StoryCorps: Rick Tillotson and Deanna Howard (Web Extra)

Deanna: Your Dad’s name is Neil Tillotson and was actually born in Hereford, is that right - in East Hereford, Quebec?

Rick: That is correct. And it goes back to a boy growing up in a frontier-like town. This was the height of the logging era and the Van Dykes and the river drivers. And the border with Canada was important in Beecher Falls because it is where the train crossed the border coming from Quebec City or Montreal headed to Boston. So, everybody had to get out of the train and they switched and put a new train on that was on the U.S. side. So there was an interchange and it was a bustling little corner of the North Country around the turn of the 20th Century.

His father had actually been one of the people in the town of Beecher Falls; got together and volunteered their labor to build a furniture factory so that they could, after it was built, have a job. And his father and the other men in town that did this started working and were the first employees of the Beecher Falls Furniture Factory that is now the home factory of Ethan Allen. So, he worked there for a while, but then left to actually put in a general store right next to the bridge in Beecher Falls, across the road from the rail station. And Dad’s real upbringing, and he said most of the lessons he learned in life and business, were learned around the pickle barrel in the general store with the wise men would sit around the barrel talking about what was good business and who got taken.

And you also have to realize that around this time there was also a growing temperance movement. And even though there was not a prohibition on alcohol, certain towns would not have bars or alcohol facilities. Although a lot of people did a lot of drinking. As Dad would call it they’d go off on "toots" for a week or two and then somebody would go and find them; some member of their family would find where they are off to and drag them home.

Deanna: I think that lasted for quite a few years, actually.

Rick: Right. That certainly went at least into the 60’s. I’m not sure if it is still that popular. The town of Beecher Falls had a particular institution that made a lot of money during prohibition because it was the line house. It was built exactly on the border between U.S. and Canada. One door went in from the U.S. and another door went in from Canada and the bar was actually on the Canadian side of the room. So somebody could walk into the line house and go over into Canada, have their drink during prohibition and be legal and then go home drunk.

When his father was off on a "toot," [he was] running the store from a relatively young age – 12 or 13 – for a week or two at a time. So he got to 1, have a good sense of operating a business; but 2, he got to feeling quite possessive about this as his business. And eventually because of the drinking problem, probably more than anything else, his mother and father were going to divorce. And when they were going to divorce he was offered by the manager of Beecher Falls Manufacturing to be staked to buy the store himself and that was when he was 15. And he went up on Canaan Hill and thought about what he was going to do with his life at that age. And decided instead of continuing and perhaps being a big a cog in a small wheel in Canaan or Beecher Falls that he would go out into the world.

So he actually got on the train. He had gotten through his junior year in high school at Canaan High School and then got on a train in Beecher Falls and went down to just north of Boston to the Lowell Technical College where he took a year’s course in bookkeeping. His father, who was a [inaudible] had gone down to Watertown, Mass. just prior to that and was a builder; and had built not only many of the smaller shops and businesses in the town of Watertown. One of the houses his uncle had built was for the chief chemist for Hood Rubber Company, which was at that time, around 1914, the world’s largest rubber company.

The uncle asked the chief chemist if he could find a job for his nephew. So Dad, by that time, had gotten a job in a drug store at the soda fountain and was getting $14 a week and all of the ice cream he could eat. So he at the age of 16 decided that he would take a cut in pay to $12 a week, which was $2 a day for a 6 day week, and go to work in the lab of Hood Rubber Company washing the beakers and test tubes for all of the chemists.

So he started working there and the chief chemist kind of kept an eye on this young fellow and talked to him occasionally and eventually gave him a small project to do on his own. And he did it so successfully that the chief chemist would continue to give him more projects, especially the ones that nobody else in the lab really wanted because it was in some new and uncharted area that nobody knew anything about. Dad said his secret was always that he didn’t know enough to know he couldn’t do it so he went ahead and did it anyway.

So he continued to work in the lab and get some assignments from the chief chemist. And about this time, all of the rubber they used and any other rubber company in the world used, was from the rubber tree. But it was made by taking the sap, spreading it out in sheets, drying it in the sun, putting it in bales, smoking the bales of hard rubber and then shipping those hard rubber bales into a country like the U.S. or the other parts of the developed world, industrial world, who would take large machines to either grind up or put under heavy horse-power-driven rolls to make sheets out of natural rubber. Nothing that was made used the latex that actually came out of the tree to do anything other than make the dry rubber. Until the Brown Paper Company in Berlin, New Hampshire invented the world’s first wet-strength paper towels by dumping the natural latex into the beater that would then deposit particles of fiber that had latex to keep them stuck together when it was re-wet so it didn’t fall apart.

The port of Boston was the port where the latex came through, and the salesman came to Hood Rubber Company asking them if they would try and make a product with it. And he was assigned by the chief chemist along with a professor from M.I.T. to make a natural latex based inner tube. That really wasn’t possible to do and probably still wouldn’t be done today. So Hood Rubber Company gave up on the idea and decided not to spend any more development time on it.

So Dad took some of the latex home and he was looking for a product that could be made without heavy industry. Then he thought the latex would do it. You could make a physical product without having to have a hundred horse-power grinder or a big machine, that the common man could do. So he tried making some pieces for eye glasses or a variety of different ideas that came up.

