Oral history interview with Seth C. Macon, 2012 (Part 2)

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PRESERVING OUR HISTORY: ROTARY CLUB OF GREENSBORO
ORAL HISTORY COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Seth C. Macon
INTERVIEWER: Kathelene Smith
DATE: April 20, 2012
KS: It’s Friday, April 20, 2012, and I’m at the home of Seth C. Macon for the second part of
our interview for the Preserving Our History: Rotary Club of Greensboro project. Hello,
Mr. Macon. Thank you for having me back to your home.
SM: Glad to have you.
KS: I believe we left off of our last interview talking about when you started at Jefferson
Standard. So if we could talk about a little bit of that history.
SM: Yes. Well, Jefferson Standard was organized in about 1907, I believe, and it was started
by a couple of brothers in Wilson, North Carolina. Wilson was a business community
because it was the headquarters for BB&T, the Branch Bank and Trust Company. A lot
of the original stockholders were BB&T stockholders also. But Wilson was so small that
the two brothers decided to start their – move their headquarters to Raleigh and start with
a home office in Raleigh, which they did in 1907. Five years later in 1912, Jefferson
Standard in Raleigh and a couple of new companies in Greensboro – Greensboro Life and
the Security Life and Annuity Company in Greensboro – got to talking with Jefferson
Standard about the three of them merging. And they had a discussion about whether the
new headquarters would be in Raleigh or Greensboro. Jefferson Standard wanted to keep
it in Raleigh, and the other two companies wanted to keep it in Greensboro. So they
reached a compromise: they would organize and merge the three companies and have the
home office in Greensboro and keep the Jefferson Standard name for the company – and
that’s what happened in 1912, I believe. The two companies in Greensboro – one of them
was the Security Life and Annuity Company was started by – and the guy that started it
became the new first President, and his name was John Van Lindley, Sr. He started that
company and was operating it, but his chief Vice President was George Grimsley. George
Grimsley’s brother-in-law, C. C. Taylor, was a staff member there. The other company
was Greensboro Life and the – one of the staff people of Greensboro Life was Julian
Price. So when they organized in 1912, John Van Lindley could have kept the
presidency of the new company, but he didn’t want it. He had so many other things,
including his big nursery and all of the other projects that he had going, so he helped
bring about having the new President be George Grimsley, and the new Vice President in
charge of personnel was Grimsley’s brother-in-law, C. C. Taylor. Then Julian Price from
the Greensboro Life became the manager – the marketing manager – for Jefferson
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Standard when it was merged in 1912, and that operation went forward for a number of
years. In 1919, Julian Price had become so important in that organization, that the
directors decided to ask for the resignation of George Grimsley and appoint Julian Price
as the new President in 1919, which they did. And this upset Grimsley so bad that he and
his brother-in-law, C. C. Taylor, resigned – went next – went over to a new office
building in Greensboro and the two of them organized Integon Life in Winston-Salem.
George Grimsley became the first President of Integon Life, and Julian Price took over in
1919 with Jefferson Standard. In the meantime, Julian Price’s relationship with John Van
Lindley, Sr., and John Van Lindley, Sr.’s son, Paul Lindley, became so great, that those
Lindleys became big stockholders of Jefferson Standard Life Insurance Company and
good personal friends. Soon after Julian Price took over as the President in 1919, he
appointed – I don’t know how long it took, but over some years – he appointed John Van
Lindley, III, known locally as Jack Lindley, as one of the directors. And Paul Lindley
inherited – when the old man, John Van Lindley, Sr., died – Paul Lindley inherited a big
hunk of Jefferson Standard stock. Paul Lindley had three or four children, and Jack was
the only son. The others were daughters, and in those days daughters didn’t participate
very well in big businesses, and so he arranged for Jack Lindley, III, to have voting rights
on all his sisters’ stock. Even though the sisters had inherited the same amount that he
did, his voting rights included everything that the whole family owned. And then Paul
Lindley died at a relatively early age because when he died he was mayor of the city of
Greensboro. He was also a trustee of Guilford College where his father, Lindley, Sr., had
been a trustee for some thirty-some years and was instrumental in getting the boarding
school changed to a college in 18-what, 1888 or something, I think. Anyway, that’s the
history of how Jefferson Standard got organized.
Then Julian Price was President and did a super job with that company and
controlled everything because he owned so much stock, and his wife owned stock, and
their daughters owned stock. And their daughter married Joe Bryan, Sr., who became a
Vice President, and as long as the Prices and the family stayed together, they had fifty
percent plus control, so they ran everything. But then, after Julian Price retired and his
son Ralph became President, then things began to take some different perspectives, and
Ralph was not the same kind of guy his dad was. His dad told him an awful lot about
what he ought to be doing and continued to guide him, but Ralph and his brother-in-law,
Joe Bryan, got crossed up, and Joe Bryan became interested in becoming the next
President. And so they were no longer voting together at directors’ meetings and that sort
of thing – so that created a whole new problem with Jefferson Standard. And another
major thing that happened: Chick Holderness who – Howard Holderness, who was very
active in the management of the company and in the investment area for years – when
Ralph became President, he resigned and after nearly twenty years with the company,
went across the street and started an office in the investment business. [He] brought his
brother in as a partner, and they were running an investment company across the street
from Jefferson Standard. It’s interesting to me that the reason he didn’t want to work with
Ralph Price the rest of his life was because he and Ralph were roommates at the
University of North Carolina when they were going to college. He just said, “I’m not
going to work for Ralph Price the rest of my life.” So that’s how he got across the street.
Well, when Joe and Ralph began competing so heavily for the new President’s job, it
created a whole new problem in Jefferson Standard. Joe Bryan, Sr. started holding
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meetings for employees of Jefferson Standard to talk about how he was going to manage
things when he became President. I attended one of those meetings and heard his
discussion of what he was planning to do and so forth. But it never happened because
when they had the next directors meeting to decide who was going to be the President –
Ralph or Joe Bryan – Jack Lindley spoke up and said, “Neither one of them are going to
be the President because I’ve got enough votes to control who’s going to be the President,
and I’ll tell you what’s going to happen: I’m going to go across the street and bring Chick
Holderness back over here, name him President of Jefferson Standard, and neither Ralph
nor his brother-in-law is going to be President.” So that changed things considerably, and
he had enough extra votes – in addition to his own ownership, he had all of his sisters’
votes – so he controlled that and brought Chick back over and made him President. And
Chick Holderness was President for I think about nineteen years before he retired. He did
one tremendous job in running that company, in my opinion. I had a wonderful
relationship with him because I knew him pretty well before he resigned and left. I’d
been there long enough to get to know him pretty well, and because of that we had a good
relationship over those years. The other thing that was happening was that my boss in the
Jefferson Standard was Karl Ljung, who had been there a long time and had been running
the marketing operation of the company for a long time. He was a great guy and a good
friend of mine. His assistant was Robert Taylor, and Bob Taylor and I had a good
relationship also. So I worked there – when I came into the home office this last time in
1946 – I worked there with Karl and Bob and Chick Holderness and had a good
relationship with all three of them, and that helped me considerably over the years.
