The next time you grab a bag of Fritos chips with your deli sandwich, you might want to reminisce, as you crunch, about a simpler time when a local man helped introduce this lunchbox staple to New England. His name was Henry Rousseau, and his widow, Fairfield resident Mary Bullard Rousseau, was thrilled to share his story with Fairfield Magazine.

fritos and fairfield
“In 1946, when World War II was over, my husband Henry Harwood Rousseau (known as Pete) and I found ourselves living in Redding…with our two little girls. We wondered how to ‘bring home the bacon’ and Pete had heard about a new product named Fritos, being sold in California.” Apparently, two brothers in Dallas had pressed corn meal through their mother’s potato ricer (a tool with tiny holes that is used to pulp potatoes, turnips, yams and the like). They connected several of the holes to form a line. That way, when the dough was pressed, it came through the slits as a ribbon. They dropped the ribbons into peanut oil, salted them, bagged them, and Fritos were born.

Henry Rousseau decided to join the Fritosbusiness and establish it in the New York area.

“Pete bought a rundown garage in Mamaroneck, New York, purchased second-hand discarded desks from local schools and started [producing the chips] on a shoe-string budget.” The “plant” began making Fritos—which, in Spanish, means “little fried things”—and then started testing the product in the area. “One of the first stores in Fairfield was Mercurio’s because a cousin ran one of the distributorships.”

Everyone in the family got in on the act. Mary herself took bags of the chips to grocery stores and asked shoppers if they would like to try one. Her brother Roger Bullard made decals from which Fritos signs were painted on the side panels of delivery trucks. “He did the painting right in our garage and my grandmother, Mrs. Henry Sturges, would ride around Fairfield in the trucks for the fun of it.”