( Partner/ Director – Collin Street Bakery History)
Famous for it’s fruitcakes, this Corsicana, Texas Bakery has made quite a name for itself over the years.
From 1896 to be exact.
Their customers over the years have included Enrico Caruso and Will Rogers.
And these days you’ll still find celebrities enjoying their fruitcakes including Monaco’s Princess Caroline and Wheel Of Fortune co-host Vanna White.
The bakery we are speaking about is the Collin Street Bakery.
And who better to talk with us about the bakery’s history is Mr. Hayden Crawford a Partner and Director of the Collin Street Bakery.
Q – I had no idea that fruitcakes were as popular as they are. As I recall Johnny Carson used to make fun of them on the Tonight Show.
A – We curse him for it Gary.
Q – Curse him? Why is that?
A – ( laughs). I guess in a dang, durn way.
Q – I take it his jokes didn’t make you feel too good then.
A – Listen, we’re a $30 million dollar co. and corporate sales make up 20%.
When Johnny Carson made that joke and we don’t know if it was written by him; that was back in the fitness craze and Jane Fonda was doing her aerobics videos, but whatever it was our corporate sales fell from 20% to almost 2%.
We’re not building it back up. We believe that American Airlines, Bell Helicopter of Texas, Texas Instruments, Bank of America and all the big cos. that were buying from us, we think they were afraid that their customers and friends would think they were sending a joke instead of a fine, legitimate product. And so they stopped buying from us and we think that’s what happened.
Q – I never thought Johnny Carson had that much influence.
A – Yeah. You know that Johnny Carson had a huge impact. Everybody watched his show. Everybody listened to it. I wouldn’t miss a night with Johnny Carson. He was so good and so powerful.
Here’s something you’re probably not aware of: Johnny Carson did a show years later where he is sitting by a fireplace and he says, ‘ I am retiring old jokes that were just not any good or well received’.
And he goes through and reads them. Some of’em are Carnac. One of ‘em is he pulls up fruitcake and it’s an envelope and I can’t remember if he’s saying fruitcake or just it’s shipped between person to person or if he just says fruitcake, but, whatever it is he tosses it as if he’s tossing it into this fire.
So, he said to the audience, ‘This is a bad joke and I’m sorry.’
So, we thought that was pretty cool.
Q – Vanna White buys your fruitcake as well as Princess Caroline. These are strictly mail order sales aren’t they? Or, do they have their reps. come to the Collin Street store to pick up fruitcakes?
A – That is correct. It’s a mail order sale and I’ll tell you something fun about that.
Vanna White is my sister-in-law. I call her my sister-in-law but, it’s close. My sister is married to her brother. She’s really not my sister-in-law but, it’s close. I see her from time to time. She came to the wedding. She was buying fruitcakes before her brother met my sister. So, she was already a fruitcake customer. But, she’s been a loyal friend and family member and customer ever since.
Q – What a nice story!
A – Isn’t that cool?
Q – It is.
A – And Lyle Lovett is an avid customer. He had his girlfriend for years order cakes from us. She calls into my assistant right outside my door and I hear ‘em and now they’re married. And they still order cakes every year. So, they’re a loyal customer.
Q – And your assistant still works for you?
A – Yeah. She’s my assistant. She sits out her and she’s been working for me I guess 5 years now. I heard her saying the name Lyle Lovett years ago. I came out after the call was over and said ‘ Is that who I thought it was?’ She said, ‘Yup. His girlfriend just placed the order.’
Q – Did Julia Roberts ( Lyle Lovett’s one time girlfriend) ever call up or come in?
A – I know she never came in and I’m not sure if she was a customer of ours.
Nolan Ryan, the Texas baseball great pitcher for the Rangers is a long time customer.
He buys every year.
The Bushes, George W. and his Dad George H.W. were long time customers. I think George still is. H.W. of course is gone.