When I first came back in 1946 to the home office, my first responsibility was
new agent training, and I conducted agent’s schools and worked on training material and
that sort of thing. After a number of years in that business, I got promoted to
Superintendent of Agencies, and Karl Ljung saw to it that every superintendent of
agencies – and they had three or four or five at various times – they would travel and visit
every branch office every year. We had branch offices in thirty-two states and Puerto
Rico, so I spent a lot of time travelling and started travelling by trains and sleeping in a
Pullman overnight from one branch office to the next, working in each branch office with
the manager a couple of days, and then going to another branch and travelling all over the
thirty-two states and Puerto Rico. And since my specialty had been new agent training
and also agent recruiting – because I had written those books on agent recruiting – I spent
most of my time with managers, either helping them recruit new agents or helping them
train the new agents they had, and that sort of thing. So I had a good relationship with
managers by travelling all over that area. Having small children and a wife at home
created a whole new set of problems in my family as well as in my mind, and I had that
kind of a relationship. I shared an office during part of that time with Bill Seawell, who
was also a Superintendent of Agencies, travelling the same way that I was and working
on his specialty, which was advanced underwriting. He was very smart and very
knowledgeable on taxes and a lot of other things and talked with managers about
advanced underwriting business insurance and corporate insurance and so forth. So that
worked for a while and it was a good way, according to the boss, Karl Ljung, for every
manager to get acquainted with every superintendent of agencies and work with all of
them and figure out a way to use their knowledge and best examples to do various things
that needed to be done.
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Then Karl Ljung was approaching retirement, and he was a great asset and a great
help to me in a lot of ways. And one of the things he did just before he retired was to
invite me to go with him to the Greensboro Rotary Club where he had been very active
for all those years. He introduced me there as a prospective new member for the Rotary
Club. At that time I was already in a little, small Kiwanis Club in Greensboro that didn’t
amount to a whole lot at the time because it was relatively small and most of the
members were young and not too active. But when I got introduced into the Greensboro
Rotary Club, I had a new perspective on what was happening in a big operation because
that club was unusual. It took me a while to get in because the classification chairman
was a life insurance man himself, and he was representing a big company from out of
town, and he was a little bit careful about letting too many Pilot Life, Jefferson Standard
Life, and Southern Life local people get in. So he kept me out for a little while but I
finally figured out a way to get in. That was forty-six years ago, and I have had a good
operation with the Rotary Club and with Jefferson Standard for a long, long time and also
with Guilford College that we’ll talk about after a little bit. But Jefferson Standard was –
I’d been there ten years when Roger Soles came – and Chick Holderness and Karl Ljung
retired about the same time. When Chick Holderness retired, he recommended Roger
Soles for his successor, and Roger became President and took over there. I’d been
working with the company for ten years when he became President, so he and I had a lot
of conversations – an awful lot of them were behind closed doors with just the two of us.
I didn’t hesitate to argue with him about some things, but I learned pretty fast that if there
are other people listening to the conversation, you don’t argue with Roger Soles in that
kind of an atmosphere, so I was very careful what to say when there were other people
sitting around listening. But Roger and I had lots of conversations, and I tried my best to
help him, and I think I did. I even helped him with his letter writing and that sort of thing
and helped him get better acquainted with managers that I had been working with and all
of those things over a period of time.
So we had a good working relationship, and Bob Taylor became the successor for
Karl Ljung. And because I had been working with Bob all those years since 1946, I had,
I thought, a very good working relationship there with him so things – the future looked
very good, and I was feeling good about how things were moving along. And then the
sudden thing happened that just shocked me to no end. You can’t believe it. I thought I
was looking – I was checking on Bob Taylor’s age: how many years he had been the
manager of the marketing operation and that sort of thing. And I felt very comfortable
with all that and then one day – I can’t remember the year but it must have been toward
1970, I guess – Roger Soles called me on the phone one morning and said, “You come up
here. I’ve got to talk to you.” It was on a Friday. I went up there, and he immediately
closed the door and there were just two of us. He announced to me something that I had
no idea was happening, and that is that he and Robert Taylor were having difficulty
working together, and that Bob Taylor had decided to retire early. And he was telling me
that what he wanted to do was to appoint me the head of the agency – the department of
Marketing Operation – would be under my direction, and it shocked me so much that I –
[laughs]. Looking back on it, I’m amazed that I had guts enough to do this, but I said to
him, “Before you decide to do this, let me tell you something. The head of the marketing
operation in a company like Jefferson Standard ought to be a member of the Board of
Directors of this company, he ought to be a senior Vice President charged with a lot of
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responsibility.” And I said, “You didn’t – you’ve got the Head of the Legal Department
in this company is a Board member and Senior Vice President; the Head of the Finance
Committee in this company, Investment Operation, is a Senior Vice President and a
Director. And my advice to you is that you appoint somebody to this job who is qualified
to be a Senior Vice President and a member of the Board of Directors of the company,
and I’ll work with him as his assistant and do everything I can to help him succeed. And
that’s my advice to you.” Well, that shocked him as much as it did me, I guess, and he
hemmed and hawed a little bit and said, “Well, it’s Friday. Let’s wait until next week to
have this conversation continued.” And I said, “Well, that’s up to you, but I’m anxious to
help you and help Jefferson Standard succeed in the Marketing Operation, and if you’re
going to have the head of the Legal Department and the head of the Finance and
Investment department represented in that way, I think you ought to have the Marketing
Department in the same way.” So we left. He opened the door and said, “I’ll see you next
week.” I went home and wasn’t able to sleep over the weekend – came back in next
Monday, finally, after a long weekend, and he called me to have that conversation
continued.
All of that – a few paragraphs about that is in this big coffee table book that was
written for Jefferson Pilot at the end of their hundredth anniversary. And Roger Soles so
shocked me and surprised me by saying that he was going to name me a Senior Vice
President of the company – name me as a Director of the company, and also – I don’t
know whether he told me this at that particular time or sometime soon thereafter – that I
would be a member of the company Executive Committee. So that’s where the big break
came for me in management, and I took over that job without having a whole lot of
qualifications for it, I guess. I’d come a long way with the help of Karl Ljung and Bob
Taylor and Chick Holderness, but I still had a long way to go and I continued to work in
that direction. So that is how I got to be a key management person in Jefferson Standard.
And beginning then, I had the big job of reorganizing the agency department that I was in
charge of because I wasn’t so keen on all of the travel that I had been able to do over a
long period of time, visiting every branch office every year. So one of the first things I
did was to start setting up regional areas and Regional Vice Presidents, so that any one
superintendent of agencies wouldn’t have to do all of this travel, but each superintendent
of agencies or each Vice President – Regional Vice President – would have a region with
a certain number of agencies and states in his region. I promoted two or three well-qualified
people in Jefferson Standard who had been successful managers over a long
period of time to fill two or three of those places, and then I began to look outside of the
company to key people in other big companies that were doing a good job to select them
and give them an opportunity to come to Jefferson Standard and become a Vice
President, a Regional Vice President, and take over a region. So I got two or three good
people moved in, and over a period of time positioned that way and divided all of those
branch offices into four or five regions. And that turned out to be a good decision in my
opinion, and there’s one or two of those Regional Vice Presidents still living that I
maintain contact with even though they and I have been retired an awful long time. And
all of that’s in my book, of course.
