Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim, a Texas farmhand who built a feed-and-seed store into one of the world’s largest poultry producers while also becoming one of his state’s most colorful political donors — at one point handing $10,000 checks to legislators on the floor of the state Senate — died July 21 at his home in the east Texas town of Pittsburg. He was 89.
The Erman Smith Funeral Home in Pittsburg, Tex., announced his death but did not disclose the cause.
Mr. Pilgrim led Pilgrim’s Pride for four decades, using quirky marketing and taking on significant debt to grow the business from a small-town outfit to an international powerhouse that supplied fast-food chains such as KFC and Wendy’s. Under his leadership as chief executive and chairman, the company went head-to-head with Conagra Brands, Perdue and Tyson before surpassing them all in late 2006.
It was an unlikely ascent for a man who was born on the cusp of the Great Depression and came of age without electricity or running water. But for Mr. Pilgrim, a Baptist who stocked his private planes with Bibles and built a 75-foot structure called the Prayer Tower in central Pittsburg, it was a holy mission that traced its roots to the book of Genesis.
Chickens, he said, were part of the biblical “fowl of the air,” created by God “to sustain man.” To that end, he spent most of his life ensuring that man was fed.
His company received national recognition in 1984, when — inspired by a food trend in Japan — he marketed America’s first whole boneless chicken. By some accounts, it was Mr. Pilgrim who perfected the knifework that enabled the bones to be cleanly removed from the carcass. His public-relations chief described the result as “flat and ugly — it looked like a truck had run over it,” but the item became a hit after Mr. Pilgrim started hawking it on television.
“It’s a mind-boggling thing,” he said in one commercial, holding a beloved stuffed chicken named Henrietta and wearing a pilgrim’s hat. Presenting his boneless creation, he said, “I’d put it right up there with marriage and my first bicycle.”
Mr. Pilgrim went on to become the rare celebrity in the world of chickens, eggs and industrial slaughterhouses. His silhouette was featured in Pilgrim’s logo for many years, and both the hat and the man became regular fixtures in Pittsburg, a town that Mr. Pilgrim and his company helped transform from a small cotton community into a kind of chicken mecca — or poultry hell, depending on one’s species.
“Bo’s town,” as it is sometimes known, was once home to a coffee shop that sold its wares from inside a building shaped like Mr. Pilgrim’s hat. A towering 40-foot bust of Mr. Pilgrim stands near a company distribution center, and on a hill south of a town is a 20,000-square-foot mansion that Mr. Pilgrim called Chateau de Pilgrim, or “my wife’s house.” Some residents preferred the name Cluckingham Palace.
In Pittsburg and Mount Pleasant, a larger community to the north, some residents also filed environmental complaints against Pilgrim’s Pride. In a predominantly African American neighborhood near the company’s mill in Mount Pleasant, chicken fat was said to flow “like thick, foul-smelling soup down the gutters,” the magazine Texas Monthly reported in 1994.
Mr. Pilgrim dismissed the dozens of complaints that were filed with the state environmental agency, saying that all large food companies “from time to time have fines.”
He maintained generally cordial relations with Texas politicians. In part, it was the result of generous donations to Republican causes and candidates, including governors George W. Bush and Rick Perry.
Mr. Pilgrim "was an outsized voice for the business community in Texas," said Ross Ramsey, executive editor of the Texas Tribune. "Legislators wanted him at their hearings, on their side, because he was the kind of person who would bring attention to their cause."
He brought unwanted attention in July 1989, strolling onto the Senate floor to hand personal checks to nine of the chamber’s 31 members while the body was debating a workers’ compensation bill that interested him. Most of the lawmakers returned the checks after Mr. Pilgrim’s actions — what he described as “contributions,” not bribes — were reported by the news media, and the incident led to a tightening of the state’s campaign finance rules.
Mr. Pilgrim was born May 8, 1928, in the 55-person town of Pine, six miles south of Pittsburg. His father ran a general store and died when Mr. Pilgrim was about 10. When his mother remarried, Mr. Pilgrim — one of nine children — moved in with his grandmother. With nine pigs and a few hundred pounds of grain to his name, he supported himself by finding work as a farmhand, gravel-hauler, cotton-picker and grocery sacker.
His brother Aubrey Pilgrim bought a feed store in 1946, and Mr. Pilgrim joined him after graduating from high school. He took over in 1966, after Aubrey died of a heart attack.
The company embarked on major acquisitions, culminating in the 2006 purchase of Gold Kist for $1.1 billion, but was eventually crippled by debt and high corn prices. It filed for bankruptcy in 2008, and Mr. Pilgrim — by then a board member — remained to help reorganize the company. He retired two years later.
The business is now controlled by JBS USA, and claims to be the world’s second-largest poultry producer, processing 10 billion pounds of live chickens each year.
Survivors include Mr. Pilgrim’s wife of 61 years, Patty Pilgrim of Pittsburg; two sons, Ken Pilgrim of Pittsburg and Pat Pilgrim of Lake Creek, Tex.; a daughter, Greta Henson of Dallas; a sister; six grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.
In speeches, Mr. Pilgrim often said that although God had blessed him with a successful business, money alone was not enough. “What is the profit if a man gains the whole world and loses his soul?” he asked at a 1994 gathering in Pittsburg. “My focus is not on selling more chickens, because when I face Jesus Christ on Judgment Day, he won’t ask how many chickens I sold.”
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