An Odd Fragment of Lesser-Known History

 (originally posted on 22nd June 2011)

It's not widely known, but when Bing Crosby retired from public life, he chose to diversify his investments into a wide array of money making opportunities. Many of these were dismal failures, however, three extremely different but equally unlikely projects saved him. The first was a proposed television comedy series set in a German POW Camp during WWII, a project which had met with considerable antipathy at the time, which went on to become the massively successful 'Hogan's Heroes', produced by Crosby's own production company. The second, still in television, was his pioneering use of audio and video recording in television, one of the outcomes of this was the creation of the concept of 'the laugh track', a pre-recorded response which eliminated the need for live studio filming. The third, and even more unlikely, was a chain of dairies. One of Crosby's uncles had owned a dairy farm and he and his brothers and sisters had spent holidays there. The farms were overseen by a man named George Laimling, who had unconventional approaches to animal feed and health care. In 1959, a virulent outbreak of Johne's disease decimated the US' dairy herds, however, due to Laimling's treatments, Crosby's herds (as well as several others) were left almost unscathed. During this time, supplies of domestic milk and milk products, especially cheese and butter, were at an all-time low, and Crosby's farms made millions, and many, though not all, of Laimling's methods were adopted across the nation's dairies. This period was known by many as the Bing Butter Boom.