And then my success in working with the other Directors, I think, turned out to be
very good and we had a good close working relationship. Because of that, I got very well
acquainted with Jack Van Lindley, III, who was quite an unusual individual and a key
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person because he inherited a lot of the leadership qualities that his father and grandfather
had. He and I became close friends, and we used to sit together in special meetings – the
executive committee in particular – and work on problems that Roger Soles wanted help
with and that sort of thing. And then after the meeting was over, Jack and I would usually
have a little visit together and talk about Guilford College. Because of his connection
with the college and mine, we had a lot to talk about. So that’s how my relationship with
Jefferson Standard developed over a period of time. And unless you have some other
questions for me, we’ll go on to the other subject.
KS: Okay, and you had already mentioned Guilford College and a connection with them.
Could we talk about that?
SM: Guilford College. Well, I’ve said earlier that I was one of seven children, and five of us
went to Guilford, and four of the five married Guilford graduates. We have two children,
and they both graduated from Guilford so [laughs] we’re up to our ears in Guilford
College and have been for an awful long time since that’s where I met Hazel. We were
seated together in alphabetical order in compulsory chapel that met four times a week.
After the chapel service was over each time, we would walk together to the next class
building – classroom building – where we got so well acquainted and started dating early
when she was a freshman in 1941. Excuse me, she graduated in ’41; she was a freshman
in 1937, and that turned out to be one of the great things that happened to me. I out-married
myself, no doubt about it. She was an A student and was – her senior year – was
President of the Women’s Student Government, and I was a C student and struggling to
make it each year because I was working all the time I could at twenty-five cents an hour
trying to pay my room and board and tuition. I never could work long enough to pay it
because there weren’t enough hours in a day and night at twenty-five cents an hour to
make it. At that rate it takes forty hours to make ten dollars. So we struggled and when
we graduated from Guilford and I started with Jefferson Standard, it took us a couple of
years to pay off debts and that sort of thing. And then we continued to work with
Guilford College, and it turned out to be a great experience. Guilford College is a good
strong college without ambitions to become a university. It’s a Quaker college that had –
it was third in the country. They have coeds with as many women as it did men in the
student body and that sort of thing. It’s been a great organization and a good experience,
and I worked there with Guilford as strong as I could for a long time because they did so
much to help me when I was struggling as a student. And Hazel and I, after we were
married and had children – I’ll get to that later – but we continued to work closely with
Guilford College. And I was a Quaker before I married Hazel and then after the war was
over and we came back to Greensboro – came back to Asheville first.
I joined the Baptist church with Hazel in Asheville, and then when we came to
Greensboro, we joined the First Baptist Church here, which is more than sixty-five years
ago – I think that’s right – that we’ve been members of First Baptist Church. I was really
a Quaker growing up, and a birth-right Quaker, but at the time I was working closely with
Guilford, I was known as a member of the Baptist church. And Guilford started
organizing their board – their trustees – and appointing a few non-Quakers and I got
appointed to that board along with a Methodist from Burlington, and we were known as
non-Quaker board members at Guilford. But I worked so closely with Guilford College
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over a long period of time and with their staff people and the presidents – with George
Grimsley Hobbs when he came in, and that was a difficult time for him because it was
during the Depression and students were not very happy in some of the areas and were
creating problems for the President. Also, faculty members were trying to run things, and
Grimsley Hobbs had a pretty difficult time, and I tried hard to work with him and help
him as much as I could. He and his wife appreciated that, obviously. And then when Bill
Rogers came along, there was a lot of discussion about whether we’d have the first non-
Quaker President because Bill Rogers was the President. But we also had a prospective
President who was a non-Quaker, and the search committee had recommended him to the
trustees. I made a pretty strong argument for having Bill Rogers who was a Quaker as the
President, and we ended up with some major discussion about that at the trustee meeting,
but we ended up electing Bill Rogers as President. Soon after Bill was named President,
Rufus White – who was a Quaker from eastern North Carolina [and] who was President
of Pilot life – retired as Chairman of the trustees at Guilford, and I ended up being elected
Chairman. There was a lot of discussion about having a first non-Quaker person as
Chairman of the Trustees of Guilford and some of the leading Quakers in other parts of
the country, including Elton Trueblood, became concerned about this. And Elton
Trueblood contacted me right away and said he was coming to Greensboro to visit
Guilford College. He wanted to have a special interview with me so I looked forward to
that and thought about it quite a little bit. I found him easy to talk with, and he had a lot
of questions that I was able to answer, I think, pretty well. We ended up with a good
personal relationship that helped me a great deal. He [laughs] reported back to the faculty
members and Bill Rogers and some other people that he found me to be not too far
removed from the Quakers, and he thought I’d make a good Chairman of the Trustees. So
he and Bill Rogers and I worked closely together and had lots of conversation. And my
biggest problem with being Chairman of the Trustees when Bill Rogers was President
was not working with the President and his wife because that was easy to do because Bill
Rogers turned out be a great personal friend and an easy guy to work with.
But the problem was that so many other people were seeking Bill Rogers as a
President that I was struggling to find ways to keep him at Guilford and not let him take
one of these offers that he was getting from various places over the country. One of the
colleges was from Pennsylvania, and I’d worried about his leaving to go there. About that
time we got – Bill Rogers and I got – an invitation from the New International College in
Japan that started after World War II. And they wanted Bill to bring his wife and me to
bring my wife, and the four of us come and spend a few days with the staff at the
University – International College in Japan. Bill Rogers was considering seriously
leaving to go to Pennsylvania to be President of a college there. So the day before we got
our flight tickets and everything ready to catch a plane to fly to Japan, the four of us –
and the day before that trip I went over to Bill Rogers’ office and said to him, “Bill, we’re
not going to be talking about your leaving Guilford College all the time we’re enjoying
this good trip together. And I want to tell you something: I’m not going to mention one
time your leaving Guilford College to go to Pennsylvania unless you bring up the
subject.” And so we went on that basis and never mentioned it again and had a great trip
over there and things that we enjoyed greatly. And one night – we were both in the same
hotel but on different floors – and one night about 8:30 or nine o’clock after we had been
out to dinner together and gone back to the hotel, we had a little visit and they had gone
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to their room and we were in ours getting ready for bed, the telephone rang. I answered
the phone, and it was Bill Rogers. He said, “I just want to tell you, I got off the telephone
with the search committee from Pennsylvania, and I told him that we were not interested
in leaving Guilford College. We are going to stay.” And [laughs] I was so delighted you
can’t believe it. I almost pulled the phone off the hook, thanking him for what he had
done. And I said, “Come on down here. We want to talk to you personally about this.” So
in a few minutes, he and Beverly came in, and we had a good visit and I shook hands
with him and thanked him profusely and told him we’d work harder than ever to help him
and that sort of thing. And then we said, “It’s too bad we didn’t learn this before dinner.
