TRADER JOE AND TRADER VIC: FRENCH CANADIANS, OTHERNESS, AND THE TASTE FOR DIFFERENCE

Leslie Choquette and Jay Gitlin

We assume that most of our U.S. readers are well-acquainted with Trader Joe’s, a chain of over 600 grocery stores with headquarters in Monrovia, California. Perhaps those who shop at Trader Joe’s do so because such a choice represents good taste and a hope that the groceries have been chosen and produced by those who share values of fair trade and organic farming. (Mind you, none of this may be true —  but this article is not intended to be an exposé or a celebration.) The Trader Joe’s in Orange, Connecticut, serves a community that is highly liberal, often academic, and decidedly not mass-market oriented. Above all, Trader Joe’s customers seem to appreciate clever, witty marketing and grocery items that are distinctive and different. Instead of Minute Maid orange juice, you can get fresh squeezed tangerine juice. It’s damn good — and not particularly expensive.

Younger readers may not remember Trader Vic’s, although this restaurant and Tiki bar chain still exists. It enjoyed the height of its fame and pinnacle of success in the 1950s and 1960s when Tiki culture, a romanticized appropriation of South Pacific cultures (Hawaiian, Polynesian, Mâori, etc.) was in vogue; witness the popularity of the 1949 musical and 1958 movie by Rodgers and Hammerstein, South Pacific. (Tiki is a Mâori word meaning “first human.”) Fifty years ago, there were twenty Trader Vic’s in the United States, two in Canada, and one each in Puerto Rico, Havana, London, Munich, and Tokyo. The popularity of the chain, headquartered in Emeryville, California, decreased in the 1980s, but it has revived in recent years, primarily in the Middle East where there are now ten branches. Today there are only three in the United States, along with two in East Asia, two in Europe, and one in Seychelles. In New York City, Trader Vic’s was located in the Plaza Hotel. Donald Trump bought the Plaza in 1988 and chased Trader Vic’s out because he considered it “tacky.” No comment.

We wondered, given the similarity in names, if there were a connection between the two chains. Indeed, there are many connections. The simplest one is this: the founder of Trader Joe’s renamed his stores because of the popularity of Trader Vic’s, especially in California. As someone posted on the internet, both chains had a “beachy vibe.” But there is more — we think much more. The two founders, Victor Jules Bergeron (1902-1984) and Joseph H. Coulombe (1930-2020), were the son (Vic) and grandson (Joe) of French-Canadian immigrants. Vic’s father worked as a waiter in San Francisco, while Joe’s father was a laborer in San Diego during the Depression. As historians of French North America, we thought this intersection deserved further exploration and explanation. While we engage in a bit of genealogy and history, please meditate on this “beachy” tidbit: surfers and Dharma bums collided on the West Coast (see Saltwater Buddha by Jaimal Yogis). The author of The Dharma Bums (1958) was Jack Kerouac, the Franco-American from Lowell, Massachusetts who coined the phrase, “Beat Generation.” Kerouac spoke no English in his early childhood, but more on him later. Let’s dig a little deeper, starting with the history of Trader Joe’s and its founder.

Joseph H. Coulombe — Trader Joe — was born in San Diego in 1930 and grew up on an avocado farm in Del Mar. He served in the air force for a year, graduated from Stanford in 1952, and stayed to earn an MBA in 1954. The left-handed economics major then went to work for Wayne “Bud” Fisher, executive vice-president of Owl Rexall, managing the parent company’s drugstores in California. (Rexall owned over a thousand stores nationwide.) In 1958, the company launched Pronto Markets, a convenience store modeled on the Southland Company’s 7-Eleven chain. When Rexall president Justin Dart tired of retail after purchasing Tupperware in 1960, Coulombe decided to buy the six Pronto Markets in the Los Angeles area. He did this in May 1962 by selling his house, borrowing money from his father and grandmother, and using all of his wife’s savings. He then sold half the stock to his Pronto employees, writing in his book, Becoming Trader Joe: How I Did Business My Way and Still Beat the Big Guys: “God bless the people who had such faith in me!”

Fair treatment of his employees and higher-than-usual wages quickly became a theme and article of faith. In a practice he describes as “selfish altruism,” Coulombe offered better wages and benefits than other convenience stores. (He did this to avoid Local 770 of today’s United Food and Commercial Workers union.) His stores, therefore, had to have a “high-value-per-cubic-inch inventory.” He achieved this by obtaining a liquor license — an expensive proposition that allowed the stores to add hard liquors to their existing supply of beers and wines — and by experimenting with limited timeframe opportunities, what he calls “discontinuities.” Coulombe figured he had at most two or three years before 7-Eleven entered California and the “guillotine would drop on Pronto.” Supermarkets were lengthening their hours, so convenience was no longer a critical attraction of convenience stores. In addition, Coulombe felt it was time to get away from this retail genre, which, in his words, “served the most basic needs of the most mindless demographics with cigarettes, Coca-Cola, milk, Budweiser, candy, bread, eggs.”

