William McNutt Jr., who turned his family’s bakery in Corsicana, Texas, into a specialized mail-order business that ships holiday fruitcakes around the world, has died. He was 81.

McNutt, who was president of Collin Street Bakery, died September 1 of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

The bakery, which opened in 1896, got a jolt when McNutt arrived in 1958 and shifted its focus to mail-order sales. He introduced computerized mailing lists, direct consumer marketing and efficient shipping methods to eventually extend the firm’s reach to 196 countries.

The company annually sells about 3 million pounds of fruitcake, or about 1.5 million cakes. Fruitcake accounts for 98 percent of the bakery’s total sales. And nearly all of those sales are by mail order, primarily from October to December, when each cake is packaged in a red Christmas tin decorated with a cowboy and his lasso.

“We breathe, eat and sleep our cake,” John Crawford, part-owner and vice president, said.

Corsicana was a thriving oil boomtown on a railroad line 50 miles south of Dallas when German immigrant Gus Weidmann set up shop 110 years ago in the Collin Street Bakery.

It was on the ground floor of his partner Tom McElwee’s luxurious hotel, where celebrities including Enrico Caruso and Will Rogers stayed. Members of the Ringling Bros. circus would leave with dozens of Weidmann’s cakes to give as gifts while on tour, and to this day descendants of the Ringling family place annual orders.

McNutt’s father, Lee William McNutt, and uncle Bob Rutherford bought the bakery in 1946. The McNutt partnership has owned the privately held company and maintained the basic recipes ever since.

In the 1950s, Collin Street was essentially a regional bread bakery, but McNutt had plans for selling fruitcakes to a wider audience.

McNutt bought a local pecan processor and an organic pineapple farm in Costa Rica to ensure a steady supply of ingredients for the best-selling “World Famous DeLuxe Fruitcake.”

Although the bakery says it will ship to any place in the world that receives mail service, one customer was turned away: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, after the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran.

“We didn’t think that was an order we needed to fill,” McNutt’s son said.

Two traditions surround fruitcakes – — one savoring the dense cakes filled with nuts and candied fruits, another ridiculing them as unwanted bookends — and the McNutt family has come to understand both views.

“We can laugh at anything,” said Bob McNutt, who succeeded his father as president of the company. “For the most part, when people come up with a fruitcake joke — all of which are bad, by the way — it gives us an opportunity to get our message out.”

Born in Corsicana in 1925, Bill McNutt Jr. moved with his parents to Nashville, Tenn., and went to work for his father and uncle, distributing Dr. Pepper in Tennessee.

McNutt, an avid football fan, became friends with Lamar Hunt, the Texas oilman who co-founded the American Football League and owned the Dallas Texans. Together, they owned the Dallas Tornado of the North American Soccer League and won the league title in 1971.

Hunt also became a minority partner in the Collin Street Bakery, and this week confirmed his appreciation for fruitcake.

“I don’t eat it year-round,” he said, “but at Christmastime, I’m right in there getting my fair share.”