News

Moss column: My dinner with the king of heat

By Bill Moss, Published: March 6, 2013

My dinner with Paul McIlhenny took place at the original Square Root, in Brevard, in the summer of 2010.

I had been digging into the story of Mr. McIlhenny's forebears, who settled in Fletcher in 1870 and finished building the home that they called the Rugby Grange. You can catch a glimpse of it from I-26 between Hendersonville and Asheville near the rest stop and weigh station. The 8,000-square-foot house is up on a bluff there, and you can see it best now, in the winter.
My research into the family that built it, led by the patriarch Gustaf Adolphus George Westfeldt, and his wife, Jane McLoskey Westfeldt, is the subject of my book in manuscript form, The Westfeldts of Rugby Grange. The Fletcher Arts and Heritage Association commissioned me to write the book, one in a series of books on Fletcher history and the community's important figures.
My research led me first to Vaughan Fitzpatrick, a cousin of Paul McIlhenny's and one of my best links to Westfeldt family history both here and in New Orleans, where the family was based. The original Rugby Grange property and land that George Westfeldt added later extended from the big stone house to Broadmoor Country Club to the Asheville airport to the French Broad River. Fitzpatrick and his brothers sold the Ferncliff land to Sierra Nevada Brewing Company for its new brewery. But that's another story.
I'd like to tell today about why I was sitting at the Square Root one summer afternoon with Paul McIlhenny, the chairman and CEO of the McIlhenny Co., the maker of Tabasco sauce. Paul C.P. McIlhenny was a fifth generation Westfeldt descendant. All the extended Westfeldt family members — Westfeldts, McIlhennys, Fitzpatricks, Eshlemans and others — spent a lot of time both at the Rugby Grange property and the family's summer house at Ferncliff, known as the green house, near the tail end of an Asheville airport runway overlooking the French Broad River.

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Paul Carr Polk McIlhenny died of a heart attack on Feb. 23 at the age of 68. He was still working fulltime as the CEO of the Tabasco company, which under his leadership had expanded into new flavors, co-branded the hot sauce with snacks like Slim Jims and stamped the iconic Tabasco logo on ties and other items.
"Those were all Paul's creations," McIlhenny Co. president Tony Simmons, Paul McIlhenny's cousin, told The Wall Street Journal. When the company developed new products, "There was no question who the chief tester was."
Paul McIlhenny was a great source for the book and a great supporter of my Westfeldt project. I was saddened that he did not live to see the book published; like those of justice, the wheels of book publishing grind exceedingly slow.
McIlhenny loved the family of caretakers who farmed, raised cattle and ran a dairy on the Rugby Grange property. A photo he loaned me shows him around 1950 with his father, Paul Westfeldt McIlhenny. In a caption he emailed to me, he said this: "As promised, here's a photo of my father, my twin sister Sara, my younger brother Sammy, myself & the revered Martin Lance at his vegetable garden on the Grange. Paul."
The Lance family's association with the Westfeldts dated to the time when the New Orleans family first came up the mountain in wagons and took up residence in the big stone house. Martin Lance was the third generation member of his family to work for the Westfeldts. After the death of George Westfeldt in 1890, his son Gustaf "Bo" Westfeldt ran the farm by letter to caretakers who lived year-round on the property or on their own farms nearby. Bo Westfeldt and one of his brothers ran the Westfeldt Coffee Co. in New Orleans and visited the Fletcher property as often as they could.
Paul McIlhenny, who had driven over to Brevard from his summer home in Cashiers, told me about the good times he and his siblings and cousins spent at the old Rugby Lodge, a log home that had been added in the early 1900s. It was replaced in the 1970s by a more contemporary summer home, which the family called Rugby Lodge II. The Rugby Grange and Rugby Lodge are owned by Tommy Westfeldt (Thomas Westfeldt II), the current CEO of the coffee company.

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Chaffe McIlhenny, the youngest of the McIlhenny cousins, recalled that the extended family always enjoyed their summer visits to the N.C. mountains.
"That was a big reason why I developed that love of the mountains," said Chaffe, whose father was a prominent New Orleans attorney. "I was the first one of our generation to move here full time."
A nationally recognized glass blower, Chaffe lives on Jeter Mountain with his wife, Bonnie.
Paul McIlhenny loaned me a copy of the biography his grandmother, Gladys Louise Westfeldt McIlhenny, wrote about her father, Bo Westfeldt, who became the family leader after his father's death.
Louise Westfeldt McIlhenny adored her father and was devoted to preserving the Westfeldt family history. She married Dr. Paul Avery McIlhenny. The grandson, Paul C.P. McIlhenny, worked his way up, becoming the sixth family member to be named president of the world's leading hot sauce maker.
"He had a great sense of humor, he was a great story teller. He was a great business leader but he always made it look so easy," Chaffe told me.
The Wall Street Journal story on Mr. McIlhenny's death supported that. "Known for his sense of humor," reporter Mark Peters wrote, "Mr. McIlhenny enjoyed a good joke contest and had won one on Friday during a lunch."

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For my dinner with Paul McIlhenny I ordered clam chowder and fried green tomatoes. I don't remember what Paul ordered but I know what he put on it: Tabasco sauce. I could not tell Paul that I'm a Texas Pete man myself but I do put hot sauce on scrambled eggs, clam chowder and fried green tomatoes. Paul would sprinkle Tabasco, then I'd sprinkle Tabasco. Paul would sprinkle, then I would sprinkle.
Finally, he gave me a sympathetic look and offered what he thought was a polite escape hatch.
"You don't have to put that on just because I am," he said.
No, I told him, I use Tabasco all the time.
I felt honored to be using the stuff in front of the man in charge of making it and shipping it the world over. The world of hot sauce was better for his devotion to heat. I'm sad that Paul McIlhenny was so suddenly taken from the world. I'm honored to have sat down and shared a little taste bud heat with the man, and I'm glad to know that the big stone house of his Westfeldt forebears still stands proudly on Carriage Road in Fletcher.
The Westfeldt and McIlhenny families are all about heat, in their sauce and in their morning brew.

Bill Moss is editor of the Hendersonville Lightning. Contact him at 828.698.0407 or billmoss@hendersonvillelightning.com.