And here’s where his reading habits and thoughtfulness served him well. At the height of his success in 1965, with a chain of eighteen Pronto convenience stores, Joe Coulombe rethought his retail future. His mentor, a professor named Bill Steere, had given him a subscription to Scientific American, where he read that in 1932, only 2% of qualified Americans attended college; by 1964, that number had risen to 64%. Another article, this time in The Wall Street Journal, predicted a significant rise in international travel with the introduction of the Boeing 747 in 1970. Thinking like a historian, Coulombe reasoned that the previous century had witnessed the rise of brand names due to technological improvements in packaging and distribution along with use of media to promote branded products. Larger self-service markets had replaced older mom-and-pop grocery stores, and homogenization had triumphed. But with an increasingly well-educated and well-traveled population, there would be more people looking for something different and distinctive — not the same old boring items. Coulombe claims to have predicted in 1966 that network television had peaked “with its 95 percent audience share.” He would cater to the emerging group “dissatisfied with this mass culture.” In his words, “you might think of Trader Joe’s as one of the more esoteric cable channels; the supermarkets as NBC-CBS-ABC.”

And so Joe Coulombe rebranded his stores and himself. With the United States at a “peak of prosperity,” with low unemployment and inflation, Coulombe wanted to capitalize on fun, leisure, and a distinctive assortment of goods beyond the humdrum items available at ordinary supermarkets — something different. The new stores would be named Trader Joe’s, a vaguely romantic appellation that might conjure up Trader Horn and the South Seas. (There was a real Trader Horn, a man named Smith who traded for ivory in Africa, and a 1931 movie by that name that played with images of imperialism and primitive cultures.) But the name came more directly, Coulombe acknowledges, from a popular bar and restaurant chain: “Trader Vic’s was at its peak. The thirty-somethings (including us) were drinking not Chardonnay but Mai Tais and Fog Cutters (you know, those drinks that come with little umbrellas).” Some friends and marketing people thought it was a “terrible name” that would create confusion between the two chains, but Coulombe stuck with it. Eventually Trader Joe’s became more famous as Trader Vic’s popularity waned.

When the first Trader Joe’s opened in August 1967 in Pasadena, it featured a Polynesian roof and nautical artifacts, including a ship’s bell, oars, and even half a rowboat. All the employees wore Polynesian shirts and Bermuda shorts, and the manager was called Captain; the assistant manager, First Mate; and the clerks, Native Bearers. Hawaiian music played on the loudspeakers because The New Yorker had observed that such music slowed customers down, thereby encouraging them to linger and spend more money. For Coulombe, the location was perfect — a larger space than he had wanted, but in an area loaded with colleges, a major hospital, and (as Coulombe describes his original customer base) “the overeducated and underpaid.”

You may be surprised, even disturbed, by this description — Coulombe’s own — of the first Trader Joe’s. But let’s back up for a minute and consider the story of Trader Vic’s before continuing with Trader Joe’s rise to popularity. Trader Vic was a generation older than Trader Joe and, predictably, very conscious of his ethnicity. Both his parents were francophones, and he grew up speaking French in a working-class environment. San Francisco’s well-known journalist Herb Caen, in his preface to Frankly Speaking: Trader Vic’s Own Story, describes him as having a “craggy face, a friendly-gruff manner, [and] a juicy vocabulary of French and English expletives.” Victor’s father — “a big, tall French Canadian” — “knew all about trapping for animals” and “was a great hunter and fisherman.” (The fur trade is an important theme in French-Canadian history. Trader Joe’s great-grandfather was a voyageur in the fur trade, and the décor of Trader Vic’s first restaurant consisted of snowshoes, deer heads, “and other paraphernalia of a hunting lodge.” Both Coulombe and Bergeron were wheeler-dealers, but their use of “Trader,” we think, also betrays a subconscious awareness of this legacy. The French word traiteur means both fur trader and caterer.)

Stricken with tuberculosis at age four, Victor Bergeron was admitted to the French Hospital in San Francisco. Two years later, his left leg was amputated to arrest the progress of the disease. (Aside: The French Hospital of San Francisco, the city’s oldest and first private hospital, was founded by the Société Française de Bienfaisance Mutuelle in 1851. There was also a French Hospital in Los Angeles, founded in 1860. During the Gold Rush, an estimated 30,000 gold seekers from France arrived in California, and the period from 1850 to 1880 was a kind of “golden age” for the French in California. There was an even a French Quarter in East Los Angeles from which the French Dip sandwich comes — invented, allegedly, by Philippe Mathieu in 1918 at his restaurant, which still exists. But California’s Francophones were not all from France. Two of the most important doctors at San Francisco’s French Hospital were French Canadians, and Los Angeles even had two mayors born in Quebec. A few years ago, a Yale student from Los Angeles, Andrew Bilodeau, wrote a paper for Jay on French Canadians in California, which included the story of his parents’ journey from Quebec. Andrew also provided a souvenir of L.A.’s French-Canadian presence — a hat from the famous Poutine Brothers food truck. French Canadians in California — not as unusual as you might think.)

