By Roger and Marcia Eaton, grandson*
*Relation to Andy and/or Flora Lehr
From a young age, I was aware that Uncle George (Rogers) and his wife, Grace, owned a pie company. All I knew about the company was its location; Oklahoma City. In researching the post on Uncle George, Marcia and I expanded our research to include the pie company.
Grace’s mother worked at the Woolworth Store in Dallas, Texas in the early 1920s. Woolworth stores were similar to the dollar stores that have spread across the country. They were known as a “five and dime” store. Like most Woolworth stores, this one included a lunch café. When the owner wanted to add pies to the menu, Grace’s mother offered to bake sweet potato pies using her own recipe.
Cornelia Alabama Marshall’s pies generated a lot of business for the five and dime store. Customers waited in lines that reached out the door and down the sidewalk for a slice of her pies. Cornelia, known to her family as Bama, continued to bake pies at Woolworths until the Great Depression hit the country. Her husband, Henry, became one of the millions displaced in the workforce.
During the depression, people relied on ingenuity and resourcefulness to survive the dire situation. Henry used the family savings – less than two dollars – to purchase pie ingredients and launched The Bama Pie Company. He sold pies door-to-door to support his family of nine (seven children).
Despite the troubled economy, the business grew. They expanded operations into Oklahoma. Grace led the Oklahoma City operation. Her brother, Paul, joined her. He inherited his father’s ingenuity and eagerly accepted the leadership of the Waco Texas operation. Paul’s brother operated the Tulsa, Oklahoma branch. He eventually swapped the Waco branch with his brother (in Tulsa) to move closer to his wife’s family.
Paul was the sparkplug that catapulted the business from a regional success to a national powerhouse. After several iterations, Paul introduced the hand-held pie. It was a perfect match for the newly developing drive-in restaurant business. I cooked hundreds of them at the Lil’ Duffer restaurants in Knoxville, Iowa and El Dorado, Kansas. He pitched the hand-held pies to Ray Kroc and the Bama Pies were added to the McDonald’s franchise menu.
George and Grace continued to manage the Oklahoma City operation. Paul was succeeded by his daughter, Paula, in 1984. She continues to expand the business.
TULSA’S BAMA COMPANIES CELEBRATES 80 YEARS BY EXPANDING LOCALLY, GLOBALLY
Monday, July 24th 2017, 10:37 am
By: News On 6
A Tulsa company is celebrating a major milestone Monday, July 24th. Bama Companies is marking 80 years of sweet success with a ribbon cutting at a new plant that will provide food for McDonald’s restaurants around the world.
News On 6 sat down with Bama Companies CEO Paula Marshall to talk about how a focus on family has blossomed into a global enterprise.
Inside a new plant in north Tulsa is a rather astonishing sight, row after row after row of hotcakes. A million of them produced every day, served at McDonald’s restaurants across the globe.
Bama Pie had the most humble of beginnings. It started with Paula Marshall’s Grandmother Bama baking pies. But the company exploded when Paula Marshall’s father Paul came up with the ingenious idea of a hand-held pie, which was soon scooped up by McDonalds. Paula took over the reins in 1984 and set out to conquer the world.
“We started putting footprints down in China. We built additional plants here in Tulsa in 1995 and then we built a new facility in Poland,” said Paula Marshall.
Today, Bama has 2,000 employees, 900 of them in Tulsa. They produce more pies and biscuits in a single day, 5-million, than Grandma Bama could have made in a lifetime.
“I love growing, I love building new products, I love building plants and providing jobs,” said Paula Marshall.
But the Marshall family is equally proud of what they’ve brought to the community and their employees who have built the empire alongside them.
“We have so many people here. That have put their kids through college. They have put themselves through school. They’ve gone back to school and are going back doing 2nd and 3rd careers here at Bama,” said Paula Marshall.
With the new hotcake facility, a fourth generation of Marshalls is stepping in. Like his mom, Jacob Chapman is learning the business from the ground up. He’s the operations coordinator at Bama Companies.
Along with the product line, manufacturing and customer service, Jacob Chapman says he’s learning about respect and gratitude.
“I take a lot of pride in what we do and a lot of caring and accountability for what we do, and I try to live the mission every day,” said Jacob Chapman.
Bama Companies cut the ribbon on its new hotcake plant Monday and they will also have several other events to celebrate their 80 years in business.
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