My life in cranberry world

By Hal Brown

Updated Jan. 13, 2023

Betty and Hal and Stoyan harvesting berries

Cranberry Stressline 

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So, if you've been wondering about my connection to cranberries - besides having grown them for 25 years....

Introduction - How it all began.

My wife Betty and I had been living in Mason, a rural town in Michigan, since we were in graduate school.. Betty was working on her PhD in English and I was in the MSW  program at Michigan State. We both enjoyed out jobs until one thing led to another and our work was no longer fun. This is irrelevant to the story but it is why when Betty’s parents told us they were retiring and planning to sell their cranberry farm (or bogs as those in the industry call cranberry farms) we were ready to make a huge life change.

We decided to move to Massachusetts and buy the bogs along with her three cousins who bought them from their father, Betty;s father’s brother who was half owner.

Betty only knew about how to grow cranberries from being on the bogs all the time when she was growing.up and from our visiting during harvest season. She was an incredibly quick learner with her father being an excellent teacher.

At the time there were only two women active in the political side of the cranberry industry. We’d become good friends with Paul, now diseased, and Linda Rinta who had bogs in the next town. Linda, who recent won this prestigious award) and Betty really hit it off and Linda became Betty’s mentor in the political side of the industry. 

Linda Pinto today

It was because of Linda that Betty ended up on the advisory council of Ocean Spray (about the co-op), the grower owned co-op we and most growers belonged to. 

She also was elected to be on the board of the Cape Cod Canberry Growers’ Association and the Plymouth County Conservation District.

This was all in addition to working as a full-time reference librarian at the local library. I had a small private practice.

Betty ran the bog and because I was mechanically inept we hired Tim DeMoranvile to be our bog manager and he ran the day-to-day operation.

 

Except for periodic conflicts with Betty’s cousins, only one of whom was himself a cranberry grower, over business decisions things wanting smoothly for several years. We had good yields and the price per barrel assured a tidy profit.

Then disaster hit. It was called a “bttter harvest” in a New York Times article which feature an inter view with Betty.

I am getting ahead of myself.

By the time newspaper reporters were traveling from New York City to interview Betty we saw a looming disaster. Ocean Spray was counting on white cranberry juice to increase demand significantly and directed their growers to plant more and more cranberry vines. New vines take three years to be ready to harvest. By the time they were ready white cranberry juice had failed to sell. Thus the supply far outweighed the demand and prices crashed. This forced many small and medium sized grower like us to have to sell our bogs to larger growers.

I am still ahead of myself.

Prior to this Ocean Spray was controlled by giant growers in Wisconsin where empty farm land had been converted to cranberry bogs. In the other cranberry growing state, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and Oregon most bogs had to conform to the land or large hills had to be excavated to make new bogs.

Many growers were like us and saw that Ocean Spray not only made a bad decision with white cranberry juice but was making numerous other bad management decisions. Betty and I decided to make a website and forum which we called Cranberry Stressline where we would expose these bad decisions and enable growers from all the regions who only knew each other form attending annual meetings to communicated with each other.

In those days there was no Google but because Betty has a Lexus-Nexus account though the university where she taught a library course we had access to information not readily available.

We found many instances where management was wasting money, our money, and exposed this.

The end result, attributed to a large degree to Cranberry Stressline’s expose and the communication it fostered, the CEO, Robert Hawthorne, was fired and the entire Ocean Spray Board of Directors was replaced.

The rest of the story

Even before the cranberry industry collapsed and began making the news, my late wife Betty had been selected by Ocean Spray as a spokeswoman. She had a two page profile in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine (a full page picture below no less), and did a segment for the Sunday Today Show and another for New England Chronicle and Rebecca's Garden (which you can view on the blog). In fact the later TV piece was still being aired around Thanksgiving eight years later. 

Boston Globe Sunday Magazine profile

Click to enlarge to read text

At first I did an us-and-the-media webpage just to send to our friends and family.  