And at this time his father-in-law, a Mr. Gardner, who had been the chief engineer for Stanley Steamer was out of a job because Stanley Steamer had just gone bankrupt, around 1930. So he was at home and Dad would go off to work and come home and Mr. Gardner would have tinkered around with something. Well he came home in late 1930, or I guess it was maybe January or February of 31, and Mr. Gardner had taken a piece of cardboard which is similar to the cardboard that’s on that back of a pad of lined paper and had cut a shape out of the cardboard in the shape of a devil’s head and had colored the latex red to try and make a red devil’s head. Because the top selling novelty item of the day was the pair of dice hanging from the rear view mirror of a Model A Ford. So he was going to make a pair of hanging red devils head which was in keeping with the younger generations’ inclination towards the new automobile.

But he had a technical problem in that the natural latex coating that he had put on didn’t stick to the cardboard very well. It kind of bubbled up and there were places where it hadn’t attached. And sure enough you could pull it, separate it from the cardboard. And he sat there looking at it for a while and then said “My God man, do you know what we’ve got here?” And he went and took another piece of cardboard and a pair of scissors and took almost the same shape head, but cut a neck on it that extended about 3 or 4 inches below the head so he could actually hold on to the end of the neck when it was dipped and not dip it all the way up, and that was the world’s first latex balloon.

And the pointed ears became a cat face and these were the cat ears and they painted a face of whiskers and a nose and 2 eyes along with the ears and that was also the world’s first novelty shaped balloon. There were balloons made during that time, but they were all made out of solvent dissolved rubber which is similar to rubber cement that you have now, but it was made with petroleum naphtha which is extremely flammable and it was a dangerous occupation to make balloons because one spark and the…

Deanna: Thing would torch.

Rick: …the balloon factory exploded, so. Finding a way to make balloons or any dipped product with natural latex, which is a water based solution, was a very important step and led to many other developments in the world.

But the product that he made as a balloon they made several samples of this and on Friday the 13th of March 1931, he took an opportunity and took a dozen of these balloons that were handmade, around to the various carnival distributors in Boston trying to find somebody to give him an order. The last place he went into was the DiCicco Brothers on Washington Street who gave him an order for 15 gross of cat balloons for April the 19th, which was the Patriot’s Day parade. And the price was $2.50 a gross they were willing to pay.

With his father-in-law and his younger brother, who had been injured in an automobile accident; his brother’s name was Harry Tillotson, and he was crippled and unable to get around, so he took one shift, his father-in-law took another shift and Dad took the 3rd shift doing all of the painting of the balloons. And they made them with a 5 foot long maple dowel with 5 clothes pins attached to the maple dowel and they took 5 one-gallon tins of maple syrup with an extension of about 3 inches brazed to the top of each can and filled that with the red latex and then dipped 5 balloons at a time.

Now every time you made a balloon in order to get the cardboard off you would blow the balloon up and then pull the cardboard out the neck which destroyed the form. So every time you made a balloon you had to take your scissors and cut a new form out of the cardboard. So they were able to produce 13 gross and he delivered them on the morning of April 19 before the parade.

And his real moment of truth in getting to the understanding of his product was when he went to Lexington Common after the parade. And there was a girl who had a home right on the Common and her mother was trying to get her to come in for dinner and she had one of these balloons she had bought at the parade on the end of a string. And before she would come in she pulled the balloon down and kissed it, let it back up and then ran into the house. And he knew that he had a product.

So the next day he went into the DiCicco Brothers and made an arrangement with them where they had a one year exclusive if they would take everything he made each week and pay for everything they took the following day. So he invested $234, which was all of the cash he had; he said it would have been $235 if he had had another dollar. He bought all the cardboard and latex he could get for that, hired a place in the basement of a laundr-o-mat that was abandoned and hired 7 people to start working and then started delivering balloons to the DiCicco Brothers. And he turned his cash…

Deanna: So then he had a cash flow.

Rick: …every week and he did that for 52 weeks and at the end of the 52 weeks had sold $84,000 worth of cat balloons in the worst year of the depression. So, after the end of that exclusive he actually quit his job because he was still working at Hood…

Deanna: And doing the 3rd shift on the balloon thing.

Rick: So he gave up his day job and took a “See the USA” Greyhound bus ticket that got him to anywhere in the U.S. for a fixed price and went around and put a distributor on in each city in the United States and 2 in New York City and built the business from there.

Deanna: We were talking about this earlier about your dad going out with Fred Harrigan who of course is another…the Harrigan family’s noted long standing family in the area. So Neil and Fred went off to the SBA auction for Dixville for the Balsam’s.

Rick: Well, they appeared at this auction and the former owner, Kallman [sp], had borrowed the money to either purchase or finance the hotel from the Small Business Administration and had not made a go of the hotel business in 1953. So the Small Business Administration put it up for auction in 1954.

Only Dad and a former hotel owner, Frank Dodera [sp], who had owned the hotel back in the 1930’s. He was the only one other than Dad and Fred that showed up at the auction and needless to say there wasn’t anybody else to make a bid. And Dad would not even had made a bid other than the fact that he got to talking to Frank Dodera who had the experience of running the hotel, so they made a partnership and it was agreed that Frank would run the hotel as long as Neil Tillotson came up with the money and Neil Tillotson agreed to put the money up as long as Frank would run it for him because he didn’t know anything about the hotel business.