We have mentioned food for a reason. The taste for distinctive and well-made comestibles provides another link between our two Traders. Victor Bergeron wrote that his dad was a “fantastic cook,” known for Ham and Eggs Hawaiian with fried sliced bananas and canned pineapple and his sorrel or sour grass soup (a rural French specialty). He also made a sweet concoction called raisinette from grapes, green pears, and apples. For a treat, the family purchased sausages known as crépinettes from a Frenchman who had “a butcher shop on wheels” in their working-class neighborhood. Trader Joe, meanwhile, spent much time as a child with his grandmother, Blanche Dumas, a “third-generation Vermonter, her people having left Quebec long before my grandfather. In Southern California, she re-created her Vermont village, Northfield Falls.” The Coulombe family insisted on real maple syrup, and Trader Joe later arranged to buy it in fifty-gallon drums from a Quebec cooperative for his stores. Bottling it under the Pilgrim Joe’s label in honor of his family’s New England roots, he sold it at a great price, noting that it appealed to his wine-retailing instincts: “each vintage is different in quantity and quality.” (The irony of a Franco-American selling Quebec maple syrup under the label Pilgrim Joe’s will not be lost on Franco-American readers.) Keeping in mind this connection between working-class French-Canadian culture and food and drink retailing — appreciating and knowing how to profit from the taste of difference — we return to business history and the creation of Trader Vic’s.

  We left Victor Bergeron at age six in the French Hospital of San Francisco. He took his first job at Fisher’s Bakery when he was seventeen, saving enough money to buy a wooden leg. He then became an assistant bookkeeper at the posh Athenian Nile Club in Oakland; this was significant “because for the first time I was exposed to food that was foreign to me, food that I had never eaten in my own house.” Subsequently, his brother opened a gas station, which Vic agreed to run. Then, with money from an aunt, he bought an empty lot from a carpenter across the street from his relatives in Oakland. For $500, that carpenter built a restaurant — 22 feet by 26 feet with “two booths, two johnnies, place for a pinball machine, place for a potbellied stove, and a place for the bar.” Vic opened Hinky Dinks on November 17, 1934, serving whiskey (15 cents), beer (10 cents), and lunch (20 cents). (The name may have come from the World War I song, “Mademoiselle from Armentières,” containing the lyrics “Hinky-Dinky Parlay-Voo.”) It was the Depression, but the business prospered. Blessed with a bit of French-Canadian blarney, Bergeron featured amateur nights, free chicken Fridays, and magic tricks. Always on the lookout for supply-side bargains, he understood the formula for success: keep it cheap, keep it interesting. The place was always crowded, and he built an extra room. For laughs, he said, “I would stick an ice pick in my wooden leg.”

  A year or two into his new enterprise, Victor Bergeron realized: “I didn’t know much about concocting fancy drinks, especially those with a tropical flavor.” To remedy this (and doubtless attract a clientele with more money to spend), he went in search of knowledge and novelty. First, he took a Southern Pacific train through Santa Fe and Texas to the great center of cocktail culture, New Orleans, where he met Albert Martin of the Bon Ton Bar on Magazine Street. There he learned how to make the Ramos Gin Fizz. Continuing on to Havana, he met another famous mixologist, Constantino Rapalo of La Florida Bar, who taught him to make a proper daiquiri and the Cuban Presidente, another rum-based drink. (Note: Grain-based spirits were in short supply during Prohibition, World War II, and the early postwar years. Gin, and especially rum, were easier to obtain — in fact, there was such an oversupply of rum that buyers were often forced to purchase several cases for each case of whiskey. In New Orleans, this led bar owner Pat O’Brien to concoct his famous Hurricane. At Yale’s drinking and dining establishment, Mory’s, someone purchased 3,000 gallons of surplus rum so that in the early fifties, members and guests were buying rum drinks at 25 cents each.)

  Still not satisfied, Bergeron journeyed to Los Angeles, where a Hollywood bar called Don the Beachcomber captured his imagination. Donn Beach, the owner, had recently moved on from his original décor (fishing nets, driftwood) and vibe (think early surfer bum) to add more of a South Seas feel. Vic loved it and even bought some stuff from Donn to hang on the walls of his own modest bar. Then, in consultation with his wife, he decided they needed a new image, a place named “for someone we could tell a story about. My wife suggested ‘Trader Vic’s’ because I was always making a trade with someone. Fine, I became Trader Vic.”

