In the spring of 1946, Al Clausi was back home, living with his parents in Brooklyn, having just returned from the South Pacific, where he had been stationed during the war. He was trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. He was twenty-four, with an undergraduate degree in chemistry, and had applied to medical school at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He whiled away the weeks waiting to hear back from the school, waiting to get on with his career. One day, his father burst through the front door. He’d been down at the local American Legion hall, and he was holding a copy of its magazine, pointing to a help-wanted ad. “He said to me, ‘You’re a chemist, aren’t you? Here is this food company in New Jersey advertising for chemists.’ And I said, ‘What’s a food company want with a chemist?’ I had worked at an explosives plant in Niagara Falls, and I knew chemistry for petroleum, and chemistry for pharmaceuticals, but food? I took the job out of curiosity.”
