Eye on Boise: Idaho icon J.R. Simplot dead at age 99
J.R. Simplot, the billionaire potato baron who made a second fortune launching a Boise microchip company, died today at the age of 99. Simplot is the former father-in-law of Idaho Gov. Butch Otter. A self-made man who quit school at the age of 14 to go into business, he built the Simplot Co. into the largest shipper of fresh potatoes in the country by the early years of World War II, and marketed the first commercially viable frozen french fries in the world in the early 1950s. - Betsy Z. Russell, SR Eye on Boise - More here