I kept it up, neglecting to link to a few articles here and there when I lost interest from time to time, mainly to document for myself our weird life here, so different from the decades we spent in Michigan where I was a psychotherapist and Betty was a librarian.

Nothing much happened between November of 1996 and April of 1999 in the cranberry industry.  But then one thing led to another little world of Ocean Spray and cranberries, cranberry prices crashed, and it became apparent that Ocean Spray's mismanagement  had been largely responsible for this. Before I knew what hit, Cranberry Stressline went from being about plain old farm stress, to being political and controversial. First the website was covered in the local media, then the reporters started calling from around the country, including the New York Times and Forbes.   Both sent reporters to interview us.

Along with a long article, Betty was pictured on the front page of the Sunday business section of the New York Times with the Ocean Spray CEO.

Click above to read, subscription required

Excerpts:

The long article begins:

Cranberries have been good to Betty Brown's family for generations. Her grandfather staked out cranberry bogs here on the sandy shoulder of Cape Cod in the 1930's, and now Mrs. Brown and three of her cousins farm the land they are in the process of buying from their parents.

And the family has been good to Ocean Spray, the 69-year-old company that dominates the cranberry business and sold about $1.4 billion of cranberry drinks and other products last year. Mrs. Brown even had her photograph featured in last year's Ocean Spray annual report.

But lately the relationship has soured, and Mrs. Brown has become one of the company's most vocal critics.

''One of the hardest things we had to do was look the two dads in the eye and say, we can't pay you this year,'' she said.

They cannot pay because Ocean Spray, besieged by crises ranging from an oversupply of cranberries to increased competition to some costly marketing mistakes, has sharply cut the price it pays farmers for the fruit. The situation has become so dire that management has commissioned a total review of its operations, hiring Bain & Company and Merrill Lynch & Company as its consultants.

Is it a dream I asked? Pinch me. Is it real? Are we really farmers that created something called by the shorthand "Stressline" that just about everybody involved in the entire beverage industry knew about and read?  Connie Hayes, the New York Times reporter who wrote the above article which appeared with Betty's photo on the front page of the Sunday business section came to visit us. 

I was shocked to learn in writing this that she died at the age of 44 in 2005. She was the author of "The Real Thing: Truth and Power at the Coca-Cola Company".Read NYT story (subscription).

Another reporter, I forget her name, came to interview us for an article in Forbes. The Boston Globe photographer spent the better part of a day in our backyard bog taking a photo of Betty sitting on a wooden cranberry crate.

Of necessity, to promote our cause, we became Shameless Media Hogs.

Betty has passed away on Jan. 11, 2011.

-----

Not all of these links are active, but many still will show you how we became "Shameless Media Hogs" when it came to being spokespersons for the small to mid-sized cranberry growers, members of the Ocean Spray co-op, during a battle-royale within Ocean Spray. LINK

P.S. We, meaning a large group of small and medium size grower-members, of the Ocean Spray Co-Op won. The giant growers, most from Wisconsin, were stripped of the power they'd have for many years. The CEO was fired and the entire Board of Directors was replaced.

Below: Cranberry bog photos, click to enlarge:

Tim DeMoranville our bog foreman

Our vintage picking rig which we replaced soon after buying the bogs.

Tim DeMoranville

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The GOP has gone beyond The Outer Limits

GOP has gone beyond The Outer Limits

By Hal Brown

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The series "The Outer Limits" was never as popular as "The Twilight Zone" but I still rarely missed an episode of either of them when I was a kid. Both could have been used in the title for this blog. I went with The Outer Limits because I found an image I liked.

No extremist has beliefs too far removed from reality or too fascist to be embraced by the Republican Party as long as its adherents can be counted on to vote for their candidates.

The GOP welcome mat has been rolled out for adherents of QAnon, which is based on the premises that "an international cabal of Satanic pedophiles extract and consume a mysterious substance found in the bodies of trafficked children. They think well-connected devil-worshippers also control the United Nations, the global economy, and even the Oscars"  (Salon).

