The Power of Testimony

DIKKON EBERHART
could keep track of it, certainly no auditor. The downside for
poor Thomson personally, though—​and he bemoaned this in
his memoir—​was that he was losing sleep while trying to keep
the accounts straight in his head.
The other downside was that he could never—​not ever—​
take a day off. The entire community admired Thomson’s attendance
record at Hormel. What an employee this man was! He
was tireless. He was faithful. He was always there with a ready
answer anytime anyone asked a financial question. And every
single day, after Thomson’s Hormel work was done, he traveled
the two hours to a spot next to the town of LeRoy, where he
had laid out and was building his experimental farms and his
entertainment park, Oak Dale. Every day, he oversaw its gargantuan
growth.
Of course, the truth was that Thomson could never dare to
miss a work day at Hormel because he couldn’t risk someone
else opening the mail.
Thomson’s first theft was this: he stole $800 from a woman
in South Dakota who mailed a check to the company to purchase
eight shares of stock. Thomson issued the stock immediately.
Then he placed her funds “in transit,” as he said. That
same $800 was still in transit ten years later when Thomson was
finally found out.
The whole Cy Thomson story was—​and remains—fascinating,
in a fascination-​with-​depravity kind of way. For ten years,
Cy Thomson was one of the biggest men in the upper Midwest.
His Oak Dale enterprise was so famous that it attracted as many
as thirty thousand eager visitors each weekend, at the cost of
one dime per head.
So eager were the visitors to come to Oak Dale that the
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