Thursday July 6
7:00 at Blue Hill Public Library
5 Parker Point Road
Blue Hill, Maine 04614
Three powerful men converge on the banks of the Red Cedar River in the early 1900s in southern Minnesota–George Albert Hormel, founder of what will become the $10 billion food conglomerate Hormel Foods; Alpha LaRue Eberhart, the author’s paternal grandfather and Hormel’s Executive Vice President and Corporate Secretary; and Ransome Josiah Thomson, Hormel’s comptroller. Over ten years, Thomson will embezzle $1.2 million from the company’s coffers, nearly bringing the company to its knees.
The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy opens in 1922 as George Hormel calls Eberhart into his office and demands his resignation. Hailed as the true leader of the company he’d helped Hormel build–is Eberhart complicit in the embezzlement? Far worse than losing his job and the great wealth he’d rightfully accumulated is that his beloved young wife, Lena, is dying while their three children grieve alongside. Of course, his story doesn’t end there.
In scale both intimate and grand, Cherington deftly weaves the histories of Hormel, Eberhart, and Thomson within the sweeping landscape of our country’s early industries, along with keen observations about business leaders gleaned from her thirty-five-year career advising top company executives. The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy equally chronicles Cherington’s journey from blind faith in family lore to a nuanced consideration of the three men’s great strengths and flaws–and a multilayered, thoughtful exploration of the ways we all must contend with the mythology of powerful men, our reverence for heroes, and the legacy of a complicated past.
Gretchen Cherington‘s first view of powerful men was informed at the feet of her father, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Eberhart, and his eclectic and fascinating writer friends, from Robert Frost to Allen Ginsberg to James Dickey. As an executive management consultant, she figured out what made powerful men tick by working alongside nearly three hundred of them in their corner suites during her thirty-five year career. Her first memoir, Poetic License,has won multiple awards; her writing has appeared in Huffington Post, Crack the Spine, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, Women Writers/Women’s Books, MS. Girl, Yankee and more; and more; and she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her essay “Maine Roustabout” in 2012. Gretchen and her husband split their time between Portland, Maine, and a saltwater cottage in Brooksville. Learn more at www.gretchencherington.com