Posted 3/06/2007 05:42:00 PM by Douglas

Two obits today. Say what you want about either of their products, but chances are you probably deal with them on a weekly basis. First up, John F. Baugh. It's hard to go to any restaurant anywhere in America and not see his legacy: "Sysco Systems, Houston Texas."

John F. Baugh, the founder of Houston-based Sysco Corp., the nation's largest restaurant food supplier, and a benefactor of Baptist universities, died Monday in San Antonio. He was 91.

Baugh left his job as a grocery store manager in 1946 to start a company distributing frozen peaches and strawberries to bakeries, cafeterias and hospitals. He made the deliveries, while his wife, Eula Mae, managed the books.

The company now claims more than 47,000 employees and more than $30 billion in annual sales, providing everything from napkins to tomatoes to restaurants, schools, hotels and other businesses preparing food outside the home.

If that's not the American Dream™, then I don't know what is.

Next up, anyone that is amused at a cheap drunk with wine that still comes with a cork. That's right, Mr. Gallo himself has transitioned to the $2.99 bin in the sky:

Ernest Gallo, the marketing genius who parlayed a wine recipe from the public library into one of the world's largest winemaking empires, died Tuesday at his home in Modesto. He was 97.

"There was no single person in the country that made such a contribution toward building and developing the U.S. wine industry," said Woodside-based wine analyst Jon Fredrikson.

Gallo, who would have been 98 on March 18, was one of the country's wealthiest men, listed on the Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest Americans with a family worth of $1.3 billion.

Born near Modesto, a then-sleepy San Joaquin Valley town about 80 miles east of San Francisco, Gallo and his late brother and business partner, Julio, grew up working in the vineyard owned by their father, who came to America from Italy's winemaking region of Piedmont.

They founded the E.&J. Gallo Winery in 1933, at the end of Prohibition, using $5,900 borrowed dollars.

The wine industry was virtually nonexistent after years of Prohibition so the brothers went to the library and "started pulling out what few reference books there were on winemaking," recalled Peter Mondavi Jr., co-proprietor of Charles Krug Winery and a member of another influential winemaking family.

Again, the American Dream personified.

Maybe you'd like to make a case for these two gentlemen ensuring that we get the same bland chicken breast from Boise to Baton Rouge served with a Chardonnay that's more like Welch's with a shot of vodka. Ok, that may be fair (then again it may not) but these men saw a gap in the market when they had the cajones to fill it. And for their troubles? A couple of Billion dollars and their names thoughtfully posted here.