Prospect Native Became Tycoon, Saved School

J.B. FUQUA

By RICK GUNTER

FARMVILLE, VA, April 13, 2006 -- A year, perhaps two years, ago, a friend of Farmville's Fuqua School told me how the man for whom the institution is named literally saved the place's chestnuts.

The school was close to having to close, the woman told me. The bankers were going to close the school.

Then entered John B. Fuqua, a Prospect native. He was told of the school's plight and before long he, in effect, wrote a check -- a very big check, indeed -- and saved the school from foreclosure.

That benevolence over the years may have totaled $12 million to a school located not far from the fields where J.B. Fuqua grew up.

CONDITIONS OF GIFT
But he gave money to Fuqua on two conditions. He insisted that the private school, established when the county's public schools were closed rather be racially integrated, be open to students of all races and creeds, and that it become a national model for rural education.

He and his wife served on the Fuqua School board. "It was not just J.B. Fuqua's money," Fuqua leader Ruth Murphy was quoted as saying at one point, "but his vision, that provided what is so profound about this school."

What a great story, for J.B. Fuqua saved the day not only for the school, for the institution that a place of learning represents, but for students who were enrolled there then and those to follow them.

Mr. Fuqua died last week at the age of 87. His life and career provide powerful counterpoints in a time when there are too much of the mindset of Gordon Glekko, the tycoon in the 1987 movie "Wall Street" who said "Greed is good!"

Mr. Fuqua instead used his vast wealth to help people, to nurture another generation and more of business people and other professionals. Perhaps he did follow the old value of noblesse oblige -- that the wealthy have an obligation to help those less fortunate, but that is all right, too.

Mr. Fuqua's life, if it was anything, and it represented a lot, was about gratitude.

John Brooks Fuqua's mother died two months after his birth on June 26, 1918, leaving his father, a tobacco farmer, to bring him up. The father didn't believe he could do so and the infant was passed on to his maternal grandparents who did not particularly want him. They could not take care of themselves let alone feed another mouth.

Born an Elam, he later changed his name to Fuqua and grew up in Prince Edward County.

THE WAY OUT
He wanted out. He wanted a better life.

The story was recalled a few years ago in Duke Magazine that one day in 1935, in the throes of the Great Depression, J.B. Fuqua walked into a Prince Edward country store not far from his grandparents' poor tobacco farm. He held in his hand a telegram and asked the clerk on duty to help him make his first-ever telephone call.

He was answering a telegram from a man offering him a job as a radio operator on a cargo ship headed for South Africa.

That job would help make J.B. Fuqua, of Prospect, Virginia, one of the richest men in America.

I love this man's story, for anyone who made their way through Kentucky's Berea College, where all of us were from the wrong side of the track economically and otherwise, can relate to J.B. Fuqua, though none of us occupy the rarefied air he did.

SELF-MADE MAN
He was born with nothing and brought up by his grandparents who did not particularly want him. He never attended college. But J.B. Fuqua had some powerful possessions that he may not even have realized back on that day he made that fateful telephone call. He was smart, very smart. He was curious. And he possessed a self-confidence that one would not expect to find in a youngster barely existing in his culture.

He was self-educated. He had bought a 25-cent mail-order booklet titled "How To Become An Amateur Radio Operator." He wanted to find a way to get off that Prospect farm and out into the world. He later would say that booklet was the best investment of his life.

He purchased the book after he tuned into a Richmond radio station and heard a chief engineer who was teaching a course in Morse code. At the end of the program, the engineer said that for 25 cents listeners could order a booklet titled "How To Become An Amateur Radio Operator."

He ordered the book and learned.

He began assembling a simple ham radio. He taught himself Morse code.
During the same period, J.B. Fuqua discovered that he could order in the mail books from a famous university in Durham, N.C.

He borrowed books about banking and finance and read them while he was at sea.

DUKE PAVES WAY
Mr. Fuqua would not forget the kindness of the Duke librarians, as we shall see in a moment.

He had noticed back in Prince Edward County in the 1930s that the folks driving the biggest cars and living in the largest houses were bankers and merchants.

He admitted he had a big ego. He said later in life he did not trust anyone who did not have a big ego.

He left the merchant marine after a year, worked as a temporary engineer at radio station WIS in Columbia, S.C., and eventually was promoted to chief engineer at the company's Charleston, S.C., station.

In 1940, he began looking for a new town where no one knew him, and where he could talk three people he did not know into loaning him $10,000, a big sum in those Depression days, to launch a commercial radio station.