  When we zoom out a bit, we notice some intersections that fill in the larger canvas. The same year that Victor Bergeron changed the name of his humble establishment and started imagining a larger stage, the Golden Gate Bridge opened — May 27, 1937. The next year in New Orleans, in the Swan Room nightclub — today’s Carousel Bar of the Hotel Monteleone — a bartender invented one of the city’s greatest drinks, a Sazerac alternative called the Vieux Carré cocktail (rye, cognac, benedictine, vermouth, Angostura, and Peychaud’s bitters). The inventor was one Walter Bergeron (no relation), born in Thibodaux, Louisiana. As for Donn Beach, creator of the first beachcomber/South Seas attraction and bar, his real name was Ernest Raymond Beaumont Gantt, born in Texas and raised in Mandeville, Louisiana, across from New Orleans. And remember the Ramos Gin Fizz? It turns out to have been invented by a Frenchman named Philippe Machet, the owner of a package liquor store in Baton Rouge next to the bar where Ramos worked. Machet, who was also Louisiana’s vice consul to France, gave the recipe to Ramos when he tired of preparing it for his own customers. The drink became famous. When Ramos retired, he sold the secret recipe to the Roosevelt Hotel (home of the Sazerac), which trademarked Ramos’ Original Gin Fizz in 1935. Here’s one more thread to conjure: in 1936, a student named Thor Heyerdahl and his young wife Liv set sail for the Marquesas Islands to pursue their interest in Polynesian fauna and culture and live what The Book of Tiki calls a pre-hippy existence. Thor would return to the Pacific in 1947 on a bamboo raft — the famous Kon-Tiki Expedition. What had begun with Don the Beachcomber and Trader Vic would soon become the Tiki craze.

  But before we explore the Tiki phenomenon, let’s consider an early Hollywood movie featuring a Polynesian setting and theme: Bird of Paradise, released in 1932, starring Dolores del Río. Already a star, Del Río was a Mexican actress considered as the “female Latin Lover.” In the film, directed by King Vidor, she plays Luana, a Polynesian beauty with a flower in her hair, living on a tropical island somewhere in the Pacific. Three years earlier, in a silent movie that cemented her fame, Evangeline, she portrayed a brave young Acadienne searching for her lost lover in Louisiana; they had been separated by the tragic deportation of the Acadian people in 1755 — known in Canada and Louisiana as the Grand Dérangement. Del Río later posed for and funded a statue of Evangeline in St. Martinville, Louisiana. Polynesian? Mexican? Cajun? Two bartenders named Bergeron?

  In his search for mixological expertise and distinctiveness, Victor Bergeron seems to have entered and been transformed by a multicultural tropical zone that included Louisiana, Cuba, and images of the South Seas. Author Francesco Adinolfi calls it Mondo Exotica, the world of different cultures. (The subtitle of his book is “sounds, visions, obsessions of the cocktail generation.”) Victor Bergeron began his journey in New Orleans, a city that was part of French North America, a land of southern Bergerons, as well as part of the Caribbean. So Hinky Dinks became Trader Vic’s: “We bought a neon sign and we were in business… Just closed one day at Hinky Dink’s selling sandwiches and opened the next day as Trader Vic’s selling tropical drinks and Chinese food.”

  The restaurant expanded its clientele during World War II, in which Vic’s “barboy,” Paul Wong, was killed in action. (Wong and Vic had spent time in San Francisco’s Chinatown together “studying how to prepare and cook Chinese food,” and Wong’s uncle had built the Asian barbecue pit when Trader Vic’s became a Chinese restaurant.) Throughout his life, Victor Bergeron went out of his way to support servicemen and veterans. During the war, he provided free liquor to enlisted men, and because of his bar’s popularity with naval officers, he started Trader Vic’s officers’ clubs in the Philippines, Okinawa, and Saipan. (We must also report that Vic kept a six-foot tall “Tahitian rag doll” in the bar, and if you were an officer out of the South Pacific, you could “write your name on Suzie Bell and kiss her whatever-you-call-it.” Without delving further into this aspect of colonialism, we recommend a book by David Farber and Beth Bailey, The First Strange Place: Race and Sex in World War II Hawaii.)

  One day in 1944, Vic decided to come up with a new drink. Experimenting with seventeen-year-old Jamaican rum, syrups, curacao, and lime juice, he tried it out on friends from Tahiti, who dubbed it “mai tai roa áe,” “out of this world, the best.” The mai tai not only cemented Bergeron’s place in history (despite Donn Beach’s rival claim); it ensured the growing popularity of his establishment and laid the foundations for postwar expansion.

  Until World War II, the island world of the Pacific remained both distant and mysterious, but the war provided actual visits and encounters, reinforcing the fascination. Following Heyerdahl’s 1947 expedition, this cultural thread became an outright craze: the Polynesian pop phenomenon known as Tiki. Carved Tiki figures appeared in bars and restaurants, and men looked forward to girlfriends and wives wearing grass skirts and bikinis. (Think of Brian Hyland’s 1960 hit song, “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.”) And who didn’t enjoy the Pu Pu platter, the name of which comes from the Hawaiian word for appetizers or small bites. (For an old-fashioned Polynesian Lounge and Chinese restaurant, try Tiki Port in Hyannis on the Cape.)