We would have had a big celebration at dinner time.” And somebody spoke up and said,
“Well, it’s not too late to go get some ice cream.” So we went downstairs and inquired
about a good place to get some ice cream, and we had trouble with the language, but we
finally got a good place and went there. And then the first question was, “Well, what
kind of ice cream does each of you want?” And I – since I was putting on the leadership
for this occasion and was going to pay the bill, I said, “Before I answer that question, let
me just say that all four of us are from a Quaker college and Quakers just like plain
vanilla so I’m going to order plain vanilla and I’ll let them decide what they’re going to
order.” So we laughed about that, and they ordered their ice cream, and we had a good
time enjoying that celebration. And then went back and, I’ll tell you, I slept a whole lot
better that night than I had in weeks.
KS: I bet so!
SM: So that’s how we moved forward with Bill Rogers and his leadership at Guilford College.
So the other thing that needs to be said about this is that Beverly, his wife, was very
active as a teacher in high school and she came to Guilford with the understanding that
she would take one year off from her teaching and help Bill get started at Guilford and
then a year later she would go back to her regular profession of teaching in high school.
But the way it worked out, Bill and Beverly and Hazel and I and staff people and faculty
and students were so thrilled with Bill Rogers and Beverly that after the year, she decided
to continue on as the President’s wife and not go back to teaching. So we bragged a lot to
Guilford trustees and faculty about getting two for the price of one. But it worked out so
well, and Bill Rogers stayed and did an outstanding job for that school. I have a great,
great appreciation for him and his leadership and especially for his personal friendship,
which, not only did we enjoy during all that time together, but we enjoy it just as much
now as ever. He spends part of his year in Maine at his beautiful home up there, but we
maintain contact with them and enjoy them immensely – and Beverly is included in that –
and we look forward to our visits together very much. And his successor when he left
was McNemar and he – we had a good relationship with him. I should tell you before I
leave Bill Rogers, though, that he became a very active member of the Greensboro
Rotary Club and was President of that club for his term there. And he is the third faculty
member or third President of Guilford College to be President of the Greensboro Rotary
Club. The first one was Clyde Milner who was president when I was a student at
Guilford, and the second one was Grimsley Hobbs who was President of the Rotary Club,
and then the third one was Bill Rogers. And when Bill Rogers became President of the
Rotary Club, a couple of people that helped me with this a lot – E.D. Kennedy’s husband
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was very helpful and helped me get a number of donations to the Rotary Club to make it
possible for Bill Rogers to be a Paul Harris Fellow – Paul Harris Member – and we got
that thousand dollars raised for him. When McNemar came along, he became a Rotary
Club member also, and we raised some money for him and got him a Paul Harris
Fellowship but he never became a President of the Rotary Club. We had only three that I
know of. But that Rotary Club has been very active and very helpful in lots and lots of
ways and especially to the education community in Greensboro, which is such an
important part of our total leadership category. Rotary Club was very, very helpful to us.
And then, when Kent Chabatar came along, we ended up with our first non-Quaker
President. He was a Catholic and still is but has done a super job in even strengthening
the Guilford College Quaker relationship and the leadership in that area and I told him
one day that he was one of the best Quakers I know [laughs] and he laughed and said,
“Wait until I tell the Pope.” So it’s been quite an experience working with Guilford
College. And I was so successful – in getting back with Jefferson Standard – I started
buying Jefferson Standard’s stock in 1947, I believe, and I had some good experiences
and was able to buy some more over the years. And the stock split so many times that I
couldn’t believe how successful I was financially when I retired at Jefferson. And when
that stock was very outstanding and caused us to work with setting up some charitable
remainder trusts and that sort of thing and making quite a hunk of it payable to Guilford
College. Because of the tax laws, I was able to do some things in that area, with the help
of our son, which I’ll get to a little bit later. But we helped Guilford College quite a little
bit financially as we moved along, and all of that I attribute to the leadership of Bill
Rogers primarily, and the fact that he helped us feel even stronger than ever that Guilford
College was an important part of our success story. And I guess that brings us around to
what? – talking about the family members next.
KS: Sure.
SM: [Laughs] I’ve already said that both of our children graduated from Guilford but Hazel
and I were so close to Guilford College that we – our children heard so much, so many
good things about Guilford that when our children came along, they both went to
Guilford. Our daughter, Carol, graduated in 1969 and our son graduated in 1974 and we –
because of them – we spent even more time there. Our daughter, Carol, fell in love with a
young fellow by the name of Jerry Shepperd. And Jerry became an early soldier in the
Vietnam War and had a bad experience there and had great difficulty for a while. When
the war was over, things didn’t work out too well – and they had a daughter named
Heather Shepperd who went to a good college in New England; had good grades and got
along extremely well but soon thereafter – Heather was quite young – Jerry died and
Carol remarried. Her new husband was the son of one of my good friends, and I never
knew the son very well until after they were married, but I knew his father well because
Karl Ljung was my boss and Karl helped me to get a lot of things done that I wanted to
do. And one of the things he helped me do was become very active in a Sales
Executives’ club, which he organized in Greensboro. It was a member of a national
organization, so that was part of my success story with Jefferson Standard. Also, Carol
remarried and her new husband was the son of this good friend of mine – her new
husband was Alen Sleeper. Carol and Alen have been very successful. Alen had his
10
Master’s Degree. They both prepared themselves to be teachers and they were teaching
together for two or three years and then he, all of a sudden, decided he wanted to do
something other than teaching. In thinking about things he’d like to do, he came to the
conclusion that he’d like to be in the sailboat business and the sailboat business is located
in eastern shore, Maryland, and not in Greensboro. They ended up, a long time ago,
moving to eastern shore of Maryland where he gave up his teaching and became very
active as a worker, a carpenter, in a sailboat organization there – a big one in eastern
shore. And he was doing very important things and taking old sailboats and remodeling
them and bringing them up to date; making them much more valuable; taking damaged
boats and repairing them and that sort of thing. And Carol became a teacher and was very
active in teaching and ended up as a principal for ten years and taught for a total of forty-one
or -two or -three years before she retired as a teacher. Soon thereafter, Allen retired
from the boat company and today both of them are in Sicily enjoying a wonderful trip to
Europe with a couple that they’ve been good friends of for a long time. Just a couple of
days ago, I got an e-mail from Carol in Sicily saying that they had an unusual experience
there in the last day or two because the volcano that’s very close to where they were
staying had just erupted, and they could see the flames out of their hotel window, and it
sprayed trash all around on the pavement next to the hotel. So they’re having a wonderful
trip with a little extra – excitement there, which has been very interesting and helpful to
them. But they made some wonderful trips together here – and they both got a year’s
leave of absence one time and sailed down to Miami and went to the islands and spent the
winter and that sort of thing. And I think I talked about that some previously but all that
experience has been great, and she’s had a wonderful experience with her family. Her
daughter, Heather, married an interesting guy whose family was from Puerto Rico.
They’re living in Baltimore now, and Heather is teaching in a – working in a big law firm
in Baltimore and her husband is a part-time student and a part-time faculty staff member
at one of the universities in Baltimore. So Carol and her family have been quite
successful over a long period of time, and Carol comes to visit us and it’s amazing how
much help she gives to her mother and me in cleaning up our “bachelor-quarters”
apartment and that sort of thing when she comes. We’re looking forward to having her
again after they get back from Italy, Sicily, and other parts of their trip over there.