That station, WGAC, was only the second radio station in Augusta, Ga. It was immediately profitable. It formed the foundation of what would become the Fuqua business empire that would embrace TV stations, movie theaters, real-estate investment trusts, the Simplicity Pattern Company, industrial products companies, Snapper power machines, a savings and loan, and the largest photofinisher in the world. He acquired coal mines, a frozen yogurt company, trucking firms, all of these concerns forming a Fortune 500 conglomerate with more than $2 billion in revenue.

In his 2002 autobiography, "Fuqua: How I Made A Fortune Using Other People's Money," he wrote this in his third sentence:
"I am proof that any obstacle can be overcome if you are willing to educate yourself and work hard."

He apparently did not believe in luck. In the same book, he wrote, "Most people who appear to have had an unusual amount of luck are usually those who have positioned themselves in order for desirable things to happen to them."

He put his name on his company, Fuqua Industries, not just because of his ego, but also because of he wanted the public to understand he had confidence in it.

By all accounts, he practiced honesty, treated employees well, even reached into his pocket and paid benefits to retirees of at least one of the companies he acquired.

Mr. Fuqua told young people, "I learned early on that goals are essential. But even with goals, the difference between success and failure often comes down to courage. I had the courage to take a risk."

His famous "Three C's" were: Capacity, Capital and Courage.

BROTHER'S KEEPER
He wrote in the book that by the early part of this century, he had given away more than $100 million. That total surpassed at least $140 million in more recent years.

He said of his charity, "I am my brother's keeper."

As to Duke, the university received millions, so much money, in fact, that the business school was named for Mr. Fuqua. It is an expression of this man's gratitude for those library books mailed to a poor Southside Virginia tobacco farmer three-quarters of a century ago.

In later life, he liked to quip that the endowment to Duke represented late payment for the overdue books he never paid fines on!

POLITICAL CAREER
Mr. Fuqua also built a sterling political career that would span three terms in the Georgia legislature and conclude with the chairmanship of the Georgia Democratic Party in 1966.

He helped pass legislation to finance a new governor's mansion. He helped Carl Sanders become governor of Georgia.

Mr. Fuqua became friends of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. He, the Kennedys, and Sanders helped to prevent much of the racial violence that blighted some other Southern states.

CLINICAL DEPRESSION
Despite the philanthropy and wealth, little came easy to this man. He long suffered from depression, and he writes about it in a short six-page chapter in his autobiography. He titles the chapter "My Personal Struggles." He acknowledges that he suffered from severe depression nearly all of his life. In 1995, he underwent electroconvulsive shock treatments, which he found to be a "highly effective last-resort treatment." He took antidepressants daily. He powerfully advocated for the removal of the public stigma associated with depression and other mental illnesses.

"When I was at my worst, which was most of my adult life," he wrote, "I just wanted to sleep or escape reality. Your thoughts slow down and your thinking is clouded by indecision. You question even routine decisions, doubting your judgment as your thoughts slow to a snail's pace."

But as book reviewer Nancy Cardwell observed tongue-in-cheek, "Imagine what this man could have done if he had been feeling good."

In typical fashion, Mr. Fuqua gave $2 million to found the Fuqua Center for Late-Life Depression at Atlanta's Emory University and followed that deed by endowing a chair in late-life depression at the Emory School of Medicine.


HIS FUNERAL
At Mr. Fuqua's funeral at Atlanta's Northwest Presbyterian Church, the Rev. Robert Schuller, founding pastor of Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, Calif., spoke of how Mr. Fuqua had become a member of his church and one of his closest friends.

"There's no other person whose telephone number I know by heart," said the Reverend Schuller. "A very, very special relationship, I had with him ... I can tell you I would not be who I am or where I am had it not been for J.B. Fuqua."

Tom Johnson, retired chairman of CNN News Group, said "fun did not come easily" to J.B. Fuqua.

"He never learned to play. He did not like golf, tennis or even following sports in the newspapers. Believe it or not, after hearing that Hank Aaron had broken Babe Ruth's home run record, J.B. actually asked, 'Who's Hank Aaron?' "

Mr. Johnson said that one of his friend's most important contributions was "his decision to go public with his long struggle against clinical depression," an illness both men shared.

"We told our stories of struggling through the debilitating effects that accompany depression, in the hope that others who suffer from it will be encouraged to see that there is a way out, that they can return to productive and happy lives with proper medical care."