Posts Tagged "Anthony Rossi"
Villa Am Meer, Chapter 12
To Elena, a tribute
New here? Start with Chapter 1…
This story about my vintage beach house on Longboat Key has taken all kinds of twists and turns since I began writing it back in March. I certainly have enjoyed the journey, and it came at a time when I really needed to start writing again. For that I am truly grateful.
I’ve learned a lot about an era I knew very little about, and I’ve begun to piece together the story of a family both blessed and cursed with wealth. At the center of it all, I’ve come to know and respect a woman by the name of Elena Duke Benedict. I never knew her, and I don’t even know what she looks like, but her life story has captivated me these past several months, and I wanted a chance to share what little I’ve been able to piece together from research and emails.
Her friends and family called her Nell. She was born in Harrison, New York on September 11, 1917. If you didn’t catch that, she was born on September 11th. I had to pause a moment when I first discovered this and wonder where she had been on her birthday in 2001, when the New York City she had known since childhood became a different New York City… a different city in a different world.
Elena was the daughter of Italian immigrants, Romeo and Maria Stella Amaducci. Romeo was the first to arrive in 1909. He was 22 years old at the time. Maria came later, in 1913, at age 21. They were married one year later, when Romeo was 27 and Maria was 22.
9200 Gainsborg Ave, East White Plains, NY
View a photo and street map of the house on Google Maps
So, perhaps it comes as no surprise that soon after, Elena went to live with the childless and wealthy German Kohls. Romeo was already working for them as a gardener, and the story goes that the Kohls fell in love with Elena and asked to take her in as their legal ward. I venture a guess that they could see Elena was brilliant, but knew that without their intervention, she would never be given the opportunity to attend college. In return, the Kohls promised the Amaduccis their family would always be taken care of, including a college education for all the children.
Keep in mind, this is the era of the Great Depression. It began with the stock market crash of 1929 and continued all through the 1930s. One might wonder why Romeo and Maria Amaducci would have willingly turned over their daughter to live with a foreign German couple, but given the circumstances, it seems understandable. They were being given an incredible opportunity to give their daughter an education and a life they would never be able to afford. I just wonder what Elena thought of the arrangement. Was she scared? Excited? Probably both.
Because Hermann Kohl was standing trial on national bootlegging charges in Chicago in 1931, I assume Elena went to live with them sometime around 1932-1933. She would have been 16-17 at the time. I’m still not sure if Kohl was ever convicted/imprisoned, but if he was, it wasn’t for long. By April of 1933, Hermann Kohl was sailing aboard the S.S. Europa, bound for NYC after visiting Bremen, Germany. By July of the same year, he had purchased a tract of thirteen acres fronting the Bronx River Parkway extension near Peekskill. And by December 5, 1933, Prohibition was repealed forever, and any wrongdoing on Kohl’s part was probably just water under the bridge.
Elena went on to college at Columbia University in New York City, then graduated valedictorian of her class at the Swedish Institute of Physiotherapy in Manhattan. Clearly, she was one smart cookie. Her younger brother, Louis, also attended Columbia University, graduating with a bachelor of science degree in Mining Engineering. He would go on to work for Hermann Kohl at Norda, Inc., eventually becoming President of the company. Their oldest sister, Ann, also worked as Elena’s personal assistant for many years.
Living with the Kohls meant high society and haute couture. In 1937, the New York Times published a report from the U.S. Ways and Means Committee which released for publication the incomes of every person who made more than $15,000 in 1935. To be clear, that means everyone in the entire country, not just New York City. William Randolph Hearst topped the list at $500,000. Mae West was next at $480,833. Other movie stars and film executives followed close behind.
And next on the list? Industrialists, of which, Hermann Kohl was among the richest. According to the article, Herman J. Kohl, president and salesman of the Norda Essential Oil and Chemical Company, was making a whopping $77,840 in 1935. His wife, Hertha, was also listed, bringing in an additional $15,988. For comparison, this is more than George Burns and Gracie Allen were making at the time (they came in at $92,000).
So, where were they living at this time? According to a NYC city directory, the Kohls were living at 43 East 19th Street in 1925. By 1930, they had moved to 121 East 24th Street, and by 1931, had moved again to 317 East 25th Street.
Starrett-Lehigh Building, 1936
Read more about the Starrett-Lehigh Building and view photos here…
186 Riverside Drive, Upper West Side, Manhattan
Kohl never trusted the stock market, and therefore felt very little effect from the great stock market crash of 1929. Instead, throughout the 30s, he invested in land, and lots of it. He owned rental properties, farm land, orange groves, and even a few private islands off the coast of Florida. One of these, Buck Key (located off Captiva Island just north of Sanibel) was donated to the people of Florida as a nature conservancy in 1979, as a gift from Elena and the Benedict family.