And our son, Randy, when he graduated from Guilford College in 1974, he had
decided he wanted to be a banker and, as luck would have it, in 1974 there was quite a
depression in the country, and the banks weren’t hiring anybody. So he had a whole
bunch of interviews, but didn’t get hired as a banker. And finally, he had so much trouble
getting a job as a banker that he decided that maybe he’d better do something else and we
talked about the life insurance business and he – at that time Jefferson Standard owned
Pilot Life, but they were operating as two competing companies rather than working very
closely together – and he asked me about going to Pilot Life for interviews. Pilot life
offered him a job in Birmingham, which he declined. He didn’t tell me this – but he told
his mother that he didn’t want to leave Greensboro because his dad kept talking about
buying some farmland after selling his parents’ farm in Randolph County and if his
daddy ever bought any farmland, he wanted to be around to enjoy it with him. After a
whole series of further discussions, Pilot Life decided to hire him and make him a staff
member of their marketing operation. So that caused us to be fairly close together
because his work and mine were very close.
11
Randy has been very successful with Pilot over a period of time, and then when
the two companies merged and became the Jefferson-Pilot with the home office
downtown, and they built a new office building to house the total operation. After I
retired, Randy ended up with an office on the same floor that I was on previously, and he
has – was doing extremely well with that company except that he and his Pilot agents in
south Texas were involved in a program that Lincoln National didn’t know anything
about when Lincoln took over Jefferson-Pilot. He ended up explaining that program to
the Lincoln National people, and they ended up having him travel all over – not just
thirty-two states and Puerto Rico as I did, but also all over fifty states – maybe forty-eight.
But he was very successful in his operation. He retired after 34 years with the
company.
[End CD 1—Begin CD 2]
KS: Now you had said that you’re also very involved in your church life.
SM: Well, now we’re down to church life. Well, when we – I joined a Baptist church in
Asheville when we came out of the military service and were located in our Asheville –
Jefferson Standard Asheville office in 1946. And when we came to Greensboro, there
were no places to live and we ended up in a one-room boarding house sharing a bath with
a couple living in a room across the hall – on the other side of the bath, maybe it was.
Anyway, that was quite an experience for us. The pastor of the church in Asheville where
we lived notified the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Greensboro, and the second day
after we had moved into that little one-room area in a boarding house, sharing a bath; we
had a knock on the front door and when I went there, it was J. Clyde Turner, pastor of
First Baptist Church, inviting us to come to his church. We went there – started going
there right away and moved our membership from Asheville to First Baptist Church. I got
in the Sunday School class across the street taught by Bill York who was an attorney in
town and had been a leader in that church for a long time. The church wasn’t big enough
to take care of everything, and they had arranged to get the funeral home across the street
as a place for a Sunday school class on Sunday morning, so I started going to the men’s
Sunday school class in a funeral-home church, across the street. J. Clyde Turner was the
pastor and he had been there – I think it was – I can’t remember the number of the years.
It seems like it was thirty-nine years that he had been pastor there, and he was
approaching retirement at the time. We ended up being new members of that church and
that was sixty-five years ago – maybe sixty-six now, I’m not real sure – but that church
has meant so much to us that you can’t believe it. Being a Quaker and a birth-right
Quaker and being a Christian for a long time at a fairly early age, the church membership
meant a lot, and we worked as hard as we could there. And one of the unusual things is
that the pastor’s secretary – she was also a secretary for the oldest of the senior assistant
past – and she had married my second cousin, and we got to know her real well. She
helped me more than you’ll ever know about things that I ought to be thinking about and
doing, and trying to be more effective in being a good church member, and she was
instrumental, I’m sure, in having the Chairman of the Deacons and the Minister of
Education call on me when I was travelling with Jefferson Standard, asking me if I would
consider being a Deacon at First Baptist Church. I kept saying that I couldn’t do that job
12
well because I was travelling so much and staying away from home and Hazel was
having to look after two young children and so forth so I had a pretty good excuse, which
they were slow to take. I was making progress with them until I got around to asking
them one question one day, and that is, “Well, who’s going to be the chairman?’ They
were asking me to be vice chairman. I think that was the first time they asked me to be a
deacon, and then they came back later, after I was elected deacon, and asked me to be
vice chairman of the deacons, and I kept telling them I couldn’t do it because I was
travelling so much. Finally, we got around to who is the chairman. They said, “William
York is the chairman.” And I – he was my old Sunday school teacher – and I said, “Well,
gee whiz, I know that if Bill York is the chairman, there’s not going to be anything for
the vice chairman to do because he runs everything. He knows everything and makes the
decisions before they have a deacons’ meeting so he knows how it is going to come out
before we start.” So I ended up laughing with them about that and I said, “Well, if Bill
York is chairman, I’ll be the vice chairman.” When I started attending vice chairman
meetings – monthly meetings with the deacons – and he sat at the head table with his
agenda and everything and the pastor and the top staff people, I was out in the audience
seated at a table with the regular deacons. And one night, we hadn’t been meeting very
long, and I was vice chairman. I never had anything to do with arranging the agenda or
anything, but one night we were in the middle of a meeting and Bill York was conducting
the meeting and all of a sudden he laid – he sat down in the chair and put his hands on the
table and put his forehead in his hands and made some comments to the people seated
next to him and slid the agenda over there and said something. So somebody got up at the
head table and called my name and asked me if I would come up there. I went to the head
table and he handed me the agenda, which I hadn’t even seen or had anything to do with,
and he said, “You’re to conduct the balance of this meeting.” So I looked at the agenda
and thought about it and we talked about it a few minutes, and I called on some help and
tried to conduct the balance of that meeting. Then, for the next meeting or two, I was
chairperson, active as vice chair, and then I went to Bill York’s funeral and ended up
being chairman of the deacons of First Baptist Church.
In the meantime, I got a lot of help from other people, and I got an awful lot of
help from the secretary who married my cousin, who helped me more than you’d ever
know, behind the scenes and on the telephone at night and one way or another.
Everybody was very, very helpful to me at First Baptist Church. And we got through that
in pretty good shape, but then we were approaching the time when the pastor was retiring
– J. Clyde Turner – and the search committee was working on bringing in Claude Bowen
and his wife. All that took place, and I worked with it as best as I could through that but
before – let’s see. But one of the main things that happened was that J. Clyde Turner was
smart enough – after thirty-nine years as pastor of First Baptist Church and bringing
somebody else in to be the new pastor, he and his wife were smart enough to realize that
if he stayed on in Greensboro and stayed as a member of this church, he would be a
handicap to the new pastor instead of a help. So he and his wife announced soon that they
were moving to Raleigh where they would not be involved in any way in the decision-making
that the new pastor and the deacons and the other church members would decide
to make. And then when he got ready to move, they were already talking about building a
new church building somewhere and the pastor – former pastor – who was moving to
Raleigh, and he said, “Well, I want to tell you something and I’m not saying you ought to
13
use this at all, but I just want you to know something, and that is that my wife and I, a
number of years ago, bought thirteen acres of land on Friendly Avenue at the corner of
Mendenhall Street, and that we own that land and you are free to look at that land all you
want to see whether or not you want to consider buying it and building a church building
there and let that be the headquarter for the new church. But, let me tell you, my wife and
I have owned that property for a number of years. We paid x amount for it, and if this
church decides they want to buy it for that purpose, we’ll sell it to them for exactly what
we paid for it, not what it’s worth today.