Q – In the earliest days of the bakery, Enrico Caruso and Will Rogers would come through your doors. Do you know if they were just passing through or did they hear about the bakery’s reputation?
A – It’s our understanding it’s through the bakery’s reputation.
What happened is, way back in the day, Corsicana was an oil boom town with the added lightening bolt I guess of having two railroads cross in the town.
So, you had all this major economic and social activity coming with the two railroads and all these people coming into work the oil boom. So, it was an enormous attraction for people.
It could have gotten as big as Dallas. This is what a lot of people say because of all that activity but the Founding Fathers of Corsicana didn’t want it to be a huge city and so when the oil cos. started springing up around ‘em they discouraged them funding themselves here and they moved to Dallas and that’s where Dallas got all of it’s growth or at least that’s what the people say around here.
Back to Will Rogers: He was such a big customer of ours that when we built our location in downtown Corsicana on 7th Avenue in 1960, we had a Grand Opening and Will Rogers Jr. came and was our emcee. Isn’t that amazing?
Q – Collin Street Bakery does attract celebrities !
A – I’ll tell you another funny one: Ernest Borgnine and Dom DeLuise both had a personal affection for my Dad who has now passed away but for years he did what I do now and probably did it better.
He was connected to all these movie stars and celebrities and they would call him and write him and we have posted down in our lobby some of these letters and fan mail.
They would autograph stuff and send it over to him because they were such big fans of him because he took care of ‘em with the fruitcakes.
So, Dom DeLuise and Ernest Borgnine would routinely call and write and say, ‘How you doing? What’s going on? Tell me about the fruitcakes.’
Q – How far is Corsicana from Dallas and Houston?
A – That is the pertinent question. It’s a long drive either way.
It’s almost an hours drive to Dallas which makes it convenient for us small towners. And in fact my wife and I went to SMU ( Southern Methodist University) which is a Dallas University back in the 70’s and many of our friends still live in the Dallas area so we drive up from Corsicana to Dallas almost every weekend and will go have coffee and lunch and meet our friends and maybe have a drink and drive back home and do the same thing again.
So, it’s about an hour from Dallas. It’s on I-45.
So, you come down from Dallas through Corsicana and then down to Houston on the same I-45.
Houston to Corsicana is about two and a half hours I guess.
So, just under 3 hours from Corsicana to Houston and about an hour from Corsicana to Dallas.
Q – Are you getting foot traffic then from the larger cities on a daily or weekly basis?
A – Yes, and this is one of the things we had no idea that we were so popular with these people from other cities.
We had this downtown location and it was the only one we had. And about 20 years ago we decided if we built out on I-45 we might catch a lot of traffic from people who decide I’m not going to spend 30 minutes getting off of I-45 going to downtown Corsicana, finding a place to park , going in shopping, and going back to my car.
I’m losing too much time in my commute from Houston to Dallas to whatever.
So , I’m not gonna do it.
So, we thought if we built a highway store where they can just get off and on maybe we’ll catch more of that traffic.
And it was a gamble and a lot of people in our bakery thought it’s gonna hurt the downtown location ‘cause as soon as the highway location opens in the same town , ‘cause they’re both in Corsicana it’s gonna kill the sales of the other one.
It didn’t happen.
Well, it did for a little bit. The downtown did shrink for a little bit but then it grew back.
So, now we have about somewhere north of a million dollars in sales coming out of our little bakeshop in downtown Corsicana and around two million dollars coming out of the I-45 location still in Corsicana but on I-45.
We would hear people come in and say,’ Isn’t this a perfect place ( the I-45 location) to meet? Our grandkids can meet us with their parents from Dallas and the grandparents coming up from Houston.
A convenient drive , not as long either way and then we’ll just pick up the grandkids, have lunch with the family and then we’ll go back our separate ways.’
So, we began to realize the highway location was a meeting point for people where they could stop, meet their friends or family, have lunch, relax, and then go back their separate ways.
