Lonnie ‘Bo’ Pilgrim, poultry baron and prominent Texas political donor, dies at 89
Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim, a Texas farmhand who built a feedand-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.
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 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 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 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.”
Pilgrim went on to become the rare celebrity in the world of chickens, eggs and industrial slaughterhouses. His silhouette was featured in Pilgrim’s logo for many years, and both the hat and the man became regular fixtures in Pittsburg, a town that 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 40-foot bust of Pilgrim stands near a company distribution center, and on a hill south of town is a 20,000-square-foot mansion that 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.
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. He made generous donations to Republican causes and candidates, including then-Govs. George W. Bush and Rick Perry.
Pilgrim “was an outsized voice for the business community in Texas,” said Ross Ramsey, executive editor of the Texas Tribune.
He brought unwanted attention in July 1989, strolling onto the Senate floor to hand personal checks to nine of the chamber’s 31 members while the body was debating a workers’ compensation bill that interested him. Most of the lawmakers returned the checks after Pilgrim’s actions — what he described as “contributions,” not bribes — were reported by the news media, and the incident led to a tightening of the state’s campaign finance rules.
Pilgrim was born May 8, 1928, in the 55-person town of Pine, six miles south of Pittsburg. His father ran a general store and died when Pilgrim was about 10. When his mother remarried, Pilgrim — one of nine children — moved in with his grandmother. With nine pigs and a few hundred pounds of grain to his name, he supported himself by finding work as a farmhand, gravel-hauler, cotton-picker and grocery sacker.
His brother Aubrey Pilgrim bought a feed store in 1946, and Pilgrim joined him after graduating from high school. He took over in 1966, after Aubrey died of a heart attack.
The company embarked on major acquisitions, culminating in the 2006 purchase of Gold Kist for $1.1 billion, but was eventually crippled by debt and high corn prices. It filed for bankruptcy in 2008, and Pilgrim — by then a board member — remained to help reorganize the company. He retired two years later.
The business is now controlled by JBS USA, and claims to be the world’s second-largest poultry producer, processing 10 billion pounds of live chickens each year.