Fun facts about my grandfather, Sherwood Mortley Pinkerton, Jr.
(Source: a newly discovered journal written by my mother.)
He was happily married and came home for lunch everyday, and so did the daughters from school.
He had a photographic memory and called all of his employees by their first names, 400 at one time.
He maintained a quarter-acre terraced garden with rock garden, arbor with sweet peas, and goldfish pool, formal rose garden with shaped boxwood hedges around each bed and a privet hedge around the outside of garden, with hibiscus in front of sunroom and stone bench on other side – 400 roses including rose garden and upper-terrace plantings. He crossed day-lilies and developed one that he named Helen, after my grandmother.
His grandfather, after the Civil War, had a grocery store and he got the idea of making chewing tobacco using clippings from a nearby cigar store. He began the Pinkerton Tobacco Company (and not Abner. Abner was one of the brothers involved in the grocery store, only.)
Kellogg’s “Pep” was a cereal in the 1930’s and 40’s, and Sherwood had chewing tobacco named Pep, so the Kellogg’s people wrote him and asked him to drop his Pep name from his tobacco. So he looked up the patent records and discovered that his patent preceded the Kellogg’s one, so he wrote them and told them to drop it.
Invented a humidor that could keep tobacco fresh — didn’t go.
Invented a rose food called Treet and sold it for 20 years.
His daughter Julia at age 11 wanted to do something naughty so she acquired a pack of Kool cigarettes, tried one and left the pack on windowsill between the house and the porch. When Sherwood looked out to check the thermometer on the porch, he noticed the Kools and asked, “Whose cigarettes are these?” Julia answered, “They’re mine, Daddy.” “Well don’t leave them on a windowsill where they will dry out.” She quit smoking them after this because her escapade did not make the impression she expected.
Sherwood ran the company as Vice President by himself when his Uncle Orr Bovard was President because he spent every winter in Florida.
He was always ready to help his daughters with homework, he took vitamins, he was happy and fulfilled, his employees loved him, he was an amateur weatherman and could tell you what the weather would be, he was not a materialist, and he drove a little maroon Ford for years, until Helen made him buy a new one.