KS: That’s a great deal!
SM: And what an offer that was. So Claude Bowen and other people started looking for places
to build a new church building. There wasn’t anything else that came close so they ended
up buying that property from J. Clyde Turner and building that church there. Bill York
was so interested in that building, and also there’s another guy who name I can’t call
right now – and he was such a leader in that church that the two of them spent most of
their working week down there at that church, supervising the construction of the new
sanctuary and all that business and making sure that the church was getting its money’s
worth in every way and they weren’t on the payroll of anybody. They were doing this as
volunteers, but both of them were so smart and had such long experience in that church,
that they were able to do a lot to help the construction workers to come up with things
that nobody else would ever think about. And I watched all of that happen because I was
a former – by that time, I was a former chairman of the deacons, and I stayed very active
there over a period of a lifetime and spent a lot of time and effort and gave a lot of money
trying to help First Baptist Church. And Hazel was very, very active because she had –
she was very active in a big Sunday school class and had excellent teachers. A couple of
her teachers – one of them is in Friend’s Home West right now and last Sunday night had
the vesper’s service here. I’m talking about Gladys Burroughs. She did one tremendous
job as a Sunday school teacher in that church. And the other teacher that worked with her
was a good personal friend of Hazel’s.
Hazel was much more active and smarter in that church than I was ever able to be,
but I was chairman of the deacons three different time at First Baptist Church and she
was very active in – when the Bowens came here and when S. C. Raye and his wife came
and was in charge of the youth area, Hazel was very active in setting up a special garden
club with the pastor’s wife and the education director’s wife being key members of that
club because none of them had gardens but they wanted a garden club so that a small
group of church members – female church members – could be very active and help and
give the two wives a place to go and enjoy conversation and talk about a lot of things and
get relief from the church. That turned out to be the most successful little garden club
anybody ever heard of. It got so popular and so important that at one time several people
wanted to get membership in that garden club and that group of people that started that
thing took the position that we’re not taking on any new members. We’re here to make it
attractive and easy for the two pastors’ wives to have a place to go and talk and enjoy life
without being in the church and let them know that we’re just as important and just as
religious as the church people, but we’re not a member of the church staff being told
what we’ve got to do at any given time. So several people tried to join and they wouldn’t
14
let them join as long as they could continue this way. So that was a very successful
program which Hazel benefitted greatly from being involved with and I heard about it at
home as well as at the church so I knew – I knew all about what was going on. But the
church organized an athletic program – a gymnasium next door to the church – and they
did a lot of things there to help the young people have activities related to the church that
were not necessarily a part of the Sunday program and that sort of thing. So that church
experience meant an awful lot to us and we have benefitted greatly from it in many, many
ways. Now that we’re out here at Friend’s Home West and I’m ninety-three and she’s
ninety-one, and we’re getting ready to have our seventieth wedding anniversary, we’re
not even able anymore to go to the annual meeting of senior members. They have a
meeting once a year for all those who have been members for fifty years or more, and
here we’re one of the senior people in that group where they’ve just announced today of a
meeting and we’ve already told them we weren’t able to get there because Hazel is not
able to go. She’s had more difficulty in the last week or two than she’s had in a long time.
KS: I hate to keep you this long, but I know you did want to talk about volunteerism before
we ended.
SM: Volunteerism at the church was a good program that I latched on to after I retired from
Jefferson Standard because I was so active at Jefferson Standard and after I retired, our
children had jobs and had things to do, and Hazel and I needed to do some things that we
wanted to do. I had an opportunity to volunteer for some things that turned out to be so
interesting that I had trouble believing it, and I worked at them as hard as I would if I had
been on a salary. And one of them was – one of the very first ones was a member of our
church and his wife came to see us and said to me, “Now that you’re retired, I want to
talk to you about a special project. We’ve got a handicapped child that most people don’t
know we have. It’s in one of the state institutions for handicapped people in North
Carolina and we want to tell you about a problem we’ve got with that institution there, in
one of the five institutions – I think four or five at that time in the state – for handicapped
people. Every one of those operations is state-owned and operated. Every one of the four
or five have a chaplain who is to do what a chaplain ought to be doing with a group of
handicapped people, but none of them have a chapel—not a chapel on a single one of the
places. And we’ve observed that the chaplain in the summertime is having his meetings
under a shade tree in the yard or, during the winter time, he’s having it in an athletic
facility or in a building that is used for some other purpose. He’s having his groups sit in
a corner and listen and talk and so forth, and we see the need so badly for chapels. We
need to build a chapel on each campus of these four or five. When we go see our son and
try to figure out a way to help him and talk to the chaplain, the chaplain is trying to do
things without any equipment to do them with and we need chapels.”
And I listened to that for a while and he talked to some other people in our church
[including] Fred Williams who is now out at Wellspring. He’ll be ninety-seven this
month. And I and two or three other people got active in trying to raise money to build
chapels. And it turned out to be such a job, you can’t believe it, because they had a
committee with a chairman, and we were just members of that committee but Fred
Williams and I got so interested in this thing and we started raising money from every
angle we could to try to build a chapel. The state at the time wouldn’t build a chapel
15
because they were afraid that government shouldn’t be involved in religious things. So
that was their excuse for not having any chapels. And then when they found out that we
were willing to raise money to build one, they said if you will raise the money, we’ll help
you supervise the construction of them. But we started to raise money, and this was back
at a time when interest rates were very high. We started small amounts of money in
savings accounts with high interest rates. We worked hard trying to raise money, and it
was amazing. We’d get people to listen to us and give us a little amount, but the amounts
we were getting were so small that all we were doing was piddling around with keeping a
little fund, but not growing it very fast. We kept on working at it so hard and kept giving
money ourselves and talking to other people and then talking with the parents or relatives
of people who were in these institutions and trying to get family members to give money
and that sort of thing. We were successful in building a pretty sizable fund and we started
building a chapel or two and it’s amazing how we got – how much interest we got. When
we started building a chapel, the churches in the community got interested in what we
were doing and we found out that not only would they give some money, but they found
out right away that the churches would look forward to working with the chaplain. This
turned out to be one of the most successful projects that you could imagine in the state of
North Carolina. And it was so successful that the state legislature took it upon themselves
to pass a state law that said that the state will pay half the cost of that chapel construction,
even though we have to be careful and we won’t tell them how to do it. That turned out to
be such a successful operation that it still blows my mind how much help we gave to
churches and five chaplains in North Carolina. And it just is amazing how it worked. It
turned out to be something that not only did we look forward to working with, we worked
at it so hard you’d have thought we were on a salary. And that turned out to be one of our
best programs I’ve ever worked with in my life, and some of the chaplains are still having
– not only did the chaplain build a nice office for himself in the chapel, he’s also got
meeting rooms for everything he wanted to do and he’s got a place to do it. Not only that
but he – immediately had a new building with a place the people in the churches around
all wanted to participate in and now that thing is so good that you wouldn’t believe it.