Q – How many fruitcakes do you sell every year? Is it 30,000?
A – I haven’t put a number to it that way. I can, but I haven’t.
We always talk about it in terms of pounds.
So, it’s a little bit over a million pounds. Most of that million pounds which is quite a lot of fruitcake batter being produced, probably a little more than 80% of that is made in the last 3 months of the year.
That’s when the demand is for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
So, out of the million pounds, 800,000 pounds of that is made in the 4th quarter.
The fact is and the reason we talk about in terms of pounds instead of number of cakes is because we use that same batter to make an energy bar that weighs about 2 ounces and then a mini loaf that weighs about a pound and then a mini fruitcake that weighs about I think 8 ounces or 10 ounces and then a 2 pound cake, a 3 pound cake and our 5 pound cake. So, all these combined a million pounds every year.
Q – What is the President’s “ E” Award? Does the “ E” stand for excellence? And what President awarded the bakery that?
A – Yeah, O.K. Good one.
I grew up in this business. I was 6 years old when they founded this bakeshop.
I was there when Will Rogers Jr. was the emcee.
The “E” Award was won early on I think back in the 70’s and it was for exporting. It may still be a thing.
Back then the United States recognized major exporters because it was bringing money into the United States economy and we were a major exporter.
We sold to somewhere between 150to 190 foreign countries in any given year.
So, a major outflux of product and it’s in dollars coming back to the U.S. And I believe it was my Dad that received the ‘E’ Award. I’m not positive.
Q – Collin Street Bakery has turned down offers from major food cos. to distribute your products. Why would that be? Wouldn’t that help grow the business even more?
A – Yes. Another good question.
There’s two different ways over time that we looked at our co.
In the early days and when I say early, all the way up until the 1990’s leading up to the 2000’s we were so popular that we actually had to constrict demand. So, since we used mail as one of the things to drive sales we would hold back on prospect mailings because we saw our demand was reaching our ability to output fruitcakes.
What we didn’t want to happen is oversell where a customer says,’ Hey, I want one of your cakes. Here’s my money’ and we didn’t fulfill that order.
And so they actually restricted demand.
In fact my Dad came up with the phrase ‘Never Sold In Stores’ and that goes directly to what you were saying.
We had a tiger by the tail. People were clamoring to come to us, clamoring to get our fruitcake and so we didn’t want to share that profit margin. We didn’t need to be with anybody else. So, we made the maximum amount of income off of just delivering it ourselves.
Now, Johnny Carson comes along. Jane Fonda and the fitness craze come along and all the other things that come along in that era and you start to see sales dropping off, and demand dropping off.
People were actually saying, ‘ I hate fruitcakes’.
These people if you talked to ‘em , ‘You hate fruitcake? Have you ever tried fruitcake? ‘
And they would say No.
And so we came up against that issue and realized we gotta get out there.
Instead of ‘Never Sold In Stores’ we yanked that line and now we’re in almost every major outlet you can get in.
We’re in a thing called AFFIES which is a worldwide military commissary that the United States runs.
We’re in Costco, Wal-Mart, and Amazon.
I’m not sure what big grocery store we’re not in. Nationwide we’re in almost every grocery store and it’s because those sales that used to be guaranteed are no longer guaranteed.
So, we want to be in front of you so you can see our product and pick it up and buy it.
Q – When you’re not talking to a guy like me, what are your duties as a Director of Collin Street Bakery?
A – So, yesterday, a television station , a major one on the Dallas-Ft. Worth are came down and wanted to film our facility from 5 in the morning until 8 to capture our production ‘cause we do come in early and make our products like almost every bakery does. And so I met them. That’s one of the things I do.
I’m the spokesman for television, radio, and newspaper. If someone wants to talk about the bakery and it’s history and what it does and how it makes it’s living I’m typically the one that does that.
The ‘Today Show’ is going to air a spot on us. They came in and filmed us for 6 hours, 2 or 3 weeks ago and they’re going to do a spot on us that should air before Christmas ( 2025).
