Israel Boyd and the Wonder Bread story
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John Kiriakou recounts finding the grave of Israel Boyd, one of two brothers whose parents, unable to afford to send them to college to become scientists, forced them into the family bakery business instead. Resenting the hard labor of kneading dough by hand, the brothers invented the first industrial dough mixer, then a machine to cut the dough so every loaf came out the same size, shape, and weight, equipment other bakers soon wanted to buy. One brother then had the idea to add milk to the dough mix, making it fluffier, something no one had done before. They built an army of delivery boys modeled on newspaper routes so customers could call in an order and have hot bread delivered by dinnertime. By the time of the First World War, their bakery, occupying an entire city block behind Union Station, was the largest in America, and the brothers were wealthy beyond their imagining.

From "Mrs. McGill's Delicious Bread" to Wonder Bread

When the brothers decided to retire, they sold the business, whose flagship product carried the unglamorous name "Mrs. McGill's Delicious Bread", to the National Baking Company. The buyer kept the entire operation intact, changing only one thing: the name of the bread, rebranding it Wonder Bread.

A later retelling, and the name discrepancy

Kiriakou has told the story again with several additional details and one that does not match. In this version the brothers are surnamed Butler, and the older of the two is "Israel Butler" rather than Israel Boyd; the buyer is "the National Biscuit Company, Nabisco" rather than the National Baking Company. The transcripts are auto-captioned and Kiriakou himself says of the original product name only that "it was like Mrs. McGillicuddy's delicious bread. That's not it, but it was something like that", so the surname and the purchaser are treated here as unresolved between his own two tellings rather than corrected against outside sources.

The added detail is otherwise consistent and richer. The brothers were born just after the Civil War and wanted to be chemists; their father refused, "We don't have money to send you to college to be fancy chemists. You're going to be bakers", and arranged an apprenticeship at a local bakery, which the retiring baker eventually handed over to them. Kiriakou tracks the reach of each invention by how far west it sold: the mixer as far as Cincinnati, "which at the time was the frontier"; the conveyor-belt dough cutter as far as St. Louis and later Denver. The older brother retired around the start of the First World War, the younger staying on a couple of years more before they sold.

How he finds these stories

Kiriakou explains the method behind the story rather than only its content: he had noticed a private family mausoleum on a traffic island near a cemetery, saw expensive bronze coffins through its glass interior, two brothers, their wives, a daughter and a grandson who died at about six, wrote himself a note, and went to the Library of Congress. The same practice produced what he says is the first Black quarterback in the NFL, who threw only four passes in the 1950s: "why aren't we celebrating this guy?" The research feeds his cemetery books, Remains of the Day and Whispers in the Dirt.

See also

- John Kiriakou
- Remains of the Day
- Whispers in the Dirt
