Mikes father owned M.L. Davies Company. They were wholesalers of fruits and vegetables and operated out of Seattle’s Commission Row. This area was also referred to as “the street’ or “produce row’. The companies were lined up in a series of brick buildings along Western Avenue. M.L Davies Company was located in a two story building at 1111 Western Avenue. The building was built in the late 1890’s and had housed at different times The Alaska Junk Company and an ice company.
The second story was located at the street level at Western Avenue. Every morning four huge doors would roll up and the street became a market place for fresh fruits and vegetables. The street would come alive at 5:00 am with all of the workers moving produce and freight in and out of the warehouses. From the basement level, facing Alaskan Way, was the back loading dock. The back dock also had a rail spur that served the Seattle waterfront. At this back dock the long haul trucks would come to unload their cargo. Rail cars laden with potatoes and onions would be spotted at the siding and here the men would unload the boxcars. The potatoes and onions were stored in the basement along with dry goods and consignment merchandise bound for export markets and Alaska. The main level was a high ceiling barn style warehouse. There were coolers and heated rooms for bananas and tomatoes. The offices were built in lofts above the main warehouse floor. There were also lofts built for storage which were sub leased to various produce dealers and peddlers operating on produce row.
At lunchtime the warehouses came alive with sound of the ping pong ball bouncing back and forth. Myron would spend his lunch hours socializing and playing ping pong. Ping pong tables were a fixture in most of the wharf buildings along the waterfront as well as the warehouses of commission row along Western Avenue. In these lunchtime games the playing field was leveled. Every man had a chance to compete against other men, regardless of his wealth or social stature, for a chance to win at a game. Myron would occasionally enjoy lunchtime libations at the Washington Commission Company. One day he had drinks and shared a heated game of table tennis with a young union organizer. His opponent was a twenty five year old from Detroit, Michigan named Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa was in town to work on his goal of organizing a nationwide union of truck drivers.
In another lunchtime ping pong match Myron made an acquaintance that would lead to a business deal that would forever shape the future of his life. It was in a warehouse located at 1013 Western Avenue that Myron first met a man named F.C Bloxom in 1938. Bloxom was a principle in the firm Crenshaw and Bloxom. They were a produce dealer that specialized in bananas and tropical fruit. They also worked deals in the potato and onions business. Crenshaw and Bloxom was a well-seasoned firm by the time Myron met the two principals in 1938.
In 1915 W.W. Crenshaw was operating a fruit stall in the Corner Market building at First Avenue and Pike Place. He specialized in tropical fruits and imported his goods from all over the world. He was one of the first dealers in Seattle to be granted a license to sell bananas under the Chiquita label. This license had been granted to him by the United Fruit Company. United would eventually grow to become one of the most notorious multinational corporations to ever operate in the western hemisphere.
United Fruit Company was formed in 1899 as the result of a merger between Minor C Keith’s banana trading concerns with Andrew Preston’s Boston Fruit Company. The company prospered and expanded in the early to mid-twentieth century. At its zenith it came to control vast territories and transportation networks in Central America, the Caribbean, the coast of Columbia, Ecuador and the West Indies. It maintained a virtual monopoly in the banana trade of certain countries, some of which came to be called banana republics, such as Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala.
In 1901, the government of Guatemala hired the United Fruit Company to run the country’s postal service and in 1913 the company created the Tropical Radio and Telegraph Company. By the 1930’s the company had absorbed over twenty rival firms and had amassed capital of $215,000,000 thus becoming the largest employer in Central America. United Fruit also owned 3.5 million acres of land Central America and the Caribbean and was the single largest land holder in Guatemala. These vast holdings gave it tremendous power over the governments of these small countries. This was one of the factors that led to the coining of the phrase “banana republics”.
The United Fruit Company spent most of the century facing accusations of bribing government officials in the countries in which it operated. These bribes gave the company an advantage in exploiting workers, paying little in taxes in these countries, and helped the company to consolidate its monopolies. When the tide of communism began to rise the company used its power and influence to silence the efforts of communist radicals. Back home in the States the company had some of the most famous anti-communist Americans on its side.
The integrity of John Foster Dulles anti-communist motives have been discredited, due to his ties to the company. Dulles represented United Fruit while he was a law partner at Sullivan and Cromwell in the 1930’s. He went on to become secretary of state under President Eisenhower; his brother Allen, who did legal work for the company and sat on its board of directors was the head of the CIA under Eisenhower. Henry Cabot Lodge, who was the ambassador to the United Nations, was a large shareholder in United Fruit. Ed Whitman, the head of public relations for United Fruit was married to Ann Whitman, Eisenhower’s personal secretary. The company was able to fight off most communist uprisings and efforts by Leninist organizers during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Eventually the company went in to decline and was bleeding financially by the end of the 1960’s.
Corporate raider Eli M Black bought 733,000 shares of United Fruit in 1968, becoming the company’s largest shareholder. In June of 1970 the company merged with Black’s own public company, AMK. AMK was the owner of John Morrell, the meat packing company. This new company was named United Brands. United Brands was poorly managed by Black and thus became crippled with debt. The company’s losses were further exacerbated by the devastation of hurricane Fifi in 1974, which inflicted massive damage on the banana plantations of Honduras. On February 3, 1975, Black committed suicide by jumping out of his office on the 44 th floor of the Pan Am Building in New York City. The commuters hustling to catch a train at Grand Central Terminal, as well the patrons of the Yale Club, were shocked on that winter day when the body of Black made an eerie thud as he landed on the concrete of Park Avenue.
Later that year the Securities and Exchange Commission exposed a scheme by United Brands to bribe Honduran president Oswaldo Lopez Arellano with $1.25 million, plus a promise of another $1.25 million upon the reduction of certain export taxes. Trading in United Brands stock was halted in the wake of what was referred to as “bananagate”. On April 22, 1975 Lopez was ousted in a military coup led by his fellow General Juan Alberto Melgar, in the 1975 Honduran coup d’état.
By 1915 W.W. Crenshaw had experienced exploding growth in his banana import business. In Seattle a housewife named Ada Davies had started adding slices of these tropical delights to the breakfast cereal she served her children in the morning. Corn flakes had been developed by John Harvey Kellogg in 1894 as a food he thought would be healthy for his patients at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan where he was superintendent. Kellogg’s Corn Flakes were a favorite of the Davies children. The added feature of sliced bananas made the breakfast experience even more enjoyable for the children. Myron, Eleanor, and Trevor enjoyed their breakfast, each oblivious to the fact that United Fruit was ravaging the ecosystems, governments, and way of life in the steamy jungles in a far away land. No one at that breakfast table suspected that Myron would soon become a banana baron and thus become one of the produce barons of Seattle’s produce row.
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