In 1935, the Kohls completed the construction of their beach home, Villa Am Meer, on Longboat Key. Word has it they were contemporaries of the Ringlings, and even purchased the chunk of land directly from them. The house is rumored to have been designed by John H. Phillips, the same architect who built the famous Ringling Museum in Sarasota.
Then, sometime during the 1940s, Herman Kohl was said to have invested $7,500 for a 49 percent share in Anthony Rossi’s fruit packing business, which would eventually grow to become Tropicana Products.
Sometime between 1937 and 1943 Elena married Emilio DeBenedictis, a former captain of the N.Y.U. football team. Around this time, Elena also shortened her married name to Elena Duke (short for Amaducci) Benedict, and Emilio DeBenedictis was shortened/Americanized to become Edward Benedict (although those who knew him just called him Ben). He also worked for Hermann Kohl at Norda, Inc, spending his entire career with the company.
In 1943, Edward Benedict took up an interest in farming and purchased the Tilly Foster Farm in Putnam County, New York. The dairy farm had 75 head of cattle, producing 8 to 10 cans of milk daily. Eventually, the dairy cattle gave way to race horses, and the Tilly Foster Farm became one of the leading thoroughbred farms in New York State. It produced such champion horses as 1969′s Silent Scream and 1997 DelMar Derby Winner, Anet.
Read more about the Tilly Foster Farm…
The Benedicts also owned a second horse farm in Putnam County, where Centennial Golf Club stands today. A residential housing development just to the north of the golf course was built with streets named after the Benedict family, including Duke Drive, Benedict Place, and Elena Court.
View the development on Google Maps…
Elena and Edward Benedict raised six daughters at their home located at 4400 Purchase Street in Purchase, New York. All six daughters attended the private and prestigious Rye Country Day School, and were presented at the Westchester Country Club Debutante Cotillion. It was a glamorous life, indeed.
So, what caused the downward spiral that led Villa Am Meer and the family’s Purchase County estate to be foreclosed upon? I don’t have all the answers, but it seems to start with a Sarasota development project gone bad.
NEXT TIME: Unicom Nursing Care and the beginning of the end…
Read MoreVilla Am Meer, Chapter 7
Anthony Rossi and the S.S. Tropicana
New here? Start with Chapter 1…
Sorry for the lapse in my blog posts lately. I had run into a brick wall as far as new information was concerned, and I didn’t want to bother any of the Benedict family so soon after Elena’s death, so I was a bit stuck. However, I still had plenty of questions, and with a little digging, I was able to find some answers.
1. In what year did Hermann Kohl come to be an investor in Tropicana? Did he know the company’s founder Anthony Rossi?
About a month ago, I had purchased Anthony T. Rossi’s biography from Amazon.com, hoping to find some mention of Hermann Kohl’s involvement in the company. The book was written by Rossi’s second wife, Sanna Barlow Rossi, in 1986, and I have to admit, it was a pretty interesting read.
Anthony T. Rossi is widely known as the founder of Tropicana. In 1921, at the age of 21, he left his hometown of Messina, Sicily and set out for New York City with 30 dollars in his pocket and a knapsack on his back. Before too long, he had a job working at his uncle’s machine shop, and within a year, had purchased a car that he used to start driving taxi cab. Not long after that, Anthony bought a Cabriolet and became a chauffeur for the nephew of a famous NYC lawyer, Elihu Root. Soon he was making $450/month, and began sending regular checks home to support his family in Sicily.
By the time Anthony was in his late 30s, he had started a grocery business, a restaurant, and married Florence Stark, the daughter of a Methodist minister. It was about this time he decided that New York was too cold and he wanted to move south. Perhaps he would try farming. They spent one year in Cape Charles, Virginia growing tomatoes, then decided to move further south to Bradenton, Florida. They purchased 80 acres on Cortez Road and started farming tomatoes.
Before long, Anthony saw another business opportunity arise when a cafeteria on 6th Avenue and 12th Street came up for sale – the Floridian. He bought the building and the business for $8,000 and convinced his brother Joe, a chef at a large hotel in Chicago, to come and cook for him. In the cafeteria’s first year, its net profit was $35,000.
With expansion in mind, Anthony convinced Florence to move to Miami and open a second restaurant in July of 1944. The Terrace Restaurant could seat 500 guests, but it was war time, and the tourists just weren’t coming in like he had anticipated. Soon, he was losing $1,000 a day. A devout Christian, Anthony was reluctant to sell alcohol in his restaurant, but in order to stay in the black, he agreed to start selling liquor at the tables, as long as there was no bar. He sold the Floridian in Bradenton for $35,000 in order to shore up the failing restaurant in Miami. But in one month, all the money was gone.
