Mother's legacy lives on
Fifth generation now employed at bakeries
By JANICE WILLIAMS
Star-Telegram Writer
This is a Mother's Day story.
It's about a woman who, in the face of incredible odds and despite the conventions of her day and time, originated a business that ultimately was to span the state - and this is not to provide luxuries for her family, but simply to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table.
No chronicle of Fort Worth, or even of Texas, would be complete without the story of Mrs. Ninnie L. Baird. And although she's been gone for 15 years now, the principles and precepts she instilled in her children live on at the company that bears her name - Mrs. Baird's Bakeries.
What would you do if you had an ailing husband who then died, leaving you with eight children (two others had died in infancy) and next to nothing in cash?
Many modern-day women might simply sit down and let society grapple with the problem. In her own time, shorty after the turn of the century, Mrs. Baird's counterpart might have moved in with relatives. Or, as was the custom of the day, she could have broken up the family, parceling out a child here, another one there.
But she didn't. Instead, she braced herself and took on the dual role of father and mother, at the same time directing her talents and energies to work that until that time had been a back-yard enterprise - baking bread.
Thus the staff of life became a way of life for the Baird family.
* * *
Hoyt Baird was only four years old when the family came to Texas from Tennessee, but he has vivid memories of their early struggles and of his widowed mother stirring bread dough with one hand and holding a baby in the other arm.
Now chairman of the executive committee of a bakery empire, his voice softens and his eyes mist over a little when he talks about those days so long ago.
Oddly enough, the first Baird enterprise in Fort Worth was not in the bakery line, but in popcorn. The father, William Allen Baird, came here as a young man of 33 to "look around" for business opportunities. He liked what he saw, and went back to Tennessee to collect the family and settle in Fort Worth.
He brought more than just his wife and four children, however - a steam popcorn machine, a "first" in the city, which he set up on the corner of 7th and Main across from the old Burton Peel Dry Goods Store.
"It had a clown on top, and a steam whistle," Hoyt says. "And popcorn was a nickel for a big sack, with real melted butter on it."
After this got off to a good start, the father bought a second machine and set it up at 5th and Main, putting the oldest son, Dewey, age 11, in charge of it.
But the older Baird had always been interested in the restaurant business, and to this he turned his attention next, buying, operating and then selling out several in different parts of town. When the restaurant operation moved, so did the family - from Rosen Heights to downtown to South Side - since transportation was slow, and people needed to live near their places of employment.
* * *
As soon as the children were old enough, they worked, too. When Hoyt was eight years old, his father owned a restaurant on 15th Street, and he remembers that his job was to go by bicycle early every morning to a South Side butcher shop and pick up meat for the restaurant. When he got back to town, he started a fire in the stove and made hot cake batter before leaving for school.
The family lived at that time at 512 Hemphill - a Victorian cottage with gingerbread trim around the wide front porch where the parents would rock, and the children play, on long summer evenings. This was destined to become the birthplace of the baking empire, because it was here that word of Mrs. Baird's magic touch with bread traveled on the neighborhood grapevine.
"You know, people in those days used to hand things across the fence to their neighbors, and with my mother, it was loaves of bread," Hoyt says. "Even in those days, everyone called it 'Mrs. Baird's Bread'."
In 1908, as her husband's health declined, Mrs. Baird took the neighbors' suggestion and started baking bread to sell to supplement the family income. At first, she used her four-burner wood-fired kitchen range and the older sons delivered it on foot after they came in from school.
"Mama put flour sacks in big baskets, hinged at the top like picnic baskets, and then set the bread in them, and covered them over with another sack," Hoyt recalls.
As the business grew, Mrs. Baird remodeled a small house (originally meant to be servants' quarters) at the back of the lot, and bought a commercial oven from the old Metropolitan Hotel. She gave $75 for it - $25 in cash, and the rest to be paid out in bread.
* * *
It was a big day for young Hoyt when the family buggy was converted into a delivery wagon of sorts, with a wooden panel body, so he could deliver bread along the route instead of carrying heavy baskets, or delivering by bicycle. Dewey helped his mother with the baking, and the girls took care of the house and of the younger children.
Two years later, Mrs. Baird moved the family and the back yard bakery operation to a rent house on Washington, at the corner of Cactus (now called Jefferson). It also had a servants' house which was converted to a bakeshop, this one with a brick oven.
