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Bernie Marcus: My parents were Russian immigrants who came to America with no money. So courageous, these people. I think often about their lives, how in desperation, they picked up and left the only life they and generations before them had ever known. They had nothing. They came with nothing. They arrived in America looking forward to freedom and safety. They didn’t speak the language. They were special people for whom courage was second nature.
I grew up in a fourth floor tenement at the corner of Belmont Avenue and Rose Street in Newark, New Jersey. It was freezing in the winter and hot as hell in the summer. I tell the joke that it was so bad that they tore it down to build a slum.
It was the only home I knew, of course, and I loved it. We were surrounded by other kids in this tenement, and I loved my life, me and my friends hanging from the fire escapes, using our imaginations to entertain ourselves. It was so much fun; just ourselves and our minds.
My mother was the matriarch and peacemaker of the family. She was such a positive human being that it was difficult to depress her spirit. She could find the bright side of any situation, even death. Mother was a great optimist. She often used the Jewish word b’sheirt, which means “it is destined to be.” And to her, everything that was destined to be was always very positive. In other words, even if somebody died, she would find a good reason—“they didn’t suffer” or “the family didn’t suffer.” She could make anything into a positive.
My mom taught me most of the beliefs I possess today, especially that you have only so much physical and mental energy. Don’t spend time replaying the past; it only keeps you from focusing on the future. Don’t spend time on things in which you can’t make a difference. She also taught me that the way you handle and deal with life’s setbacks creates the basis for what you’ll accomplish in the future.
I often think of Willy Loman, the central character in Arthur Miller’s great play Death of a Salesman. Willy’s glory days as a star salesman were clearly behind him. If he wanted to keep his job he needed to change. Instead, he blamed everyone but himself for his failures. My mom was just the opposite, always looking on the bright side.
A very, very bright woman, my mother had enough wisdom to qualify her to teach at our best business schools. She was bedridden in her mid-forties, crippled with rheumatoid arthritis. She couldn’t walk. When my sister, Bea, was eight years old, Mother’s doctor told her that the only hope she had of ever walking again would be if she had another baby. Believe it or not, I was conceived for medical reasons! Even better, after giving birth to me—on Mother’s Day, no less—she was able to walk again. Her hands and feet were still hopelessly gnarled, but she was able to walk.
To her, I was a blessing. She loved me so because I literally saved her life. Although in unrelenting pain, she functioned for some thirty years after my birth and had an immense influence on my life.
My father was a cabinetmaker. He was strong as an ox, a great craftsman but a terrible businessman. He worked day and night, seven days a week, fifteen hours a day, and still couldn’t make ends meet for his wife and four children. Without the contributions of my two grown brothers, Irving and Seymour, the family would never have survived.
As poor as we were, my mother used to take ice cream money away from my brothers and sister and me—often against our will—and give it to charities. Her sincere belief was that “the more you give, the more you get.” How right she was.
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We lived in a predominantly black neighborhood, which made me a target if for no other reason than I stood out in any crowd. Black gang kids used to challenge me to fights every day after school and whip me badly, but, somewhat fearless, somewhat stupid, I always came back for more. Finally, the leader of one gang was so impressed with my ability to take what he was dishing out that he wanted me as part of the gang. At 11 years old, I not only ran with this gang of thirty black kids but I became its second in command.
Then when I was about 12½, we moved away from that neighborhood, which was getting too rough for our family.
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My family was always in tough shape financially, so I started working from the age of 13. My first job was as a soda jerk after school. During summer vacations in high school, I earned money for college as a busboy in the Catskill Mountains. You could accumulate a significant (in those days) amount of money if you were frugal, because the jobs included room and board and the tips were all yours.
From an early age I had a propensity for medicine—especially psychiatry. I was particularly interested in studying the mind. I spent hours reading the works of Freud and Jung and became determined at the age of 17 that I would become a psychiatrist.
During this time, I learned the art of hypnosis. When I was a waiter at Kutsher’s Country Club, I became proficient enough that I was able to perform on stage. I would put somebody into a hypnotic state, take them back in years, but I never made a fool out of anybody. I helped people with memory problems find something they lost. In fact, I did one of the original stop-smoking routines. It was a very exciting period in my life; I hypnotized as many as ten people at a time. It was here, as I got into people’s minds, that I began to understand how some folks become obstacles for others.
I recognized then that my calling was in medicine, and specifically psychiatry. I registered for premed studies at Rutgers College in Newark, which allowed me to save money by living at home.
After my second year, I sought a med school scholarship. One day the dean, with whom I had become friendly, called me. He had arranged a scholarship for me to attend Harvard Medical School. I was very excited.
Then he said to me, “I will give you the address where you have to send a $10,000 check,” and I just looked at him in disbelief. He explained that there was a quota on how many Jews Harvard would willingly accept into medical school. The $10,000 was some kind of kickback.
