“I was in a bind as the organizer of a campus blood drive because very few students wanted to donate,” says Rosenthal. “Then Bobby Chazonoff — the manager of A. Gold & Sons who taught me about business and customer service — told me to go see Norm Silver, the legendary impresario who ran the Esquire Show Bar.
“Before I knew it, Norm had arranged for Ben E. King and his band to play for us. When I introduced them on stage, the students went nuts!”
The “Stand by Me” singer helped Rosenthal’s blood drive eclipse “all records for the amount of blood collected” by any university in Canada, a letter to the editor of The Georgian later stated.
Like father, like son
With his reputation as a macher — a doer, in Yiddish — cemented at Sir George, Rosenthal parlayed his interest in polymer chemistry into a job with Kord, an Ontario-based manufacturer of plastic containers for the nursery and greenhouse industry. The containers were a novelty in the 1970s; most growers at the time still used ceramic pots, which were expensive and fragile.
Rosenthal loved the opportunity the job gave him to assist people who, like his father, worked the soil. It was redemptive, he says.
After Quebec’s sovereignty referendum in 1980, Rosenthal accepted Kord’s offer to expand the business to the United States and moved to Florida with his wife, Betty, and sons, Jonathan and Eric.
While Rosenthal was able to move his mother down south — she succumbed to Alzheimer’s in the 1990s — his father never made the trip.
“Stomach cancer took him,” says Rosenthal. “When he was on his deathbed at the Montreal General Hospital, he told me to look under his bed at home. There was a metal box he wanted me to have.
“It turned out this man, who toiled his entire life, had saved $35,000 — one dollar bill at a time — for us to start a new life with our boys. Not even my mother knew about it. To this day, I have no idea how he did it.”
The unexpected gift gave Ed and Betty Rosenthal the seed capital to purchase a home in Sarasota and, in 1982, start Florikan ESA (Environmentally Sustainable Agriculture) — the company that would make Rosenthal’s name, provide a legacy for his sons and partner with NASA.
With a mission to “help the grower find a better way to grow,” Florikan took a page from Kord’s playbook and encouraged nursery owners to boost yields with less expensive polymer-based pots. Dubbed “Eddie pots,” the containers became the industry standard.
A moonshot moment
Rosenthal could have let that success ride. But after a grower expressed frustration with inefficient water-soluble fertilizers, Rosenthal had a eureka moment: He could use agronomic lessons imparted by his father and his knowledge of chemistry to come up with a better method.
What Rosenthal went on to test and market — a controlled-release fertilizer (or CRF) — drew the attention of NASA. The U.S. space agency now depends on the Concordia graduate’s know-how to help grow vegetables on the International Space Station.