  The Tiki craze peaked in the late 1950s. Pan Am had begun commercial aviation to Hawaii in 1935, but mainstream tourism increased with jet travel and statehood in 1959. Disneyland got into the act in 1963 when they opened the Enchanted Tiki Room, their first attraction to use audio-animatronic figures: four multicultural parrots named Fritz, Michael, Pierre, and José.

  In this postwar period, Trader Vic not only prospered; it became a national, even international, brand. Expansion began in 1948 with a branch in Seattle at a Western hotel (the Benjamin Franklin). This led to locations in Hawaii and San Francisco, but the turning point came when Conrad Hilton asked Bergeron to open a restaurant in his new hotel in Los Angeles, the Beverly Hilton, which opened in 1955. (A celebrity hangout for decades, the Trader Vic’s in Beverly Hills closed after 62 years in 2017.) Hilton licensed the Trader Vic’s brand, with Bergeron overseeing the staffing and operations for an annual salary. The Hilton branches proved highly profitable, and other hotel chains soon entered the Tiki race with their own versions: Sheraton had Stephen Crane’s Kon Tiki restaurants, and Marriott the Kona Kai Tiki Bars. As for Bergeron, his empire by the early seventies included twenty Trader Vic’s in North America and one in London. He also marketed his own line of products, including Tiki mugs, drink mixes, glassware, chopsticks, and recipe books. To add to his legend, Trader Vic popularized the once ubiquitous appetizer “rumaki”: pieces of chicken liver and water chestnut wrapped in bacon, marinated in soy sauce and ginger, then fried or baked. He was even, it seems, an early promoter of sushi.

  By the 1950s, Trader Vic’s had become a destination for urban tourism. Bergeron built a commercial empire on the distinctiveness of what he had to sell, while providing good deals when opportunities in the supply chain allowed him to do so. All of this explains why his namesake and admirer, Trader Joe Coulombe, chose to emulate Trader Vic Bergeron when he opened the first Trader Joe’s in 1967. The two Traders didn’t only share a common name and ethnicity; their strategies as businessmen were remarkably parallel.

  As we have seen, when Joe Coulombe opened his first Trader Joe’s in 1967 in Pasadena, he made sure it would be an entertaining destination, featuring — with a nod to Trader Vic’s — a Polynesian theme. And much like Trader Vic’s, Trader Joe’s success in this period depended on the sale of alcoholic beverages. As Coulombe notes snarkily in his book, “the correlation between alcohol consumption and levels of education is about as perfect as one can find in marketing.” For his highly educated consumer base, he reasoned, wine would be perfect. Finding various loopholes in the fair-trade laws regulating the sale of alcohol in California, Coulombe made his chain into the state’s “leading retailer of imported wine” within a few years. He then moved into selling private-label California wines, anticipating the Chardonnay craze of the 1980s. By providing entertainment and selling good bottles of wine for modest prices, Trader Joe satisfied the first two of what he called the three “d’s” of retailing: “destination” and “deal.” He then enhanced the “distinctiveness” aspect of his star product by holding wine tastings in his stores and issuing his first Insider’s Wine Report in 1969. Adding an Insider’s Food Report the following year, Coulombe concluded that his patrons were not mere consumers, “dolts who are driven by drivel to buy stuff they don’t need or even want.” Rather, they were “reasonably well informed” people with a “thirst for knowledge.” (In 1985, a Canadian supermarket chain paid $100,000 for the use of the Insider’s Report name, at which point Trader Joe’s newsletter acquired its current name, The Fearless Flyer.) According to Coulombe, the concept and design of the newsletter borrowed from Clay Felker’s New York; that magazine’s brilliant and innovative column, “The Passionate Shopper,” begun in 1968, had been the first to fold adventure, discovery, history, and insider knowledge into shopping — appealing to the inner maven in all of us. Both New York and The Fearless Flyer made extensive use of nineteenth-century illustrations, post-Woodstock graphic design, humor, and whimsy.

  Having found that ordinary branded supermarket products were not particularly good sellers, Coulombe focused on distinctive private-label items — products that were inherently special or carried clever names. In his words, as customers “moved down the aisles they would read secret messages on products” such as Sir Isaac Newtons, Disraeli or Gladstone’s British Muffins, and coffee beans labeled Heisenberg’s Uncertain Blend. Relevant to our discussion, he also sold Kiwi from Paradise Juice and started ethnic translations of Trader Joe including Pilgrim Joe, Trader José, Trader Giotto, and, of course, Trader Jean. Such names have not escaped criticism, but they were logical extensions of Coulombe’s desire to enhance the entertainment value of shopping via the notion that Trader Joe’s and the items sold within were somehow different.

