The Exchanges

Q You were, I guess, in your early twenties when he died. Um, how did that change your, your direction at that point?

A Well, dad and I were always going to go into business together. Well, that didn't happen, of course. And, ah, one day, I was driving down Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles, and they had just put up a big sign on a corner that said, coming soon, a mobile gas station. And I wrote the phone number down. Called it, because I wanted to find out how much it would cost to get a gas station. I didn't even think there was enough money in the world for me to do that, but they came through with a figure that seemed fairly reasonable to me, and so we put the house up for sale and sold it immediately, and got the money we needed to buy the gas station, and that's what I did.

AI assessment note: “dad and I were always going to go into business together. Well, that didn't happen”

Q So if you were enjoying things at the gas station, you, uh, I should mention, you, like, sold it a couple years later and got out of L.A. Why? Why did you do that?

A Well, LA had a lot of problems. It was very smoggy. It was so intensely uncomfortable that we talked about, well, now that I have a gas station, we could really move any place. We could get a gas station in any town, and we decided, ah, that Mammoth Lakes was the right place to go. The Mammoth Lakes Lodge Had just built a big ski resort up at the top of the mountain, which I believe is still a very active ski area, and so I sold my station, and we sold that house, so we had enough money. I think at the time we had about 17,000 dollars, which in 1959, oh, guy, it was a lot of money.

AI assessment note: “LA had a lot of problems. It was very smoggy. It was so intensely uncomfortable”

Q When you moved to Sacramento, what was your family's financial situation?

A Well, I think we were at the lowest point. We moved in, ah, we, we had a minister of the church that we decided to go to at the time. He was caretaking an apartment, three unit apartment, and one of the units, ah, didn't have a shower that worked. And, ah, he said, well, Bob, ah, can let you and Charlie and the boys live in that for a while. And we took him up on it because we didn't have any money. I remember, ah, the kitchen was very small, and Charlie and I put a, a mattress in the kitchen and slept on the floor, and the boys, the two youngest boys slept together on a, ah, a fold-up bed, and Ken, the oldest at that time, ah, slept in a sleeping bag, and that's how we slept. We didn't have any furniture, so that was about the lowest point in our life when we were living on somebody else with the three boys, You know, when you get down, you feel helpless like a baby.

AI assessment note: “we were at the lowest point... we took him up on it because we didn't have any money”

Q Where, where were you when it happened? I mean, how did you find out about it?

A Well, I got a call in the middle of the night. Bob, Bob, your mill's on fire. So I got up and put my clothes on, jumped in the car, and, uh, got on down, uh, and as I went around the corner, I didn't, I lived just one mile from the mill, and I was up on a hill, and the mill was down in the valley, and when I came around the corner, and I could see this fire reaching into the heavens, uh, And realizing that that was my business. And, ah, you don't know what to think, ah, ah, you don't know how to think, ah, you don't know whether to cry or, or what. I just got down there, ah, pretty quickly. The fire chief came up to me, who I knew. They used to make inspections of the mill. And he said, we got all the water we need. But if you could tell me what part of the mill is, is the most precious that would keep you going in business, uh, I can direct a whole fire, uh, department at that point. And of course, the millstones were the most important part of the whole thing. We walked over to the mill. It was pretty hot there, but you know, the, and the, the fire departments were throwing a lot of water on the, on the building. But, ah, we walked over, and, and I pointed out on the building, side of the building, where, ah, the mills were inside, and they immediately had a saw. They just whacked a big square hole in it, and he planted one of the firemen there on the ground with a fire hose …

AI assessment note: “I got a call in the middle of the night. Bob, Bob, your mill's on fire.”

Q get really interested in this idea of, uh, maybe starting a mill, and lots of people get interesting ideas and get obsessed with, with, with, um, things for a time being, and so what did you do? Did you start to think, well, how are we gonna buy a mill? Did you start to talk to your wife, to Charlie, and say, let's, let's look for a mill to buy?