GOP members of Congress have refused to roundly and soundly condemned the NAZISM espoused by the likes of Ye and Fuentes. "Oh sure it's bad but - wink, wink - it's not really all that bad."

Between these two we have all the Republican politicians who have embraced the Big Lie. If they believe it they are delusional, gullible, and/or stupid as these three are not mutually exclusive, or they are craven, power hungry, and/or unethical as these three aren't mutually exclusive either.

The Republicans who are savvy enough to understand the inevitable demographic shifts in the United States realize this is their last chance to turn the country into a white supremacist fascist autocracy at the ballot box.

Their solution to this has been, and continues to be, to try to destroy fair elections.

Another way to look at the Republican Party as it is today is to compare it to the Democratic Party and consider which is the "big tent" party which embraces true democratic principles. Consider: 

Wikipedia defines big tent party as a term used in reference to a political party's policy of permitting or encouraging a broad spectrum of views among its members. This is in contrast to other kinds of parties, which defend a determined ideology, seek voters who adhere to that ideology, and attempt to convince people towards it.

This is how they describe how the term has been used in the United States. Consider especially the part which I highlighted below:

The Democratic Party, during the New Deal coalition, which was formed to support President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies from 1930s to the 1960s, was a "big-tent" party. The coalition brought together labor unions, working-class voters, farm organizations, liberals, Southern Democrats, African Americans, urban voters, and immigrants.

The Blue Dog Coalition is a big-tent caucus of centrist and conservative Democrats in the House of Representatives, some of whom are socially conservative and fiscally and economically progressive or vice versa. For a brief period after the 2006 and the 2008 elections, when Democrats held a majority in the House, the Coalition wielded increased influence over the party, but its power declined again after most of its members were defeated or retired in the 2010 elections. Its Republican counterpart is the Republican Main Street Partnership.

To counter the New Deal coalition, the Republican Party was for much of its history a "big tent" party that encompassed a wide range of right-wing and center-right causes, including a wide range of politicians who were fiscally conservative and socially moderate or liberal and vice versa. During the 1970s and the 1980s, the Republicans attracted support from wealthy suburban voters in the South and Midwest, Northeastern moderates, Western libertarians, and rural conservatives across the country. From 1968 to 1988, Republicans won five out of six presidential elections, with the only exception being a narrow loss to the Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976. The culture wars of the 1990s and the growing influence of the Christian right within the party have prompted the socially moderate and liberal sections of the Republican base, particularly in the Northeast and the Midwest, to begin slowly leaving the party in favor of moderate Democrats or independents.

What began in the 1990's as a slope which became more and more slippery as time passed became a precipice with the election of Donald Trump and more and more extremist Republicans. The moderate Republicans who remained in Congress now find themselves at the mercy of the extremists for their political survival.

The party became toxic to legislators like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger who maintained their ethical compass.

Many if not most of the episodes of "The Outer Limits" and "The Twilight Zone" were morality tales which ended with a lesson. Two classic Twilight Zone episodes come to mind. One is "The Obsolete Man" with Burgess Meredith as the librarian who survives the end of the word but realizes he still have his books to read, and then steps on an breaks his glasses. The other is "People Are Alike All Over" where an astronaut lands on Mars and is greeted by friendly seeming aliens and ends up in a closed room. Then the wall on one side goes up and he sees he's in a cage in a zoo being gawked at by a crowd of Martians looking at an Earth creature. The last lines are: 

Specie [sic] of animal brought back alive. Interesting similarity in physical characteristics to human beings in head, trunk, arms, legs, hands, feet. Very tiny undeveloped brain. Comes from primitive planet named Earth. Calls himself Samuel Conrad. And he will remain here in his cage with the running water and the electricity and the central heat as long as he lives. Samuel Conrad has found The Twilight Zone.

Among these 10 episodes of "The Outer Limits" you will also find many which were morality tales, for example "The Galaxy Being" which warns about man's hubris. 

