Most private companies take on the personalities of their CEOs; Prince certainly became a reflection of Joe Pellegrino. Both were aggressive, uncompromising, amusing, and constantly in the public eye. Joe himself could not sit still. He ran over to Italy to shop for premium offers: he and Lena carted back wine pitchers, spaghetti forks, cheese graters, and, on one memorable trip, 100,000 medals blessed by Pope John XXIII. He invented a new product: square spaghetti, of which he sold 6 million pounds. He threw the largest spaghetti supper in history: 26,500 people twirling pasta with luminaries like Ted Williams, Rocky Marciano, and a young TV personality named Johnny Carson. In the mid-1950s, he committed a sizable chunk of Prince's advertising budget to local television in Boston, not because, as he says, "even though I didn't own a set, I heard everybody talking Monday about the Sunday-night movie, so I knew that was the way to go." He hobnobbed with New England politicians, met Harry Truman at a White House reception, and generally made his presence felt.
"If he were a woman," Lena, his wife of 54 years, insists, "he'd be the biggest prostitute in the world, because he never says no to anyone."
It wasn't all fun and games, though. In the mid-50s, the spaghetti industry's version of a speakeasy shootout erupted between Prince and Ronzoni, another symptom of the market warfare heating up in the macaroni business. This time the catalyst was Rossotti, the box-maker who had once supplied the Roman Macaroni Co. in New York. For young Joseph, an only son just coming to awareness of what the family business was all about, the lesson proved instructive -- albeit far different from the one his father intended.
Rossotti and I got into an argument over some [printing] plates he didn't want to give us. I told him I never do business with him again. When I got to Prince, he was their sole supplier. Rossotti tells his salesman to stay away, leave Pellegrino alone, he'll ruin the business in six months anyway.
Now, my own ad guy happens to know Rossotti's salesman [Holbrook], so after I design my own package, I call Holbrook in and tell him to figure on an order of 6 million boxes. What does Rossotti do? He fires Holbrook and goes to Ronzoni, says Joe Pellegrino copied your design but we won't print the order because it'd be unfair competition. So Ronzoni sues me for $500,000. But's it's all really a setup, see? I know, because I buy a container company of my own and hire Holbrook as my salesman. Guess what Holbrook has? A complete set of interoffice memos between Rossotti and Ronzoni, laying out the whole scenario of how they plan to set me up. I get the papers, stick Holbrook in a hotel room, and tell my son I'm taking him out of school for a day, because he'll see something he'll never forget.
We go to court. The judge listens to [opening arguments] and calls us into his chambers. You're two reliable, upstanding businessmen, he says, let's settle it here, we shouldn't have to go back out there. I say, Your Honor, I'm here to negotiate, not litigate. But Ronzoni won't back down. He gets very cocky, very aggressive. Says I gotta do this, I gotta do that. I say, listen Mr. Ronzoni, you haven't won anything here, I don't gotta do a thing. The problem is, he's from Genoa and I'm from Sicily, and the north always has this animosity for the south. I don't know what it is -- they think we're a bad element or something, uneducated. It's crazy.
Anyway, they insist on going to trial, and Rossotti takes the stand and starts lying like a rug. They have no idea we've got the documents. Or Holbrook in a hotel room. We finally bring in Holbrook to testify, and it's all over the minute he opens his mouth. As soon as he finished, I put my family on a boat for Italy, because I knew we couldn't lose. Three days out to sea, we get confirmation of the judge's verdict.Why did I want my son along? So he could see how a man risks everything when he gets too greedy.
(JP)
Cleghorn Container Co., the carton manufacturer that Pellegrino purchased, was one of several small -- and struggling -- concerns that Pellegrino would bring under the Prince corporate umbrella during the '50s and '60s. In 1956, Joe hired Armond Giarrusso, a former Internal Revenue Service man whose parents had come over from Italy and gone to work in the Lowell textile mills. Together the two men began traveling the country, looking for acquisition targets that might expand Prince's distribution channels or vertically integrate its supply lines. Relying on their own industry intelligence, they worked alone: no investment bankers, no high-priced analysts drafting colored charts.
"The first month I was here," says Giarrusso, "I was on the road 22 days. We went to St. Louis first, where we tried to buy the old Viviano Macaroni Co. After that came Roselli Foods of New Jersey, the first successful deal we made. All these negotiations were owner-to-owner and face-to-face. If JP didn't get his point across the first time, he kept presevering, but he left all the accounting and tax aspects to me. We never even took an attorney with us."
The string of acquisitions made by Prince during this era -- Meisenzahl Macaroni in Rochester, N.Y.; Cardinale Macaroni in Brooklyn, N.Y.; Roma Macaroni in Chicago; Michigan Macaroni, a Detroit franchisor; and others -- represented the company's first crude attempts to push its name beyond New England and establish it in the national marketplace. The results of this strategy were mixed at best. Meisenzahl's market share, for instance, dwindled significantly once Prince converted the product to its own label, a testament to the tenacity of regional brand loyalty. Then, too, many of the deals were paid for partly with Prince stock, which created a growing constituency of shareholders among the acquired companies' owners. Furthermore, because these companies had their own arcane management and accounting procedures, they strained the managerial capacity of the home office almost to the breaking point.
