Poultry Magnate Frank Perdue, 84, Dies

Frank Perdue, 84, died after a brief illness. (File Photo)

After New York, the company expanded to Boston, Baltimore, Washington and Philadelphia and then later to Miami, Chicago and the Midwest. Most of the company's chicken is still sold east of the Mississippi River.

Mr. Perdue became president of Arthur Perdue and Son in 1948. During the 1950s and 1960s, he pioneered special crossbreeding methods to improve quality. He also expanded the company's grain merchandising and soybean oil-refining operations.

His energy was legendary. Building the fledgling business, he worked 16-hour days, with a cot in his office for naps, even though his house was across the street. It was said that when he visited poultry raisers around the Eastern Shore, he'd hop out of the car before it stopped moving.

His impatience occasionally got him in trouble. From 1968 through 1989, he accumulated 37 separate moving violations on Maryland and Virginia roads, most of them for speeding. He paid hundreds of dollars in fines and thousands more to settle claims resulting from two traffic accidents, including a 1974 fatality in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Perdue retired in 1991; his son Jim Perdue became chairman and chief executive. Today Perdue Inc. has 20,000 employees and sales of $2.5 billion. It processes 52 million pounds of chicken and turkey each week.

"It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken," Mr. Perdue regularly told consumers in his TV ads. Over the years, his tough-minded approach to doing business and his alleged strong-arm tactics made enemies and prompted headlines. In 1981, the Justice Department charged the company with unfair trade practices. Processing-plant employees complained of dangerous working conditions, charges that the company has always vigorously denied.

Mr. Perdue was vigorously anti-union and in testimony before the President's Commission on Organized Crime in 1986, confessed to soliciting assistance from the Gambino crime family in New York. "They have long tentacles, and I just figured they might be able to help," he said.

He also was a frequent target of animal rights activists opposed to factory farming, In 1992, a woman dressed in a chicken suit hurled a cream pie in his face.

In 1995, he was inducted into the Poultry Hall of Fame. He also endowed Salisbury State University with funding to establish the Perdue School of Business and served for five years on the University of Maryland board of regents. In 1996, he was instrumental in bringing the Class A Delmarva Shorebirds baseball team to Salisbury and building a stadium named in honor of his father.

Mr. Perdue's first marriage, to Madeline Godfrey Perdue, ended in divorce.

Survivors include his wife of 17 years, Mitzi Ayala Perdue of Salisbury; four children, Jim Perdue of Salisbury, Sandra Spedden of Cambridge, Md., Anne Oliviero of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, and Beverly Jennings of Midlothian, Va., and two stepsons from the second marriage, Jose Ayala of Dallas and Carlos Ayala of Granite Bay, Calif.; 12 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.