And the thing that surprised me the most is that when you call on somebody in the
handicapped group to lead a prayer – who couldn’t even talk a sentence – and they can do
a job of prayer that you would find hard to believe. You bring in music people to lead the
singing and they come up with an old hymn that was so popular as they were growing up
that they can sing almost as well as the people who were there to sing. And it’s amazing
how the success of the chaplains has been – the results have been so good that it’s
amazing. And that thing is still operating. We built about three chapels and we revised a
couple of buildings on the other campuses where we took an old building and turned it
into a chapel. And now the chaplains – most of them are retired, but one or two of them
are still there, and they’re still telling us how much they appreciate all we did. I’m not
supposed to identify this person but, let me tell you, the couple that had the kid that was
handicapped that came to see Fred Williams and me, he’s been dead for a number of
years, but his wife is in this facility today.
KS : Oh, really, what a small world.
16
SM: I speak to her at dinner at night and that sort of thing. It’s amazing, and I’ve got in my
book letters – copies of letters – from chaplains and that sort of thing. That’s been one of
the most successful volunteer programs I’ve ever been involved in.
KS: Now I know that Rotary does quite a lot of community work, too.
SM: It’s amazing what the Rotary Club does and I’ve listened to their program and I’ve been
able to help a little bit in some of the things they’re doing, but the other thing – and I’ve
got to tell you about it. First Baptist Church – is that when Greensboro, North Carolina
was having its – what? – hundred and seventy fifth, I think, anniversary. I could be wrong
about the anniversary. They were having a big anniversary and it was on a certain date – I
think it was the hundred and seventy fifth anniversary – and they called on a pastor who
was a professor at Greensboro College by the name of – I’ll tell you in a minute. I know
it so well. Joe and Jim – [laughs] my mind has just reached a blank, but Joe – Jim would
have been a professor at Greensboro College for thirty-one years. He was such a popular
professor there. He was a minister and he was the Jefferson Standard professor because
he was so – it was so important what he was doing for people and staff at Greensboro
College that Joe Hull – Jim Hull, Dr. James Hull, was asked by the city of Greensboro if
he would arrange for a special program – not at the college but at the main theater in
Greensboro, public theater – to have a program that would recognize the anniversary of
the city of Greensboro. He arranged to do this at the coliseum and he – being a minister
and working with students and working with things that colleges have to be concerned
with – he was successful in setting up a program that would amaze you. He included –
the first thing he included was a group of young black students. The second thing he
included was a group of Jewish students. The third thing was a group of some other
category of students, and he came up with every different denomination, every different –
and even a group of native American Indians. If you could believe that, Native American
Indians – a group of them. But in bringing all of these groups from all sections of
Greensboro – every religion he could think of including some that you couldn’t think of
and you didn’t want to be involved with or anything. He had thirteen different groups
from every category of people in this city that you could imagine, and he brought them
all together for a special program and got a lot of them to participate in that program. And
it was so successful that not only did it create a success story that the leaders of the city
of Greensboro are still talking about, but that was more than twenty-five years ago now,
and every year since that time he has had an annual meeting of what he calls the
“Piedmont Interfaith Council.” And they met for a number of years in that same place
that he had the big meeting – the original one. Then they got so expensive there that he
couldn’t afford it anymore and he got Dana Auditorium on Guilford College Campus to
let him have that kind of a meeting in their auditorium on the Sunday before
Thanksgiving every year. I’ve been on that board of the Piedmont Interfaith Council
since it started. It started one year after the big celebration for the one hundred and
seventy-fifth anniversary, and it’s had an annual meeting every year since, and it’s
getting ready to have another one this fall at Thanksgiving. I have participated not only in
that, but in raising money to help provide it, working with the people at Guilford College
and having Guilford participate in a way to make that big auditorium available every
year. I’ve been so active in that with Hazel, you couldn’t believe it and all of these
17
twenty-five years and we are still trying to be active in giving them a little money. But
we’re not as active at anything as we used to be. That Piedmont Interfaith Council is
written in my book along with the chapels for the mentally retarded, and those are two of
the main things that I would like to tell you about.
I’ve got to tell you about one more. The Independent College Fund is a fund that
independent colleges work with to try to raise money from businesses in the North
Carolina area. There are so many colleges and universities in Greensboro, North
Carolina, that the Independent College Fund gets to be important in raising money for
these individual colleges. And when they – they’ve got an organization for soliciting
money. And that organization requires that no person from one college can go and raise
money for the Independent College Fund by himself or by herself because if you do, she
or he will be talking about their particular college more than they would be talking about
independent colleges in the state of North Carolina. So their organization arranged for
each solicitor to have a staff person from another college as a co-solicitor so that two
colleges are represented instead of one when you go raise money. I got assigned as one of
the people in Greensboro to call on Greensboro businesses for this purpose, and the
person that was assigned to work with me was from Campbell University. And he started
coming with me to work on that project years ago and – the name won’t come because
this is part-timers not Alzheimer’s. His name was Dr. Norman Wiggins, then President of
Campbell College. Dr. Wiggins came from Campbell University here, spent the night in
our home, had dinner with Hazel and me in our home, slept in the guest room, got up the
next morning and had breakfast with us. Then the two of us went out making calls in the
city of Greensboro to raise money for the Independent College Fund. We did this so well
that we got money that you wouldn’t believe for the Independent College Fund. The
Independent College Fund has a system for dividing it up with the independent colleges
in the state. One of our best givers – donors in the city of Greensboro was Blue Bell
Corporation, and it’s amazing how much money we got from Blue Bell and how
successful they were in helping us with other firms and that sort of thing. We worked
with them so closely that they just helped greatly and we – when they moved away –
were bought by VF Corporation and went to Pennsylvania – then the success of that
company in Greensboro was so great that VF Corporation moved back to Greensboro.
They’re now a local corporation in Greensboro that owned what was previously Blue
Bell, and now they’ve got VF Corporation here. And I’ve watched that company grow
like crazy because of our experience with Blue Bell and all those people. I’m in an
investment club and we bought some VF Corporation stock when they moved back here
and it went up so well that we sold it when it was forty dollars a share because we wanted
to get the capital gains because we were afraid it wouldn’t go any higher. We sold that a
long time ago and then this investment club that’s been operating for twenty-two years –
we sold it for forty dollars a share. One of the members of the investment club was a vice
President of VF Corporation until he retired. He kept some of that stock and we’ve been
watching it. I saw it on this week’s program and it hit a hundred and fifty dollars a share.
And we sold it at forty.
KS: Well, you never know, though.
