PJ Ritter Company - pt2 Prosperity on the Cohansey River

Welcome back to the Bridgton Beacon as we join Meg McCormick Horner, Bob McCormick, and P.J. Ritter III as they continue their walkthrough of the P.J. Ritter Company location on the banks of the Cohansee River in Bridgton, New Jersey. You talk about the hundred Ritter workers who served in World War II, and I think three didn't make it home. When I was here, they were all World War II veterans, these folks, and the women too.

Like Hannah Penfield operated all types of volunteer things through the hospital. She was in personnel. You know, the United States, it was the war effort, the whole country.

It's just like you see in the movies about the time there. Everyone put their shoulder to it and worked together. And the families here, the Wolberts, the Lettas, but I want to talk about two brothers, Frank and Mike Bertolini.

They were a bit like me. You know, a young guy works at a place as a summer employee. He's just one of those summer kids.

Get out of my way, kid, you know. Get out of college, you've got a piece of paper. You know nothing, basically.

But you learn everything on the job. And I was tasked one time with down just this way where Mike was foreman. Product was coming out.

He's making sure everything's done correctly. He always wore white, white outfits and a white hat. And I was told to get numbers from him.

And I thought Mike Bertolini would holler at Mr. Funky if he came down and interrupted him at his work, let alone me, who two days ago was graduating from college. You had to earn their respect. And so I thought and Mike always had a red face.

I mean, he was a face. He was a corporal in the Marines in the South Pacific, fought in the big battles. So I went up to him and I said, Mike, when you got a minute, will you talk to me? And he just looked.

I said, I'll be around. I'll watch for when you're free. Then he was free and I went up to him and I said, Mike, I'm just a kid.

I know nothing. You fought in the war. You've had all this experience here and I'm not going to be able to ever succeed in this job unless you help me.

He just from that minute on, we became close friends and we stayed close friends until he died in his 90s. I would write letters to him. He'd write back.

He was a distance runner into his very old age. But developing that friendship meant a lot. And his brother, Frank, he was a calmer soul than Mike.

He didn't have a red face. One time, though, I got into it with a foreman down along the river who really they weren't doing it. They weren't getting it done.

And it was going to slow everything down. And I said, what are you doing? You're never going to we're never going to get this done. You got to get it done.

And then, you know, I always feel badly and I lose my temper because I never really do. And and then Frank took me aside. He said, Bob, you were right, but he's older than you.

And you you run him down in front of his workers, and that's not right. God, I knew it. And I knew it in my heart.

And I I went back and I apologized to him in front of everybody and said, look, I'm very tired today and I lost my temper because you're really a good person. And, you know, and it all worked out well. So they're the kind of things you can get from people like that.

And I've learned that my entire life. But like I said, every name you list in your story, I see their faces. And it was a great affection and fondness that I think about them and how much they meant to me in my life.

And then I was here until I was 25. And you might call them the beginning of dark days for the company and for the city, because the Curtis Burns management was not. First of all, they really weren't very good.

I've come to learn that as I age through life and see what good management is. And they made some very bad decisions which adversely affected me. They affected the finances of the company and it was a domino effect, one thing or another.

Certainly federal regulations, et cetera. The federal government saying you can't let all that odor from the ketchup go into the town. The one thing everybody always remembers is the wonderful smell of ketchup.

And that was from the spices. Yeah, it was great. And it was great.

And my wife Jane doesn't like ketchup to this day because I was here all the time. I mean, you know, when you're in season, you're working day and night. And she just resented the fact that here we are newly married and I'm at the plant all the time.

So she took ketchup personally. But I tell you, I and not many people here knew it. Earl knew.

We were talking and I was talking to my friends, the ones who were supervisors in the lab, and they're all gone now. I mean, everybody I'm talking about has passed away. They took me aside and I said, you know, I got a letter from Rochester to come there and work.

And I'd fly around doing whatever I had to do, different companies. And I had been up there thanks to Earl. He arranged for me and they were having young people from their various management training programs come up and address the board of directors.

Well, Mr. Garing, who is the vice president of finance, senior vice president of finance, come and talk to me about what you're going to say. And we went over it. I pretty much nailed it.

He gave me some good advice. I took Jane up. Earl said, you take Janie up.

There's old farmers on that board are going to see her, this beautiful young girl. She's our secret weapon, Bob. So anyway, we went up.

It was a wonderful trip. Flew up on an airline owned by the corporation somewhere along the line, Agway, whomever. And it was a good experience.