I also do customer service and public relations.
So, when a customer calls in and says, ‘ I have a complaint. I got a dented tin’ or ‘ I got a rude customer service agent ‘ or ‘ I didn’t like the way you worded your sales letter’ or whatever it is , it comes into my group.
Typically they handle it and I don’t need to handle it. Sometimes it bubbles up to me where someone will just be so angry they want to talk to the Boss.
And so, I’ll get them. My Dad was the best at winning over an angry customer and turning ‘em around.
I will say I’m the second best. He was the champ.
But, what people really want to hear is that they’re heard and a lot of times people get defensive.
You get a mad customer and really all they want to know is I hear you. I understand your problem and I’m gonna fix it for you and that’s what I do and that’s what I did.
Q – I read there was a movie that’s been made or going to be made about your former bookkeeper Sandy Jenkins who embezzled millions of dollars from the co.
How interested do you think the movie going public will be interested in that?
Are we talking a tv movie or a feature film?
A – They’re talking about it as a feature film. They’ve been talking about it for a long time.
They approached us. They actually showed up at our door, the producer and the head writer the one that comes up with the script and two money men. This was probably 7 or 8 years ago and they said, ‘We want to do this movie and we see it as a comedy. We understand how awful this thing was to you all but by the way you are a fruitcake co. after all and you’re in this little Podunk town and yet you were able to have $17 million dollars swindled out of you over 8 years which just sounds so unbelievable. It’s almost got to be a comedy.’
They said we’ve got this comedian who stars in ‘Elf’, Will Ferrell. He said, ‘I love the script. I want to be Sandy Jenkins , I want to be in this movie.’ So, he signs up.
Laura Dern signs up to be the wife .
Henry Winkler’s son Max is a Hollywood director, well respected, and well known turns out movies all the time signs on to be the director.
Right before the movie is supposed to be made and remember this is leading up to Covid, Laura Dern drops out because she’s doing ‘Jurassic Park’ and she had that conflict.
Julianne Moore who turns out to be a friend of Laura Dern takes on the part.
And it’s just going along and it ends.
Apparently in Hollywood when you take on a script it sets a clock and after a certain amount of time and nothing happens it stops the clock and so that movie version was gone.
And so they come back again and a guy named Zach Galifianakis , very strait laced but funny comedian signed on.
And Melissa McCarthy who starred in ‘Ghostbusters’ probably one of the most famous comedians right now signed on with Zach.
And I think that’s when Covid hit.
Then another group came on and I can’t even tell you the guy’s name. He’s some popular star.
He signed on to become Sandy Jenkins.
Anyway, the bottom line is they keep signing on.
It’s Big names that do it and it just times out before the finish line.
Q – If I’m Hayden Crawford and someone comes along and says ‘I want to make a comedy ‘, I don’t see anything funny about someone stealing from my business.
A – Yeah.
Q – But, you seem upbeat about it.
A – O.K. Gary, that’s a good question.
By the way I was one of the few in the bakery who saw this as a positive.
They called first and said, ‘ Here’s what we’d like to do.’
I was like, ‘Man, that is kind of a touchy subject’ and we talked about it for awhile and they called back the next day and we talked about it a little bit longer.
I said, ‘ Look I have a big concern and that is there are people here in the community and probably nationwide that think we’re a bunch of idiot, country bumpkins and had all this money and had it stolen right from under our noses and didn’t know any better. That’s not what happened’.
What did happen was we’re a family owned business and we run it like that and we brought this guy in with full trust and turned our money over to him and just trusted him to run it for us like the family always had before.
We always had employees that were touching our money that was golden. They were totally above board. They were just wonderful people.
We had several different accountants that came in that were that way.
When we brought this guy in unfortunately he was going through a little bit of a rough time and he saw that we carried a lot of money in our petty cash. We just had a lot of cash.
