer, in the unlikely guise of a native Manhattanite, Horace
Hagedorn, who worked in an advertising agency in New York
City, and an upstate New Yorker, Otto Stern.
Stern was in the nursery business and wanted to buy some
advertising time on the radio. A German immigrant, his accent
was so heavy he had trouble being understood on the phone and
so came in person to talk to Hagedorn. Stern told Hagedorn that
when he shipped plants by mail, too often they were not in good
shape when they arrived. Why not ship a little packet of
fertilizer with the plant to perk it up on arrival? Rutgers
University, where I now hang my hat, is and was well known for
its agricultural expertise and they consulted a professor there, O.
Wesley Davidson. Davidson fiddled with the chemistry and
came up with a formula that could be easily dissolved in water.
Well, the rest is history. Hagedorn decided that this formula
could have a brighter future than as just an additive to perk up a
mail order plant. In 1951, he and Stern put an ad promoting the
formula in the New York Herald Tribune, at a cost of $2,000
each. Four years later, they had a half million-dollar business.
Hagedorn was ahead of his time. He created what might be
termed today a “virtual” company, contracting out the
manufacture of the product. After buying out Stern in the 1980s,
in 1995 he merged with the Scotts Company. If you live in the
U.S. and don’t know the name Scotts, you must be a city dweller
with no plants or grass to fertilize.
Hagedorn’s family became the owner of over 40 percent of the
stock in Scotts and his son became CEO of the company. I liked
John Steele Gordon’s ending to his article. In spite of
Hagedorn’s expertise in advertising and marketing, “it was his
wife, Peggy, who came up with the name for the little blue-green
crystals that made them so rich: Miracle-Gro.”
A couple days ago, I saw my wife go out with a container of
those little blue-green crystals to apply to her flowers in our back
yard, where I hope to enjoy a Legal clambake sometime this
summer!
Allen F. Bortrum
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