Poultry baron and prominent Texas political donor
The Washington Post
Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim, a Texas farmhand who built a feed-and-seed store into one of the world’s largest poultry producers while also becoming one of his state’s most colorful political donors — at one point handing $10,000 checks to legislators on the floor of the state Senate — died July 21 at his home in the East Texas town of Pittsburg. He was 89.
The Erman Smith Funeral Home in Pittsburg, Texas, announced his death but did not disclose the cause.
Mr. Pilgrim led Pilgrim’s Pride for four decades, using quirky marketing and taking on significant debt to grow the business from a small-town outfit to an international powerhouse that supplied fast-food chains such as KFC and Wendy’s. Under his leadership as chief executive and chairman, the company went head to head with Conagra Brands, Perdue and Tyson before surpassing them all in late 2006.
It was an unlikely ascent for a man who was born on the cusp of the Great Depression and came of age without electricity or running water. But for Mr. Pilgrim, a Baptist who stocked his private planes with Bibles and built a 75-foot structure called the Prayer Tower in central Pittsburg, it was a holy mission that traced its roots to the book of Genesis.
Chickens, he said, were part of the biblical “fowl of the air,” created by God “to sustain man.” To that end, he spent most of his life ensuring that man was fed.
His company acquired national recognition in 1984, when — inspired by a food trend in Japan — he marketed America’s first whole boneless chicken. By some accounts, it was Mr. Pilgrim who perfected the knifework that enabled the bones to be cleanly removed from the carcass. His public-relations chief described the result as “flat and ugly — it looked like a truck had run over it,” but the item became a hit after Mr. Pilgrim started hawking it on television.
“It’s a mind-boggling thing,” he said in one commercial, holding a beloved stuffed chicken named Henrietta and wearing a pilgrim’s hat. Presenting his boneless creation, he said, “I’d put it right up there with marriage and my first bicycle.”
Mr. Pilgrim went on to become the rare celebrity in the world of chickens, eggs and industrial slaughterhouses. His silhouette was featured in the Pilgrim’s logo for many years, and both the hat and the man became regular fixtures in Pittsburg, a town that Mr. Pilgrim and his company helped transform from a small cotton community into a kind of chicken mecca — or poultry hell, depending on one’s species.
“Bo’s town,” as it is sometimes known, was once home to a coffee shop that sold its wares from inside a building shaped like Pilgrim’s hat. A towering 40foot bust of Mr. Pilgrim stands near a company distribution center, and on a hill south of a town is a 20,000-square-foot mansion that Mr. Pilgrim called Chateau de Pilgrim, or “my wife’s house.” Some residents preferred the name Cluckingham Palace.
In Pittsburg and Mount Pleasant, a larger community to the north, some residents also filed environmental complaints against Pilgrim’s Pride. In a predominantly African American neighborhood near the company’s mill in Mount Pleasant, chicken fat was said to flow “like thick, foul-smelling soup down the gutters,” the magazine Texas Monthly reported in 1994.
Mr. Pilgrim dismissed the dozens of complaints that were filed with the state environmental agency, saying that all large food companies “from time to time have fines.”
He maintained generally cordial relations with Texas politicians. In part, it was the result of generous donations to Republican causes and candidates, including then-Govs. George W. Bush and Rick Perry.
Mr. Pilgrim “was an outsized voice for the business community in Texas,” said Ross Ramsey, executive editor of the Texas Tribune.