18
SM: You never know, but what I’m saying is that the people that helped with Blue Bell are
now VF Corporation and some of them are still helping with the Independent College
Fund, and that’s been a very successful experience. Those are three of the big things that
we’ve done and I’ve got to tell you that we had a bunch of little things that we’ve been
helping do in various ways over a period of time and I have been so happy with my
volunteer work and with Guilford College primarily, but with other things like the ones I
mentioned to you. I’m sure it’s the reason I’m still here – because of being involved in
these things. I’ve been so involved with them that instead of looking for salary for my
work, I just appreciate an opportunity to be able to do it. And I’m still working on a few
little projects along the way. And one of the things I happened to think about right now
before we leave is when we moved in out here [Friends Home West], one of the first
programs we went to – about the second year we were here – was the eleventh day of
November when they had a meeting in the living room to recognize veterans of various
wars. They had all the residents in that living room and they had somebody talking about
the veterans’ programs and so forth. Then they played music for the Navy and everybody
in the Navy stood up; then they played music for some other branch of service and all of
them would stand up; and then I got confused because I was in the Army and then I was
in the Army Air Corp and then they changed it to the Air Force – not Army but Air Force
– so I was in three different branches of the service that grew from one to the other to the
other: Army and Army Air Corp and Air Force. When we got through with that program,
I looked around and the guy seated next to me looked around with me and we got to
talking to each other about the fact that almost a big percentage of the total men in this
facility were in military service, and a lot of women were in various branches of military
service also. So the minute that program was over, he and I got to talking and said, “Gee
whiz, we’ve got to get these stories written up because there’s so many of them, you can’t
believe.” We started working with the activity director here on trying to get military
people in this facility to write their military stories and put it in the library. We set up a
private loose-leaf book and designed a cover for it that said, “Military Services of
Residents” and we were filling it up with people that were responding to our efforts to get
them to write it. Some of them were writing a half a page and some of them were writing
a hundred pages and the ones that were writing a hundred pages or more, we were putting
in a separate book. If it was something ten or fifteen pages, we’d punch it and put it in the
loose-leaf notebook.
KS: That’s a great idea.
SM: It’s amazing how it’s worked, and there are sixty-five or seventy of those in the library
right here today and the guy that was working with me – his name was Allmendinger.
Allmendinger, that’s his last name. So Allmendinger and I have promoted this thing for –
I’ve been here fifteen years, and we’ve been working on it about all that time. And we’ve
got sixty-five or seventy of those in there – at least a dozen that are in individual books
plus all of those in the loose-leaf notebook. Then I’ve got to tell you one more thing:
There’s one guy here who, when he came to see me, he said “I want to get my story in
your book but I’m not going to put it in there until you change the title of the book.” I
said, “What’s wrong with the title of the book?” He said, “You’ve got ‘Military
Experiences’ and I was a conscientious objector for the Quakers, and I didn’t go into
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military service, but I had such a wonderful experience in volunteer work for that
organization that I want my story in that book.” And it just so happened that he was a
freshman with me in 1936 at Guilford College and his name is Will Edgerton. Will
Edgerton was such a good Quaker and conscientious objector, and they assigned him up
here to work on the [Blue Ridge] Parkway in the mountains. He worked up there for two
or three years with a civil service organization, and then they promoted him or sent him –
transferred him from there to a mentally retarded institution in eastern North Carolina,
mentally handicapped, or maybe it was in Virginia, I’m not sure but somewhere. He went
there and worked at it so long that he ended up – when the war was over, he went back to
school and got his Master’s degree and ended up as a professor of medicine with the
medical school at the University of North Carolina. He was a professor for assistance for
retarded people, and it related to his conscientious objector work. He wrote that story and
it’s in – not only is it in that book, but I changed the copy of the cover of the book to
“Military and Related Service Experiences,” and he is so happy with it. He brags about it
all the time. And let me tell you the results of this thing. We’ve gotten more comments
and letters of appreciation from family members – you couldn’t believe – who say we’ve
tried our best to get our parents – our dad or our mother – to write their military
experience and they wouldn’t do it, but now that they’ve written it for you, we’ve got a
copy of it, and we appreciate it very much.
KS: That’s great.
SM: That’s been a great success story and one of the best ones in it is a guy that I worked with
for years who was a trustee at Earlham [College] and I was trustee at Guilford for all
those years. Guilford College got three presidents from Earlham. And he and I – he had
the same job in a life insurance company that I had in Jefferson Standard – and when
we’d meet at insurance meetings where we had meetings for people in the marketing
operation of companies in the U.S. and Canada, and we’d meet with a big group – he and
I would show up there at that meeting. We called it the “Insurance Marketing and
Research Organization” and when we met there, first thing we’d talk about our wives –
they were both named Hazel. The second thing we’d do is talk about our colleges –
Earlham and Guilford. And the third thing we’d do is talk about our businesses, and we
had such a wonderful experience. He was a guy I never mentioned military service to
because I thought he was a conscientious objector and a Quaker, and I found out later – I
visited him in his home – he got transferred from Indiana to Vermont and I visited him up
there. He used to tell me about everything except his military service. He had four
children: one went to Earlham, one went to Wake Forest, [and] two came to Guilford – so
he had three in North Carolina and one up there. So when he got old, he decided he’d
better start talking about his military service, so one night his daughter from North
Carolina was up there, and he told about his military experience. He was in the big thing
from London across that water into France. And the initial part of World War II, he was
in the Battle of the Bulge, he was in the Holocaust battle. And when she learned about all
that, she couldn’t believe it so she came back home so excited about it that she ended up
writing an article for the Greensboro newspaper about her father. One night she called to
talk to him further on the phone and they had two phones – one in the bedroom and one
in the living room – so he got on one phone and his wife got on the other and she was
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having a conversation with the three of them and just delightful and all of a sudden her
father stopped talking so she and her mother said, “What’s the matter? You’re not
speaking to us anymore.” And she [her mother] said, “I don’t know but I’m going to hang
up and go in there and check on him.” So she hung up; they both hung up and she went in
there and checked on him and he was seated in his chair with his phone in his lap; no
breath, and he died sitting there. She called up the daughter and her daughter got the other
children and they all rushed up there and they had his funeral and all those things, and
then she wrote this article about what her father did – changing his mind two or three or
four weeks before he died. So when the article appeared in the Greensboro paper, I had
heard about her and I knew her brother because he worked in Jefferson Pilot for a while
before he went to Charlotte with another life insurance company. And I’d heard about
one of her sisters who had graduated from Guilford and was a staff member on the
campus, but I hadn’t heard anything about her. And I called her up when I read the article
and talked to her about it. She said she was at UNCG, and we talked at some length and I
got telling her just what I’ve just told you. She came over here with a copy of that
newspaper article plus the things she sent to them that they didn’t use. And I got a copy
of all that and went back to my book in the library here and wrote that story. Her father’s
name was one very similar to mine, and it just so happened that when I put the copy of
twenty pages or more, it was in there in the same category and next to my copy of my
story in the book here. And what a guy he turned out to be, and I’ll give you his name,
too.
KS: Well, thank you for telling me that story and thank you for the interview. I really
appreciate it. This has been wonderful. Thank you.
SM: Well, let me tell you, there’s a lot to talk about and after you leave, I’ll think of lots of
things I wish I’d told you.
KS: Well, you can write it down and we’ll add it to your history, your transcript. Well, thank
you so much, Mr. Macon. I appreciate it.
SM: Well, let me tell you. That’s amazing. I’m anxious to get copies of all this because I’ll
have some inserts and some improvements in it.
KS: Okay. Well, thank you again.
[End of Interview]