  Coulombe’s next marketing phase, which he calls “Whole Earth Harry,” came as a result of his discovery of health foods. Trader Joe’s began selling vitamins, certified raw milk, and granola, their first private-label food product. Continuing the search for inexpensive specialty items with snob appeal, Coulombe began importing Brie from France and, as we have seen, real maple syrup from Quebec. The combination of secret messages, an insider’s newsletter, special deals, and a newfound belief in the value of health food created a sense of cult-like belonging among his customers — what Coulombe calls the loyalty and power of “True Believers.” Describing Trader Joe’s as a “cult” retailer, Coulombe conjures up the idea of Trader Vic’s Tiki temple.

  In 1979, German billionaire brothers Karl and Theo Albrecht bought Trader Joe’s company, retaining him as CEO. The first East Coast stores opened in the Boston area (Cambridge and Brookline) in 1996, by which time the clientele had morphed from “overeducated and underpaid” to upwardly mobile “yuppie.” But this shift, which mirrored national trends, did not represent a major departure; the taste for difference remained an article of faith.

  Above all else, Joseph Coulombe and Victor Bergeron were remarkably astute and successful businessmen who knew how to survive and also exploit the vicissitudes of the marketplace. Joe Coulombe consciously modeled his store on Trader Vic’s, and the two men and their retail operations had much in common. To further explore these connected histories, let’s take a deeper look at the roots of these two Franco-American entrepreneurs from California — that is, their French-Canadian heritage — who they were, and why it matters.

  In his autobiography, Trader Vic writes of his French-Canadian father: “His parents were Huguenots who were driven out of France and settled in the backwoods of Canada. He never put his foot inside a church. While he never said anything against it, I think he had a kind of contempt for monsieur le curé.” This description caught our attention because until Quebec’s Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, French-Canadian culture and Catholicism were virtually synonymous. Whether in Quebec or its diaspora, French-Canadian elites promoted the ideology of survivance: the struggle to maintain French language, Catholic religion, and French ancestral traditions in the face of Anglo-Protestant dominance. Furthermore, most nineteenth-century French immigrants to Canada (Trader Vic’s grandfather, Narcisse Bergeron, lived from 1821 to 1882) were Catholics, including several thousand priests, monks, and nuns opposed to France’s anti-clerical Third Republic (1870-1940).

As expected, our reconstruction of the Bergeron family’s genealogy revealed Trader Vic’s tale to be completely false. His father, Victor Bergeron Sr., belonged to the seventh generation of Catholic Bergerons in Quebec. Their French ancestors, father and son Pierre and André Bergeron, had arrived in New France around 1665 from a village in central western France, where André was baptized Catholic in 1642. After working as indentured servants for a protégé of the Jesuits, they acquired their own farm on the south bank of the St. Lawrence. When Victor Sr. was baptized by the parish priest of La Présentation in 1863, three generations of Bergerons had been farming in or near this southern Quebec village, fifty miles north of the Vermont border.

What could explain this fabulation on the part of Trader Vic or his father? Victor Sr., who grew up on the farm with his own father and grandfather, certainly knew they were Catholic French Canadians. Yet few American myths are more potent than that of the Pilgrims — persecuted Protestants seeking religious freedom in the wilds of America, where they sowed the seeds of a new nation. (Not for nothing did Trader Joe label his Quebec maple syrup Pilgrim Joe’s.) Inventing a Huguenot origin in the Sister Republic (France) allowed the Bergerons to claim a French version of this story, which identified them as loyal Franco-Americans — and not Catholic French Canadians.

Although Trader Vic penned his autobiography in 1973, his father naturalized in California in 1895, a time of intense nativism with a strong anti-Catholic component. (The New York Times even editorialized in 1892 that French-Canadian immigration was “part of a priestly scheme” to bring New England “under the control of the Roman Catholic faith.” See David Vermette’s A Distinct Alien Race.) Perhaps Victor Sr. felt the need to prove his Americanism by lying about his ancestry, especially after he married Trader Vic’s mother, a French peasant woman who was a pious Catholic.

Religion also played a role in the Coulombe family’s integration into American society, as seen through the story of Trader Joe’s paternal grandmother, Blanche Dumas. Since his mother worked full-time as an educator, Joe Coulombe was raised by this grandmother, the Vermont-born child of Vermonters John Dumas and Louise Greenwood (anglicized from Boisvert). Although both Louise and John had French-Canadian parents, they chose to marry in Northfield’s Congregational church. Their incorporation into the Yankee community appears to have been seamless, despite their ancestry, thanks in part to this religious choice. (However, Blanche herself adopted the religion of her Catholic spouse, Joseph C. Coulombe, a Quebec-born French Canadian who moved to Vermont with his family as a child.)