And it must have worked is that then I got a letter from Moore Adams, who was at the time running the show. And so I told a couple of my friends and they said, Bob, if you go up there and you, your mom was pregnant with you. Now, you were just born.

If you go up there, your daughter is going to grow up and never know you. We guarantee you will never be home. You will be on the road all the time or in the office on every weekend.

And you should really consider that. And that concerned me a great deal. So I talked to Jane about it.

She said, well, what would you do? I said, well, you know, I was a substitute teacher my junior year and it was really great fun. I love doing it. I always took the toughest classes.

Just because they were fun. I'd walk in and say, oh, my God, not you guys again. Why didn't I study? I can have a real job instead of having to put up with you clowns every day.

And the kids love that, you know. And so I applied. And as it turned out, the superintendent secretary was the person who handled all the files.

She was like the HR department. And I hadn't known that before. She was my lady because she called all the subs and I never turned her down, even when it was a tough class.

And I remember getting a call here. I was in production. Robert, we have an opening.

Would you come in for an interview? And I did. I got the job. I started teaching seventh grade language arts, which was a far cry from anything I'd ever done.

But we could all do that, unless, as long as we can relate to the kids. So I left. And that was that.

Before we get to the closure, I just want to talk for a couple minutes about diversification. And you touched upon it, Paul. Obviously, Ritter's was known for its cats up.

But there was a lot of diversification, as was seen in the food products. In fact, this was just found, what, a couple days ago, condensed vegetable soup. So I guess my question is, there was, I think it was 1959.

Was there a merger with Brooks? Yeah, to try to diversify the geographic distribution, Ritter's and Brooks merged, which would give them Midwestern markets. Brooks was famous. They had the largest tomato bottle of cats.

It was a giant water tower shaped like a bottle of ketchup. So diversification, these are all lessons that the Ritter company has taught us. Do you agree? One famous story was during the winter time, when there wasn't tomato production, they diversified into dog food.

And they said the... Thrivo. Thrivo. And the requirements for the dog food were stricter than for the people food.

Well, you know, as I read the history, prior to this location and the focus on the cats up, your great-great-grandfather had a bakery, confectionery, ice company. They actually manufactured ice cream for a time. And also jams and jellies were their specialty in the late 1800s, before they got into the tomato business.

It was a decision when they located the brush and the concentrated tomatoes and to not do the jellies and jams that they were doing in the 1800s. Focus on what was the most productive and profitable, but also not be afraid to expand into other lines. Is that right? Exactly.

And actually, hearing Bob speak, you can see the biggest overall overarching thing about the corporate culture at Ritter's was the family atmosphere, where everybody had each other's back and everybody worked as a team and everybody cared and looked out for everybody, whether it was management or staff. And we even had a mother that worked here, I think her name was Daisy Charlton, and she had, I think, five sons that worked here. And all five were in the military during World War II.

Well, that has to start from management. So do you want to take a walk over to the offices? Sure. Let's check it out.

All right. Sounds good. One thing I'd like to add, while we're still in the plane, Eddie Barber, who is with the company now, the carpenter company that owns this facility, was in my first class that I taught when I left here.

He was a seventh grader in 1970, 71. And he was a good kid. And if Eddie's son's listening to it, he was a pistol, too.

Just to take you back in time, right now we're standing on the weigh station, the scales that a lot of trucks passed over fully loaded with baskets of tomatoes. Area farmers would truck the tomatoes in 24-7 while the plant was operating. I think people that grew up in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s remember the lines of trucks.

The trucks would start here at the plant and go all the way out into Broad Street, past the courthouse, all the way out to Hopewell Township, where Sunny Slope Farms was. Also, next door to us was the Hunt's Ketchup Factory. So sometimes if the machinery broke down in one factory, the trucks would be redirected to the competitor next door, because the tomatoes wouldn't last long.

They had to be processed, because they were picked ripe right off the vine. And many a farmer would tell the story of waiting in line for literally hours to be able to unload the tomatoes. Some of the local kids would pick some of them off the street that fell out of the trucks and have tomato fights while the trucks sat there waiting to unload.

And like I said, the plant ran 24-7. They had to get the produce processed while they could so it didn't spoil. So this was a hub of activity.

And this yard was full of, in the early days, it was horse and wagons with baskets of tomatoes. Later, it was trucks stacked up 111 baskets high. One time there was a particular case where one of the trucks came through Bridgeton and took out one of the stoplights, because they had it stacked too high.