A Yeah, I did a lot of talking. I did a lot of talking to Charlie, and I, and the boys were all in their teenagers by that time, and, and I got them interested too, and one thing I did was I went to the library, and they had a twelve-volume group of American manufacturers of equipment, and in there they had, ah, pages of companies who made flour mills, and, ah, equipment for, ah, mills, and, I wrote some letters, rather naive, because I really, I was talking about stuff in the eight, 1800, and, uh, asking them about stone mills, and I wrote about 10 letters, and I think I only received a response back from about two of them. One of them gave me the name of a fella who they knew had a stone mill. His name was Dewey Sheets, and he lived in Muncie, Indiana, And, uh, he had been in the milling business for, you know, a lot of his life, and Dewey was such a help. He found me a mill that was to be torn down in Fayetteville, North Carolina. So I ended up, for not a whole lot of money, With my garage stacked full of old, very ancient stone mills dated, 1870, 1860, 1880.

AI assessment note: “I did a lot of talking to Charlie, and I, and the boys”

Q So when the fire was, when the fire was put out, and you're, you're, you're looking at what was left of Bob's Red Mill, which I'm assuming was not a whole lot. Did you, did you, were you immediately thinking, we're going to just rebuild and start up again really soon? Or did you, did you think maybe it's time, maybe this is a sign to, to pack it in?

A Well, that's pretty much what I thought, but there were some things that changed my mind, uh, and even that very night. David, my, at that time, my oldest employee, his wife came down, Eileen was such a lovely lady. She was our, she worked at the bank where we banked, and that's how David met her, and we took them, the two kids, on their first date together, uh, for dinner, and they got married. We went to their wedding and everything else, and David had been with me almost 10 years by that time, and that night, within a few minutes of my arrival there, Charlie came. And she and Eileen were talking, and I overheard them, and Eileen told Charlie, oh, Charlie, I don't know what we're going to do. Uh, we just signed the papers on our home. David doesn't have a job now. And, you know, that sunk in pretty deep. Charlie looked at me, and I guess what she was saying, and what I was thinking in my mind, is that there's probably not going to be any thoughts of not continuing this thing. Somehow we'll make it work. There's an awful lot of things that have motivated me over the years, and, ah, a lot of those things came out because of David and Eileen, ah, and the fire. So I felt that I had a weighty responsibility staring me in the face, and, ah, there's a lot of things that go through your mind in, in those kind of situations, and certainly I had every thought you could think of.

AI assessment note: “that's pretty much what I thought, but there were some things that changed my mind”

Q Bob, you, you talked a little bit about, um, about, about your faith and your Christianity, and I'm, I'm just wondering, like, how much, how much has it guided you, you know, over the years, like, your, your decisions and your thinking?

A Well, I think it permeates me as far as that's concerned. Uh, the whole concept of whole grains I got from the very first page of the Bible. You know, when you, when you go to seminary, they start you off with the first page. So I have it, uh, with me, uh, uh, I can read it to you. There's only a couple of lines. God said, behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food. And I read these words in 14 different translations, and I learned to figure it out in the original Hebrew. It still says the same thing. Simple, unequivocal, comforting. Just made perfect sense to me, uh, Guy, and, and the fact that I could establish a business around it, uh, was, was just unbelievable, and, and I, I'm not doing too bad at it. It's working pretty well.

AI assessment note: “Well, I think it permeates me as far as that's concerned.”

Q So, so this is 1974, you open the doors to Moore's flour mill with your boys, um, and, and, and what, and you're making wheat flour, corn flour, what else?

A Oh, actually, we, I created the 10 grain cereal that we're using now. We ground whole wheat. There's a lot of kinds of wheat. There's a durum wheat, which is a hard white wheat. There's a red wheat, which is high in protein and makes wonderful bread. Oh, and then soft wheat. There's a soft white wheat for pastries and, and biscuits and So, you, you, you get a little knowledge of what grains are, and how to use them, uh, then you, uh, create, uh, some recipes, and put them in a bag, and then you pedal them, and that's just what we did. We put, uh, large, uh, windows across the wall from the store into the mill room, and they, they could see it one or two or three mills running all the time.

AI assessment note: “I created the 10 grain cereal that we're using now. We ground whole wheat.”