Linguistic as well as religious difference persisted in both the Bergeron and Coulombe families, despite the transition to English which began with the immigrant generation. Although Trader Vic never says so explicitly, he did not learn English until he went to school; on the 1910 census, his parents listed eight-year-old Vic and his younger sister as French speakers, although they and twelve-year-old Narcisse spoke English. Significantly, the only French terms in Trader Vic’s autobiography are names of foods, but knowledge of the language must have facilitated his monthlong visit to Tahiti, where he wrote his Pacific Islands Cookbook and acquired “a fresh approach to Polynesian foods and customs.” Language, ethnicity, and food came together in Trader Vic’s commitment to serve “different food, interesting food, something they [his customers] wouldn’t cook at home.” Inspired by the simple French dishes of his childhood, his “continental” recipes included his mother’s oxtail stew and leg of lamb with beans. Beans (haricots) were also a staple of French North American cuisine, celebrated in Clifton Chenier’s famous song, “Les haricots sont pas salés” (the beans aren’t salted); his Louisiana French pronunciation of les haricots even became the name of a new creolized musical genre, zydeco. Interestingly, Trader Vic’s affection for French food did not extend to France’s fabled haute cuisine, which he describes as “the same old French crap.” His openness to culinary difference had a strong class component and was restricted to “peasant” and “primitive foods.”

Trader Joe, as a third-generation American (fifth generation on the Dumas side), spoke only “hotel-level French,” yet he proudly sprinkles French phrases (sometimes misspelled) throughout his book. In his preface (entitled “What’s in a Name?”), he associates his first consciousness of difference with his French-Canadian surname, referring to “the mild paranoia generated by a name that few people can pronounce.” Yet rather than renounce his marginalized ethnic culture, Trader Joe, like Trader Vic before him, used it as a springboard to explore cultural difference more widely. Both Traders broke away from the homogenized American life of the 1950s and 1960s by becoming, in essence, cultural voyageurs. Their passion for travel is consistent with and even derives from their French-Canadian cultural inheritance. Geographic mobility was an important element of French-Canadian identity during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period when around a million migrants left Quebec, a province of between one and two million people, for destinations spanning the North American continent.

The primary cause of the exodus was economic: Quebec’s small family farms, once the backbone of its economy, were ceasing to be viable by the mid-nineteenth century. Not only were the best agricultural lands fully occupied, threatening the livelihood of future generations, but the transition to commercial agriculture required significant investments in land and equipment which few could afford to make. As farm size increased, rural society grew more stratified. While some farmers with access to urban markets successfully modernized their operations, a large population of landless day laborers emerged, and the remaining small holders found it increasingly hard to make ends meet. For many rural French Canadians, migration seemed to be the only solution. But where could they go?

Quebec’s industrializing cities, especially Montreal, grew significantly in this period, but not fast enough to absorb the growing numbers of rural migrants. Beyond Quebec, the northern and western reaches of the continent were already familiar because for generations, young men had participated in fur trade migrations before acquiring farms of their own. So when frontier agriculture and mining began drawing settlers to the American and Canadian West, rural French Canadians already knew the way. Closer to home, the massive industrialization of New England provided ample employment opportunities for French-Canadian individuals and families, especially after the Civil War.

Once migrants began to leave, family and friends followed, and before long, migration chains linked various Quebec communities to others in the diaspora. Still, no one destination ever had a monopoly, and many French Canadians moved to multiple places in the United States and Canada in search of adventure and opportunity before settling. Wherever they went in the Northeast, Midwest, or West, they were bound to encounter other French-Canadian migrants. By 1901, only 55% of French Canadians remained in Quebec; 37% were in the United States, 24% in New England.

The movements of the Bergeron and Coulombe families turn out to be a microcosm of French-Canadian migration history from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries. Both families settled in southern Quebec during the reign of Louis XIV and farmed there for a century and a half before starting to move out under pressure of necessity. The continental exodus of Bergeron and Coulombe forebears during the Great Migration provides helpful insight into the prevailing culture of mobility and border crossing that shaped Trader Vic and Trader Joe.

As members of the first migrant generation, Trader Joe’s great-grandfather and Trader Vic’s grandfather grew up in a changing rural world, one in which survival was ever more precarious. Cleophas Coulombe (1855-1919) was the fourteenth of eighteen children, thirteen of whom did not survive to adulthood; this shockingly high mortality suggests a family, if not a community, in crisis. Although the oldest surviving Coulombe son remained on the farm, the other three sought their living elsewhere. The younger sons appear on the Canadian census of 1881 as voyageurs, laborers in the fur trade, which was a traditional occupation for young men in their village. But instead of using their earnings to buy farms in Quebec, they moved to towns to work in industry. Like Blanche Dumas’s grandparents a generation earlier, Cleophas Coulombe crossed the border into nearby Vermont, finding unskilled work in the Island Pond engine house.

The trajectory of his son, Joseph C. Coulombe, would be very different. Coming to Vermont with his parents, he went to work early — the 1900 census lists him as a seventeen-year-old janitor. But Joseph C. pursued an education, graduating from Norwich University with an engineering degree in 1905, the year after he married Blanche Dumas. In 1906, the couple and their baby son moved to New Jersey, where their second son, Trader Joe’s father (patriotically named Joseph Grant) was born. Embracing mobility, Joseph C. subsequently worked in Caracas (Venezuela), Dracut (Massachusetts), Kokomo (Indiana), and San Diego, where his grandson Trader Joe was born in 1930. When he died in 1946, the retired engineer and inventor had 200 patents to his name.