And the farmer pulled in with the traffic light on top of his load and a Bridgeton police car closely following behind. Another time, one of the farmers decided to take a shortcut through the Bridgeton City Park and got wedged under the railroad trestle, because he had his load a little bit too high for that. But a lot of tomatoes passed over these scales over the decades.

It was a major contributor to the local agricultural economy. You know, we talked about Brooks, and your dad was in the management, the marketing side, everything with Brooks too. Great guy.

I had a 62 TR3 from my uncle, Roadster, British Racing Green. I bring it in here and weigh it on the scale. So if anybody wants to know, TR3s weigh 2,000 pounds.

There's a bit of trivia for you. And the grading platform was over there, where those white things are. The trucks would come in, and then the graders would take baskets off and inspect the tomatoes, make sure they weren't, you know, sticking something in there they shouldn't.

And then it would come over. And then along the way, they'd be dumped in these water troughs and brought up onto these long roller tables, stacked by nice ladies who would inspect them. And I would go out there lots of times with them.

Bill Batten, one of the foremen, he was a slick character, Bill Batten was. He and his brother Bob were both foremen. I want to ask you a question.

I've heard a lot about the tower. Where was the Ritter Tower? Right there. Right behind us? Yeah, in the air.

But it was up in the air. Yeah. Okay, let's go take a look at the offices.

Yeah. One of the innovations was, as the growing season came to a close, a lot of the farmers had a number of tomatoes that hadn't ripened yet, the green tomatoes. So the idea came about for the green tomato relish, which was another popular product, was to use those green tomatoes and put them to good use.

So they got some recipes from the Amish for a green tomato relish. And that became one of their very popular products. And that reminds me, as we were talking earlier, everyone in town knows Big John's Pizza.

One day, this was my grandfather's office, and before that his brother Bill's office, up on the third floor of the brick office building at the plant complex. And it was from here that he operated the company for many years. Along with his brother before that.

It was dark red curtains, dark red carpet. And Mr. Ritter would sit at his huge desk, cigar often, and a bright banker's light shining down on his paperwork, no other real lighting. It just always impressed me how he was so... That was it.

He was focused on that. You almost didn't want to interrupt him because it looked so, you know... Then all the other executive offices were down that way. And down these railroad tracks, the Central Railroad of New Jersey would bring boxcars in to deliver product throughout the country, especially east of the Mississippi.

And also, tank cars of corn syrup would come in to be used as a sweetener in the ketchup process. So a lot of boxcars took a lot of product down these rails all over the East Coast. More than one night, we'd be here till one or two in the morning, getting those pumps working that might have frozen up to get the syrup out.

Otherwise, you couldn't run the shift. That's true. Yeah, there are a lot of things that go on.

It's like owning an old house. There's always something to do. Absolutely.

Just make it happen. Probably the biggest takeaway of the P.J. Ritter Company is what was said earlier. That a company isn't the brick and the structure, the buildings, or even the products.

A company is the people. And as you've heard from Bob before, it was a very caring company, a family-oriented company, a company that strived on teamwork. It was also a very important part of the local economy because a company like Ritter's, Owens, Illinois, and Hunt's, and some of the other companies, there was a synergy where the silica sand that was mined down in the lower townships of Cumberland County was brought up and forged into glass bottles and containers at Owens.

Produce was produced by the local farmers and trucked in and Ritter's processed it and put it those glass containers. And then those products were shipped out all over the East Coast by Lobiondo Trucking, by the Central Railroad in New Jersey. So you can see all the various facets of the economy.

And then Bridgton is famous. It's named Bridgton for a reason with the Kansee River flowing through it. That Kansee River was a source of the produce coming in from Delaware and Maryland on boats, the tomatoes to be processed.

Some of the product was sent out by boat. And it all worked together back then for many, many decades. And although Ritter's is no longer around, hopefully that same spirit exists and goes forward with some of the other companies that exist today in our area.

Well, I can attest to the fact, Paul, that you've brought these lessons that we talked about today, management, innovation, diversity, partnership into Cumberland Mutual. And we'll be talking again shortly when we do the 180th anniversary edition of Cumberland Mutual Fire Insurance Company. So I want to just end by thanking you, Paul, for taking the time to give us a tour here today.

And thank you, Dad, for sharing your stories that I know mean so much to you and so much to many of the people of the town. So thanks again. Thank you very much.

Harper, who showed us in and set things up. His son works for you. My daughter works for you.

Her grandfather worked for your relatives. It all goes on and on. It's all about family.