I was born in 1952 and spent a lot of my childhood with my maternal grandparents, who lived next door to us. I had no clue that Will Smith had over 50 patents to his name, owned the canning factory that was the major employer in my tiny hometown, and was an accomplished amateur scientist and photographer. To me, he was just Granddad.

To make applesauce the conventional way, you peel and core the apples, put ’em in a pot, add sugar and water, and cook. It takes a half hour or so and you get nice brown sauce, depending on the apple variety you put in. In the early Twenties, Granddad came up with the idea of pressure cooking the apples, hitting them with steam jets in a continuous process. It was fast, it was inexpensive, you needed less than half the sugar, and it poured out applesauce so fast that any other method became obsolete. Granddad and two friends bought a factory in Lyndonville and converted it to making sauce. They would start buying apples in September and pack sauce until February when the apples ran out. The rest of the year they would ship the stored sauce, mostly in private labels for A&P, Safeway, Loblaws, and other grocery chains, as well as their own brand, VB. (The name came from Vischer Brothers, the original owners of the plant, but rather than try to establish a new brand they just changed it to Very Best.)

The summer was when Granddad and his sons George, Clayton and sometimes Stan would build and test new machines, as well as building cookers to order for other companies. Stan was “sometimes” because his real job was in Niagara Falls at Bell Aircraft. He was the chief engineer on the X-1 and X-2. I’ve written elsewhere on Ricochet about how Stan quit rocket-powered planes when his friend Iven Kinchloe was killed in an X-2 crash, talked Larry Bell into giving him six months and a small budget, and Stan built the world’s first vertical takeoff jet.

In the Fifties and early Sixties, I spent some time at the factory. They tolerated me, and OSHA would have flipped out at me wandering around among trucks getting weighed, tractors with scoops picking up piles of apples, and all the machines on the factory floor.

Two things fascinated me. The first was the peeling and coring operation. The apples were put in a hopper, different varieties in different amounts depending on the sauce recipe. They were washed and floated out to the peeling machines. Workers on the peeling line picked the apples out of the floating conveyor, rejecting any bad ones. A holder, a sort of cup with no bottom on an arm, swung out from the lower part of the machine, and the apple was placed on it. It swung back inside and a clear plastic shield came down so the operator could watch the process and stop it if it went wrong. A sharpened tube descended and went through the apple, removing the core, which was then popped out of the tube into a separate wet conveyor by a blast of compressed air. The tube then rose about half an inch, taking the apple with it, and started to turn. A blade came out and removed the peel. Finally, the tube tilted a bit to the rear, and another larger tube pushed the peeled and cored apple off into another wet conveyor, headed for the cooker. The peels and cores went next door to a company that made vinegar.

Once the sauce came out of the cooker, it went to another fascinating gadget. Seeds and bits of stem and peel would make it through the cooker and need to be removed. Straining or filtering the sauce was impractical and reduced the quality and texture. Granddad came up with a clever setup for removing the bad bits. Picture a triangular table, with sloping sides going up to an open top, angled like an artist’s drafting board (which I think is what gave Granddad the idea). The sauce is pumped up through the opening at the top and cascades down the sides. The apparatus is heated, so the warm sauce flows easily. Workers with little metal vacuum hoses can easily pick the bad bits out of the flowing sauce, which is gathered up at the bottom and proceeds to the packing area.

Someone had to analyze previous years’ sales trends and decide what to pack. Gallon cans were popular for restaurant distributors. Most of the sauce went into quart jars. I remember long lines of those jars traveling along, through a washer and a drier, to a rotating machine that filled them with hot sauce and capped them, to a cooler, to a racking device that allowed them to be put in boxes with cardboard dividers. Most of my teenage summers were spent working on the labeling line, where we would unload these boxes, run them through a labeler, reload the boxes and paste a label on each side when we sealed the flaps down. There was a room with stacks of beautifully-printed labels, full color with gilt edging, ready to make up cases of sauce for the grocery chains as they ordered. Printing was my hobby; I had a treadle-operated letterpress and collected type fonts from a couple of small-town newspapers that ceased production, and did enough business in wedding invitations and business cards to pay for some college. I almost went into that trade but decided instead to go for a liberal arts degree and wander off in all directions. My three brothers were engineers, but I was classically inept and mathematically challenged, so I became a writer in self-defense.