While the family lived there the father died, in 1911, and then baking took on new urgency, as the only means of family support. Mrs. Baird cajoled her landlord into building another structure on the property, the front of which became the first retail store.
And new lines of bakery goods were added: cream puffs, cinnamon rolls and pies, in addition to bread, rolls and cakes. Though she often labored 16 or more hours a day in the bakery, Mrs. Baird found time occasionally to ride
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along the delivery route with young Hoyt.
"We had this horse named Ned," he says. "Ned knew that route better than I did, I think - and while I was delivering bread inside a house, Ned ate the grass in people's front yards."
The children went to school during the week, to church on Sunday. Their mother's discipline was tough, but fair.
"If she gave us a licking, it was because we deserved it," Hoyt says, recalling the paddlings he got for sneaking off down the T&P tracks to go swimming in the Trinity, a pastime strictly forbidden by his mother because it was too dangerous.
Nor could the children fool her, either - like most mothers, she just instinctively KNEW.
"She could tell when I'd been swimming, even after I dried myself off good with some of that old waste you used to find along the railroad tracks."
* * *
In 1917, they bought the first family car - a Ford they customized into a delivery truck by taking out the seats and putting a panel body on it. On the side they painted: "Eat More Mrs. Baird's Bread."
It was about this same time, too, that three wholesale accounts came to them - and with Hoyt's enlistment in the Army the following year, the family decided to discontinue the retail business and go wholesale only.
The rest is history: expansion to five delivery routes that covered all of the city, purchase of a lot at Terrell and Sixth Avenue for the site of the first bakery the family built from the ground up, and enlargement of this facility nine times in as many years.
It was a small step from this to expanding into the Dallas market and then on to all of the others: Houston, Abilene, Victoria, Lubbock, Waco, Austin, and the newest one, in San Antonio.
This is a business today that has a payroll of 2,500 persons, and serves 10 million Texas customers.
When the first out-of-town plant opened, in Dallas, an important decision was made - a member of the family would head it, supervising all the operations and taking personal responsibility for a product that bore the family name.
"And it's still that way," says Hoyt. "Mama taught us first that there is no substitute for quality or cleanliness, and that we always stood behind our product."
He remembers that even in those early days in the back-yard kitchen, when his mother was mixing dough by hand, how particular she was about ingredients.
"She'd break an egg, and if the yolk didn't stand up good, she'd throw it away - she said it wasn't fresh enough to put in her bread."
* * *
There are Bairds all through the bakery operation, even to the fifth generation now. Traditionally, they start out at the bottom. Vernon Baird, the president and official company spokesman, remembers that he began his career by sweeping floors, and later greasing pans.
Vernon is a grandson of Mrs. Baird's, and the one that you see on television commercials. This is not as glamorous as it may seem - it entails dressing up, donning makeup, and standing for hours under hot lights while commercials are shot and reshot. Although it adds to his already heavy work load, he feels it is necessary to help carry out the image of a family solidly behind its product.
There are other extra chores he's taken on, too. Not many company presidents take the time to check out things personally at the consumer level, but Vernon does.
One of his habits is to drop into a supermarket - whichever one is closest when he's out and about town - and take a walk past the bakery shelves.
Frequently, customers recognize him because of the television commercials, and despite the fact that this fame embarrasses him a little, he thinks that he is doing something that his grandmother would approve of.
* * *
And what of Mrs. Baird when the business had grown mammoth in scope, and children and grandchildren were actively engaged in the overall operation?
After they finally persuaded her to hang up her apron, she could, of course, have retired and simply rested from her labors, but such a thing would have been alien to her nature. Instead, she took an active part in company affairs up to the time of her death, when she was in her 90s.
"She was always right in there with us in things we wanted to do," says Hoyt. "Another woman might have said 'Let's wait awhile'."
But despite all her obvious qualities as a business woman, it's as a mother, grandmother, and matriarch that the Bairds think of her first.
He characterizes her as a "remarkable" woman - loving, patient, tolerant, with a deep and abiding religious faith - and above all else, a good mother.
"She said she didn't start the bakery for any other reason except to take care of us," he says. "And she always told us that she was a lot prouder that her children had grown up to be good citizens than she was of the fact that she had founded a successful business."
End of Article
There are three photos that accompany the article. One is if Ninnie Baird with the caption, "NINNIE L. BAIRD '...a remarkable woman'. Another is of the Budd Briggs painting, and another is of the first stove used to bake bread. The caption is "HUMBLE BEGINNING...first bakery, first stove."
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