Tales told by two idiots full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

Tales told by two idiots full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

By Hal Brown 

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DonkeyHotey, background from InPixio

One of the two specimens shown above in the DonkeyHotey caricatures was a threat to American democracy. Hopefully we will soon know how close he came to turning our country to a fascist dictatorship and whether justice will prevail so he pays a price for this.

With Trump, putting him in  certain perspective, he's a tragic comic figure. He's a pure idiot who stumbled into a position of power by malignant guile and grift which was enabled by the gullibility and fears of his base. Add luck to that and we have the spectacle of a grandiose narcissist that began his presidential campaign riding down a golden escalator being cheered on by people who were paid to be there and who survived the "I could grab them by the pussy" incident. 

All this could have been the subject of the exploits of comic strip character.

The other, who like Trump belongs on a petri dish in a CDC lab where highly contagious microbes are studied is Elon Mush (typo or Freudian slip) Musk. He's not a garden-variety idiot. Rather, he is a rare breed because he's an idiot savant with a reported 155 IQ. 

When it comes to having a human version of hoof-in-mouth disease (which can be fatal in animals) he's just as much of an idiot as Trump. Both have recently engaged in a self-defeating crime spree against themselves. Anyone reading this follows the news so I don't have to list what they been doing.

Giving credit to caricaturist DonkeyHotey, a name meant to be pronounced Don Quixote, for leading me to think of this comparison: both Musk and Trump remind me of the Cervantes character:

From Wikipedia:

In the course of their (Don Quixote and Sancho Panza) travels, the protagonists meet innkeepers, prostitutes, goat-herders, soldiers, priests, escaped convicts and scorned lovers. The aforementioned characters sometimes tell tales that incorporate events from the real world. Their encounters are magnified by Don Quixote's imagination into chivalrous quests. Don Quixote's tendency to intervene violently in matters irrelevant to himself, and his habit of not paying debts, result in privations, injuries, and humiliations (with Sancho often the victim).

Trump has had several "squires" (aka sycophants) who we could say have been akin in their loyalty to him Sancho Panza was to Don Quixote. Musk has none. The reason for this difference between the two of them is fodder for psychohistorians. 

I'd hazard a guess that Musk never mastered the ability to put aside his obnoxious authoritarianism with people working under him. Trump has the need to be worshiped up close and it appears that Musk only is comfortable wielding power without letting anyone get close to him. It may be possible to gain some insight into his personalities by analyzing his three marriages and why the first two ended in divorce. From YaHoo News:

Excerpt: His first marriage was to author Justine Wilson in 2000, ending in an acrimonious divorce in 2008. In an article for Marie Claire in 2010, she claimed: “Elon's judgement overruled mine, and he was constantly remarking on the ways he found me lacking.

"‘I am your wife,’ I told him repeatedly, ‘not your employee.’ ‘If you were my employee,’ he said just as often, ‘I would fire you.’”

From Cervantes to Shakespeare's Macbeth and the title the of my blog today. Here's the actual version of the altered quote in context:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

 I can't envision Trump or Musk uttering something like this on their deathbeds. They are both as shallow as the puddle left on the street after a light summer drizzle which will fast evaporate when the hot sun comes out. 

Deep people, those we consider to be self-aware and introspective, live their lives informed by knowing they are mortal. They consider that when they die their legacy will be the good that they have done for their children and for those who were in a position to do so, for society.

Addendum:

This excerpt is relevant to today's blog:

Donald Trump may be very wealthy, but he's rapidly turning into a sad and pathetic figure. According to this report in the Washington Post, the former president tends to wander aimlessly around Mar-a-Lago, bored and lethargic, depending on his attendants to call around to allies to ask them to deliver "affirmations" and cheer him up. One former adviser characterized his new life as sad, saying he wanted to replicate the grandeur of the White House but it's more like "a Barbie Dream House miniature." Ouch.

This is not a picture of someone gearing up for an arduous presidential campaign. It's a picture of an old man trying to grapple with the fact that he's retired and doesn't have much of a purpose anymore.