Sell a disposable product, make a fortune.
Heinz Ruhe was a big, jolly German whose family had been in the wild animal business for four generations.
During colonial African days, before people much cared about saving endangered species – well, maybe before there were much in the way of endangered species in Africa, and even before the days of expensive safaris with the white man killing lions, rhinos and elephants merely pour le sport, not to mention well before the days of Ernest Hemingway and Robert Ruark – Heinz’s great-grandfather established a series of “catching stations” in Africa. Wildebeeste, monkeys, chimps, gorillas, giraffes: you name it, they caught it.
All of these products went on the market in Europe and America, for zoos (both private and public) , circuses and roadside parks.
Grandfather Ruhe took over from great-grandfather, father took over from grandfather and Heinz’s older brother, Hermann, took over from father. Somewhere around the time of World War I, the catching stations were largely abandoned and the family began to move in other – but still animal-related – directions. They operated the Hanover Zoo for many years and, after World War II, developed a series of wild-animal parks in Germany, Spain, South America and California.
In European tradition, Heinz and younger brother Lutz didn’t inherit the family business, although they worked in it for a while until they found there was no future for them. So they struck out on their own and developed a traveling “baby zoo,” specializing in baby exotic animals which they would buy from zoos, from the Ruhe family or from other animal traders, exhibit until they had passed the “cute” stage and then sell back to a zoo or another animal broker.
At any given time, their baby zoo might feature a giant Galapagos tortoise (on which kids could ride), pygmy African goats (which the kids could feed), a harbor seal, baby elephant, baby llamas, baby exotic cattle and pygmy horses (all of which the kids could pet), baby capuchin monkeys, baby chimps, a baby (or, sometimes, pygmy) hippo, and lion cubs which were put on display at bottle-feeding time and which the kids could sometimes pet.
(They eventually had to give up on the lion cubs, since lions are such prolific breeders in captivity that they became a glut on the market. Most zoos have their lions on birth control and you can’t even give a cub away once it reaches adolescence.)
After spending a couple of years in southern California, they began traveling north, where they struck a deal with the struggling Oakland Zoo to operate a baby zoo as a concession. A few years later, the San Jose Zoo was closed down amid a minor scandal involving mistreatment of animals and misuse of public funds. The brothers Ruhe then contracted with San Jose’s Parks and Recreation Department to remodel and reopen the zoo as the San Jose Baby Zoo.
That’s where I met Heinz, when I was hired as the public relations director for the San Jose Baby Zoo. But that’s not the point of the story.
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Heinz was only 20 years my senior (he died that same year at age 46), but had an entire extra lifetime’s experience over me. He introduced me to quality coffee beans years before Starbucks became ubiquitous, pushed me to share his entrepreneurial dreams and encouraged me to travel to Sacramento to lobby the California Assembly to amend a proposed bill about importation of wild animals to make it less zoo-unfriendly.
He also refused to become flustered and could find the humor in almost any situation. I was still pretty brash and hot-headed and would occasionally make remarks that might be – how shall we say? – possibly true, but not exactly diplomatic under the circumstances.
“Oh, Ho, HO!” Heinz’s laugh would boom, followed, in an accent that sounded almost exactly like Henry Kissinger’s, by “Now, Steve, you don’t really mean that!”
But that’s not the point of the story, either.
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Before they left the family business to strike out on their own, Heinz and Lutz were sent to New York to manage a new Ruhe venture: importing canaries from Germany to supply a growing market for the songbirds in the states and for further export to South America, then swarming with German immigrants.
Business was fairly profitable for a couple of years until another German immigrant took Heinz aside one day and gave him a neighborly bit of advice: get out while you can.
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The Ruhe family home and business for several generations had been located in the German village of Alfeld, about halfway between Hanover to the north and the Harz Mountains to the southeast. About 150 km south of Alfeld, and just next door to the Harz Mountains was the village of Fulda, home of the Stern family. So the Ruhes and the Sterns were ancestral neighbors, so to speak.
According to their on-line biography, brothers Max and Gustav Stern emigrated to the United States and began importing canaries in 1926 and, six years later, began manufacturing canary food under the label “Hartz Mountain.”
According to Heinz’s report, one of the Stern brothers approached him one day and suggested that he and Lutz should begin making arrangements to close down their canary business. Possibly taking a page from King Gillette’s marketing model (the profit not being in the sale of the razor but in the sale of disposable blades), the Brothers Stern planned to vastly increase their bird seed sales by vastly increasing canary ownership. In other words, they were going to sell canaries well below cost, practically giving them away.
Had it not been for this friendly warning, the Ruhes might have been ruined.
Heinz, who bubbled over with promotional ideas but never himself hit on the big one, held no grudge against the Sterns; in fact, he seemed to find the story amusing.
The Stern brothers did so well for themselves that they eventually branched into real estate and Hartz Mountain today is one of the largest holders of commercial real estate in the United States. And all from bird seed, cuttlebone and more than a little grit.