On December 28, 1944, only five months after starting the Terrace Restaurant, Anthony received a call from a realtor who had a client willing to buy the business – Lou Walters, father of television news personality, Barbara Walters. The deal was made, and Anthony Rossi was free to start again.
Anthony began his career in the orange business picking out Florida citrus from Miami supermarkets, packaging them, and shipping the gift boxes to retailers like Macy’s and Gimbel’s department stores in New York. He worked hard to pick the best quality fruit and sell it at the lowest possible price, and soon his business was thriving. Florence’s niece, Dorothy Brown, and her husband Bob joined the gift box business, and the orders continued to pour in. They named the company Fruit Industries, Inc.
But Anthony wasn’t satisfied. He realized if he returned to Bradenton, he could buy the fruit cheaper straight off the trees and make a higher profit on each gift box. So, Anthony and Florence returned to Bradenton while Dorothy and Bob stayed in Miami. They purchased a warehouse, and soon, two rail cars of fruit boxes were shipping out of Bradenton each day.
But, the dilemma… what to do with the smaller oranges that weren’t big enough or perfect enough for the gift boxes? The answer? Orange juice.
Word had it that the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City was employing 40 women a day to cut up the Florida citrus fruit for appetizers and salads, and squeeze the remainder into fresh orange juice. Anthony knew he would have a market for his jars of sliced citrus and fresh fruit juice if he could just figure out a way to ship it up to the great New York hotels without spoiling.
They began acquiring trucks and blew chipped ice into the trailers to keep the juice and fruit sections chilled on the one-and-a-half-day trip to New York. The trucks had to make regular stops to add more ice along the way, but it worked, and business boomed.
By 1950, Fruit Industries, Inc. had changed its name to Tropicana and had a standing order of 1,000 gallons of fruit juice per week, just for the Waldorf-Astoria alone. Even with the new refrigerated trucks, they couldn’t ship the juice fast enough. Anthony had to think of a way to get more juice to New York faster.
On April 12, 1951, Anthony’s beloved wife, Florence, died of a heart attack. Left alone, he threw himself into his work. He wracked his brain over the company’s transportation dilemma and finally decided that the only way to get the juice up to New England faster was to buy a ship. And so, he did.
After much nay-saying from his critics, Anthony Rossi watched the S. S. Tropicana pull into New York harbor on February 19, 1957. The ship left Tropicana’s new five million dollar packing plant at Port Canaveral, Florida, loaded with two million gallons of orange juice, chilled in six custom-welded, refrigerated, stainless steel tanks. They called it “The Golden Stream” as the juice left Florida, bound for New York City.
When cold weather ruined Tropicana’s orange crop in 1964, Anthony Rossi had to get creative once again. He refused to buy orange concentrate even though it was readily available from Brazil, and instead focused on how to supply his Florida plants with fresh oranges from Mexico. He began shipping oranges on giant freighters, but on the third cargo load, a state inspector noticed evidence of the Mexican fruit fly and shut down the operation. It was then Anthony proposed the world’s first floating orange juice factory.
The Mexican Pride was a fifty-foot-wide hulking barge that loaded fresh oranges by conveyor belt from wherever they could be found, then processed them and chilled up to 225,000 gallons of juice, all on board the floating factory. From there, juice was pumped from the mother ship to another barge that would take the juice up to Tropicana’s bottling plant where it was distributed to the hungry juice markets.
Better plans and production methods were always in the works, and soon the S. S. Tropicana and the Mexican Pride were replaced with more efficient methods of processing and transportation, namely refrigerated boxcars. This concept evolved into Tropicana’s famed “Great White Juice Train,” consisting of 150 insulated boxcars.
In 1969, Tropicana Products, Inc went public, and in 1978, Anthony Rossi sold Tropicana to Beatrice Foods. The company was later acquired by PepsiCo in 1998.
So, back to my original question, in what year did Hermann Kohl become an investor in Tropicana? And, did he know Anthony Rossi? The answer is, I don’t know. According to the Benedicts, Tropicana was a tiny local company prior to Hermann Kohl’s involvement. It grew to national prominence at his direction, and the whole concept of fresh juice distribution, logistical expertise, and the ability to finance it were all his.
That being the case, then why was Hermann Kohl’s name left out of Anthony Rossi’s biography? I don’t know, but I may have a guess…
Next time: More on Dr. Hermann J. Kohl and a theory on how he made his fortune…
Read MoreAbout Me
Join me in my sporadic ramblings as I embrace the curious life. Wife of a turkey farmer. Mother of two teenage boys. Avid ponderer. Treasure seeker. Curator of the written word. I enjoy sparking interest in the mundane and uncovering a compelling backstory.
