He’s Used to Having the Feathers Fly : * Poultry: Chicken farmer Frank Perdue is no stranger to controversy.

Twenty years ago, a New York ad man persuaded a skeptical chicken farmer named Frank Perdue to do his own television commercials.

But he also gave Perdue a warning. “He said, ‘If you do this, you’re going to have some heartaches from it. You’re going to have people yelling at you or maybe screaming at you or criticizing you, but I think it’s the best way to sell a superior chicken, which I think you have,’ ” the 71-year-old Perdue recalled.

The ad man was right on both accounts.

Perdue’s tough, folksy TV persona has helped boost sales of Perdue Farms Inc., from $56 million in 1970 to more than $1.2 billion today. But at the same time, his business practices have suffered stinging criticism, from employee advocates who complain about plant conditions to animal rights activists who say he mistreats his chickens.

Perdue dismisses his critics. “These groups can associate me, a face that’s well-known, with whatever cause they have,” he said.

Poultry industry analysts say Perdue is riding the national tide of health-conscious eating. His diversity of products, including prepared dinners, low-fat chicken burgers and turkey sausages, keeps him competitive, they say.

He remains the fourth-largest chicken processor in the country, delivering 7 million a week from eight plants in Maryland, Delaware, Virginia and North Carolina.

The fact that millions of people know him is remarkable, considering his upbringing.

An only child of older parents, Perdue said he was a shy boy who spent much of his time working on the family egg farm his father started in the rural Chesapeake Bay town of Salisbury in 1920.

Arthur Perdue was a stern man who Perdue said was so thrifty that he used to save leather from old shoes to make hinges for the doors to the chicken houses.

Perdue’s dream as a youth was to play professional baseball, but he said he “gathered more splinters than hits” on the Salisbury State Teachers College team and after graduation in 1939 was back on the farm.

Perdue and his father switched their business from eggs to chickens in the 1940s and broke into retail sales in 1968.

A big turning point came in 1971, when Perdue hired an ad agency to push chickens in the highly competitive New York City market.

McCabe, Scali & Sloves faced a daunting challenge: Nobody had ever advertised chickens by brand.

The ad executives decided Perdue would be his own best salesman when they toured a plant with him and watched him stop repeatedly to personally correct things he didn’t like. Those tough quality standards combined with Perdue’s down-home looks and sound were unique, they theorized.

Perdue said that he had to be talked into it.

“It was quite a shock to my nervous system because I’d never been in a school play or anything and I’m basically reticent about speaking in public,” he said.

The first commercial showed Perdue picnicking in a Salisbury park. Since then, he has given viewers a history lesson of famous chickens, winked at them while serving Cornish hens to attractive house guests, and lately has been extolling his boneless breasts to an aerobics class.

The settings may be tongue-in-cheek, but Perdue’s sincerity is real, ad executive Sam Scali said.

“If he was pretending to do and say these things in the commercials, I think people would see right through it,” Scali said.

Perdue Farms’ expansion in the 1970s was rapid, but it also sowed the seeds of worker discontent.

Perdue opened new plants in rural, often poor areas of the South, where labor was cheap and government regulations lax. Inevitably, union activism sprung up, which he sought to suppress.

In 1986, Perdue’s folksy image took a major hit. He admitted to a presidential commission that he had twice unsuccessfully sought help from reputed New York crime boss Paul Castellano to put down union activities, actions he later said he regretted deeply.

In the late 1980s, reports of repetitive motion injuries rose rapidly in the industry among workers who performed the same handling, sorting and cutting tasks all day.

Perdue paid $40,000 in fines to North Carolina in 1989 after a report found 36% of workers in two plants had symptoms of wrist trauma known as carpal tunnel syndrome. This year, the company agreed to set up a four-year program to reduce injuries, including job rotations, rest and exercise periods and automation equipment.

Worker rights groups still aren’t satisfied.

“They should have longer breaks and slow down the line so people don’t have to work as fast,” said Chavuletta Jones of the Center for Women’s Economic Alternatives in Ahoskie, N.C. “The faster you work, the more pain you have.”

Perdue acknowledged poultry work is tough and repetitive, but added: “We’ve spent millions and millions to make our plants more efficient and less labor intensive.”

Perdue said his turnover rate is 70% a year, compared with at least 100% for the industry. Perdue’s rate of repetitive motion injuries is two-thirds the industry, he said.

Perdue began facing pickets at his public appearances from animal rights activists after his appointment in January to the Board of Regents of the University of Maryland system.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, a vegetarian group, said farmers who raise chickens for Perdue keep them in cramped cages the bird’s whole lives, where their beaks must be clipped to prevent them from pecking each other to death.

Perdue Farms insists that its chickens roam freely in well-ventilated coops. Their beaks are trimmed because chickens naturally go after each other, the company says.

Perdue’s nutritional labels came under fire in July from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington consumer group. The center told Congress that the labels mislead because they give fat, cholesterol and calorie contents for one ounce of meat when most people eat four to six ounces.

Perdue said servings vary widely so giving figures for one ounce is the most useful.

Ironically, these attacks come at a time when Perdue is phasing himself out of his company’s day-to-day operations.

He still shows up to work regularly, but takes more vacations, plays more tennis in his back yard and named his son, James, chairman in July.

Associates say Perdue doesn’t spend much time worrying about his critics, but remains uncomfortable with his fame. He refused to advertise in the Baltimore and Washington areas for years to lower his profile at home.

Harry Palmer, a Perdue executive for two decades, said the tough man also has a tender side that he doesn’t like others to see.

Although acknowledging that Perdue’s devotion to business has been a contributing factor in two divorces, Palmer said his boss is extremely loyal to his children. Perdue and his third wife, Mitzi, take all of them on vacation each year, Palmer said, and he even invites his in-laws.