And so he started stealing a little bit here and a little bit there and we trusted him.
He’d come into my office and say, ‘Here Hayden, I know you like wine. Here’s a bottle of wine that I discovered at this restaurant and I think you’re gonna love it’.
He’s go downstairs and on Fridays he would pay all the staff $20 a piece or even $100 a piece just thanking them for what they do.
He would go into the community and he would donate money all across the community.
He would put on big parties.
He was seemingly a very generous guy but he was a low key guy.
We didn’t socialize with him so my business partner and boss and my good friend didn’t know what he was doing outside of the office.
Well, outside of the office he was taking people on jet rides all over the United States and sometimes even to Europe. He would tell them he was just borrowing his rich uncle’s plane.
I walked out with him to the parking lot and he peeled off in his car and it was a different car than I thought he drove.
I said, ‘Hey, is that your car?’
And he said, ‘Yeah. I just got it. You’re driving that car that’s 4 years old . You’re probably paying the same amount you were paying 4 years ago and it’s old and you can probably drive it a few more years. That’s what you do.
What I do is I’m a car trader. And so I’ll go to these shows and I’ll get into a car for a fraction of what you’re paying for yours and mine will be brand new.
When it gets to be about a year old or I’m tired of driving it I’ll take it to another car show , flip it and get another car. That’s what I do.’
Then he would bring in watches, these gorgeous watches.
He said, ‘ Yeah, this is my Dad’s collection and I inherited it and I’m just trying to build on it a little bit. It’s a wonderful collection of my Dad’s watches’.
Well, it was his.
We didn’t know any better. We didn’t follow him around. We’d just see him in the office.
So, the fact was he was totally trusted by us and he ended up using it probably in spite of himself to get around being caught.
In fact he was sitting in the Meeting Room and said, ‘ Somethings’ wrong. We’re not making the money we should be making. What is it?’
And we’d say maybe it’s the profit margins. Maybe we’ve lost track of our profit margins. Our costs are too high. We’re losing money when we’re thinking we’re making money.
Nope that wasn’t it.
Well maybe it’s inventory control ‘cause we buy millions of pounds of ingredients.
We make huge volumes of fruitcake. Maybe we’re buying too much ingredients and at the end of the year they’re getting wasted ‘cause we don’t use them.
So, we checked into that and that wasn’t it.
Maybe it’s hiring practices ‘cause we go from like 100 employees to 800 and back down to 100 all in the course of a couple of weeks. Maybe we’re holding onto these people too long and that’s what’s costing us.
So, we went through all these different things and he was sitting in on these meetings listening to us.
So, he knew what we were looking for and where we weren’t looking and that’s how he was able to take what he took.
But, it was a matter of trust and love that he took advantage of and that’s what happened.
Q – Where was he from?
A – He was from a town not far from Corsicana. Maybe 20 or 30 miles away.
Q – A fellow Texan.
A – Yeah, a fellow Texan.
We didn’t know him or know of him. It’s a tiny little town but he came out of there.
He was brought in by another relatively new accounting guy that was not guilty of this, not guilty of embezzlement. But, this new CFO brought Sandy Jenkins in as his assistant and Sandy after a couple of years being slotted in there kind of started realizing he could fudge here and fudge there with the petty cash and get away with some money and then he started being creative and realized he could actually mess with the books ‘cause he’s the one that did the books.
We had checks going out for $20,000 or whatever and he would go in and write check stubs that would allow him to take out of the funds without being caught.
For instance, he’d want to buy a watch from Neiman Marcus . He would take Check 100 and he’d write it to Neiman Marcus , but he wouldn’t stub it.
He’s write it to Neiman Marcus for $10,000 and put that check in the mail and mail it.
He would take the stub and say ’Void. Mistake in check’.
He’s drop down to 101 and he would say Novelle Pecan Co. or Post Office and write a check for the exact same amount $10,000 and he would take that check and tear it up.