The Bergeron migration story is even more complex since Victor Bergeron Sr. (1863-1934) and his ten siblings (three of whom were born south of the border, as was their mother) all survived to adulthood. The destinations of Trader Vic’s various aunts and uncles included: Cleveland, Ohio; Salem and Hudson, Massachusetts; Keene, New Hampshire; Montreal’s Saint-Henri, a hard-scrabble industrial neighborhood; Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin; the Red River Valley; St. Boniface, then as now the unofficial capital of French Manitoba; the Santa Inez Valley; and Los Angeles. One aunt’s husband became a blacksmith on the newly established Turtle Mountain Chippewa Reservation in North Dakota; their son would marry a French-speaking Native woman. Trader Vic’s father, the youngest Bergeron sibling, made his way to San Francisco, California’s largest city, where he found work as a hotel waiter. He later moved across the bay to the gritty industrial city of Oakland, where he opened a grocery store in 1915.

As seen through the lens of these two ordinary families, French Canadians practiced migration as a way of life during the period of the Grand Exode. Anchored by the family economy, they created a veritable culture of mobility based on hard work, risk-taking, curiosity, adaptability, and openness to the other. As crossers of multiple borders — national, linguistic, religious, and class — they developed what critic Edward Said labels “contrapuntal consciousness,” the ability to view the world simultaneously from different if not opposing perspectives. Such were the cultural ingredients that went into inventing (to quote the obituaries of our Traders in The New York Times) a market chain that was “equal parts gourmet shop, discount warehouse and Tiki trading post,” and a “beer-and-beans parlor” that morphed into a luxury Polynesian restaurant chain serving what Vic called “inventive American food.”

Let’s conclude with some observations about what this all means.

As we’ve seen, Victor Bergeron worked with his employee and friend Paul Wong during the Depression to create a new menu for his rebranded restaurant. When Trader Vic’s opened in 1937, it served Chinese food along with tropical drinks evoking New Orleans, Havana, and Polynesia. Ironically, in 1881, a report published by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics dubbed French Canadians “the Chinese of the Eastern States.” (This was not a compliment, occurring as it did just one year before Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act.) It is unlikely that Bergeron was aware of this, but his appreciation of difference in himself and others produced both empathy and profits.

Yet Bergeron’s place also featured a Tahitian rag doll that sexualized Polynesian women in a predictable way that is not acceptable today and shouldn’t have been then. Again ironically, many English Canadians of the time compared Quebec to a woman in a literal interpretation of the slogan that would appear on Quebec license plates from 1963 to 1977, “la belle province.” When Quebecers expressed a desire for sovereignty and separatism, anglophones felt spurned, as expressed in Serge Chapleau’s cartoon of an English tee shirt on a laundry line reading, “We Love You,” while the French tee shirt next to it read, “Pas cette fois-ci j’ai mal à la tête (Not this time, I have a headache).” Humor aside, American historian (and Boston Brahmin) Francis Parkman, writing about the great contest for North America between the English and the French in the eighteenth century, described “the Anglo-Saxon” as “peculiarly masculine, and therefore, fitted for self-government.” “The French Celt,” on the other hand, “had always on their lips the nothingness and the vanity of life.” And so, concludes Parkman, “a happier calamity never befell a people than the conquest of Canada by British arms.” Canadian historian Susan Mann Trofimenkoff, in her brilliant history of Quebec, concludes chapter one with the following line: “And conquest is like rape.” Sadly, the experience of being othered does not prevent the members of a particular group from doing the same to a different group.

For a summarizing idea and perspective, we return to Edward Said’s notion of “contrapuntal consciousness” and to one of its foremost practitioners, Franco-American author Jack Kerouac. Asked in French on Quebec television about the origins of his term the “beat generation,” he said it referred to both spiritual beatitude and the beat of the voyageur’s canoe paddle. As described by literary scholar Hassan Melehy, Kerouac embraced the uprooting that enables “the festive multiculturalism of America.” Being on the road, experiencing exile, crossing multiple borders — these experiences are part of the historical legacy of French North America. As businessmen, Trader Vic and Trader Joe translated that legacy into spaces that continue to allow their customers to cross cultural lines. A problem remains: how can we enjoy the tastes of difference and support the contributions of unique cultures in a pluralist society without transgressing the bounds of civility, repeating the errors of colonialism, or being frozen by fear of appropriation?

What we have sought to do here is raise the visibility of French North America and its unique position on our continent. We could imagine Trader Joe, in the spirit of the 1967 ad for Levy’s Rye Bread (You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s), proclaiming: “You don’t have to be French Canadian to enjoy Pilgrim Joe’s maple syrup.”