I know a lot of things. Mostly inconsequential and esoteric things, but a lot of things nonetheless. But as Bill James tells us, the world is a billion times more complicated than our minds, and so there's a universe of stuff out there that someone knows, but that I don't.
Case in point, the origin story of Old Bay Seasoning.
Gustav Brunn was a successful spicemonger (we should use 'monger' for more things: zman is a lawmonger, for example) in Wertheim, Germany in the late 1930s. On Kristallnacht, he was one of 30,000 Jewish men who were captured by the Nazis and taken to the notorious Buchenwald concentration camp. At this point in history, the Nazis had yet to initiate their ghastly final solution, and men of means were often able to purchase their freedom. Brunn's family paid a lawyer 10,000 Deutschmarks to secure his release.
Unable to secure funding from banks to start a new business because he was Jewish (and after getting fired from McCormick for the same reason), Brunn got an assist from Katz American, a Jewish-owned competitor in the spice game. Katz loaned him the seed capital necessary to start Baltimore Spice Company, which in 1940 developed a seafood spice to pair with the crabs coming into town at the Wholesale Fish Market, which was immediately across the street from Brunn's business.
The rest, as they say, is history, save for one ironic coda. Brunn's business and McCormick feuded for years as the latter marketed a seafood seasoning in a suspiciously yellow tin. In 1990, five years after Brunn passed, the company sold the recipe for Old Bay to McCormick. Those dicks.
Some of you may know this story, but it was news to me.
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