So, the $10,000 check actually got mailed and got cashed and went to Neiman’s but it was just stubbed out as a mistake. And the check that was torn up was stubbed out as one of the vendors we owe money to all the time anyway.
So, it all made sense.
We’d check the books and they would always balance.
Q – What happened to Sandy Jenkins?
A – So, we brought in most of our clerks who worked under our CFO and our accountant Sandy Jenkins. All of them were simply clerks. They were mainly housewives and they knew how to balance the books.
They knew you have this many dollars coming in and this many dollars flowing out.
Does it balance? Yes.
You move onto the next one.
And that’s what they would always do.
We hired a new clerk, a female who came in from the banking system and so she’s more skilled.
And she’s looking at the books and she spots something that doesn’t look right to her.
She goes to Sandy and says, ‘This check doesn’t make any sense to me. What are you thinking?’
He goes, ‘Oh, I know exactly what that is. There’s a glitch in our computer system that will sometimes cause that very thing to happen. I’ll fix it tomorrow.’
This is on a Thursday afternoon. ‘Just leave it on my desk’.
And she goes, ‘O.K.’
She goes back to her desk but she tells people later he just looked funny. There was something about his expression that didn’t sit right with her.
So, she keeps digging through the books and by the end of the evening on Thursday she found $280,000 worth of questionable transactions that she couldn’t quite explain.
She goes to Sandy , her boss with this and she saw his unusual reaction.
So, she goes to our Chief Operating Officer, a guy named Larry Jenkins, no relation, and goes, ‘ This is what’s happening. I’m not sure what this is.’
He looks at it and goes, ‘I believe this is fraud. I think he’s embezzling from us.’
So, Friday morning in the Summer they bring him into their office and say ,’Sandy can you explain this?’
And he goes, ‘ Yeah, yeah. It’s just this weird glitch. I can fix that.’
And they said ,’O.K. but can you explain this one? And can you explain this one?’
He went white. He blanched.
We told him we weren’t going to embarrass him.
At the time we thought it was $280,000.
We told him he needs to leave the office now and we will pack up for him and send his stuff home later.
We’ve called the police. The police will be standing at the stairs.
We won’t stop you or arrest you going out but, we will not let you came back in.
So, that’s how it went on Friday.
Over the weekend we found what was more like $4 million dollars instead of the $280,000.
Over the weekend we found what was about $17 million dollars stolen.
So, the F.B.I. got involved on a Monday and brought my Dad up, me up and the new clerk.
Sandy had bolted by then.
The F.B.I. was interviewing all of us.
They only zeroed in on Sandy when everybody else seemed to have a clean slate and they eventually caught him.
He went to prison.
He was supposed to go for 10 years. About 7 years in he committed suicide.
He had a heart condition and he took a blood thinner.
So, he would take the pill from the nurse and pretend like he was taking it and he accumulated a handful enough to kill him and he took ‘em all at once.
Q – What a story !
A – That’s why I believe people will be amazed at this story and they’ll realize the predicament that we got ourselves in because we simply trusted this guy like one of us. He treated us with total disrespect but e had no idea until that.
Q – I just wonder if if he thought it was worth it in the end.
A – My business partner and my boss said to me when they sentenced him to 10 years he goes, ‘You know if someone told me that I could take $17 milllion dollars and have to spend only ten years in prison for it that might be a fair trade to me.’
So, that’s one look at it.
What Sandy Jenkins actually did is he called my boss and I happened to be in the office.
We were sitting and talking and he his speaker and it’s Sandy calling from prison.
And he says,’ I don’t know why I did it. I called to apologize . I know it’s zero interest to you but I’m sorry I hurt you and your family and your partners and your co and the town. I can’t explain it. I started taking the money ‘cause I felt like I needed it and then I couldn’t stop. Once I started I couldn’t stop. I know that’s not an excuse but I just wanted to say that to you.’
©Gary James
Official Website: collinstreet.com