I never personally spoke to anyone from Harvard, but I was told there was an unwritten quota system regarding how many Jewish students could be accepted into various graduate schools—medical included. But if my family could come up with a $10,000 contribution, I could probably circumvent the quota. Well, my entire family—parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins—had never seen that kind of money, let alone possessed it, so my dream was quashed like a tenpenny nail being hit by a sledgehammer.
In total frustration, I quit school the next day, packed my suitcases, and hitchhiked down to Florida, where I stayed for a year. I was so despondent because I couldn’t be a doctor.
After I’d had a year of real-life learning experiences and total independence, my mother prevailed on me to finish my education. All good Jewish mothers feel their children need a college degree, so I went home. I went back to Rutgers and enrolled in pharmacy school, which was far from my heart’s first choice.
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I was very young during World War II, but it—and the news of the Holocaust in particular—had a sobering effect on me. It dawned on me that folks like myself were massacred for no other reason than being born Jewish. If not for the courage of my parents giving up everything they knew to come to this wonderful land, I might have perished in Hitler’s death camps. So at an early age, survival of the Jewish race and religion became very important to me.
We were brought up in an Orthodox religious home. Going to synagogue—and living our lives according to the scriptures—were very important and had a special meaning to my parents and, through their eyes, to me. They had a strong belief in God, and they instilled that in me.
I was very religious myself, although I had a problem: I didn’t understand Hebrew. It was difficult for me to pray to God in a language that I didn’t understand. I did the chants, and I did the words. But I didn’t understand it, and, as an adult, I kind of backed off on Orthodoxy. But I never backed off on being a Jew.
I understand the frustration that blacks faced in America years ago. Jews suffered the same obstacles. Large corporations, banks, and industries were devoid of Jews in positions of authority. We couldn’t belong to exclusive clubs or high society. So we had to work harder and smarter to succeed. There is great jealousy of the accomplishments of Jews in America, but we fought for our share.
I believe that the value of our religion is critical. I think it has taught me values. And what I have always understood is that the human being is his own temple, that if you feel good about yourself and share your good fortune with others who are not so fortunate that you are doing the work of God. Beginning with my mother’s encouragement, I have tried to conduct myself in this manner.
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When I finished pharmacy school in 1954, I interned for a year. Before the year was up, the father of a friend of mine, Larry Wortzel, died, and Larry offered me a 50 percent sweat equity share of his father’s Millburn, New Jersey, pharmacy business, Central Discount Drug. I accepted, but it was a mistake.
This was not a great partnership and was full of stress for both of us. A frustrated would-be doctor does not make for a good pharmacist. Lots of heated arguments ensued.
One Saturday night—we were open until nine P.M. —after I had yet another conflict with Larry that day, I was alone in the store and eating dinner at the back counter between customers. That’s when fate—a little guy with a big cigar in his mouth—walked into the store and changed my life.
“Hey, kid, come here, get me a cigar,” he said.
This fellow may have been two years older than I was, maybe three years at the most.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said, kid, get me a cigar.”
So I walked up to him, and said, “Pick a window.”
This big cigar dangling in his mouth, he looked at me, confused. “What do you mean, pick a window?”
“Pick a window, because you are going through one of them. I want you to have a choice in which one.” And believe me, he knew I wasn’t kidding.
He put up his hands in a defensive way, as if to suggest he meant no offense. But I was in a foul, foul mood, and I was prepared. Calling me “kid” was the last straw.
“Wait a second,” he said. “You must have had an argument with your partner.”
“How did you guess?” I asked, disarmed by his intuition.
“Hey, I’ve been in here before,” he said. “I’ve seen you around your partner.”
He introduced himself as Danny Kessler and said he was the chairman of a company called United Shirt Shops.
“What are you doing in this crummy store?” he asked me. “Why don’t you get the hell out of here? Go into a business that is more suited to your talents.”
“And what business would that be?”
“Discount stores. Concession departments. I have the men’s clothing concession in a whole bunch of stores and we are making a ton of money. There are lots of great stores doing this.”
“Where are they?”
“There is one not far from here in Paramus,” he said, “Why don’t you come visit me there tomorrow?”
So the next day, I did.
I had never been in a discount store in my life, and it was mind-boggling. I had never seen that many people in my whole life go through a store, and every department, while part of the same store in the customer’s eyes, was run by a different concessionaire. Kessler took me over and introduced me to Henry Flink, who leased and ran the cosmetics department. Health and beauty aids were just flying off his shelves.
“How does a person get in this business?” I asked Kessler.
“You want to get in, I will get you in,” he said.
I had no money to buy into a new venture; I was broke. Larry had no money, either; he had the store, that’s all. But Kessler was true to his word and found a place for me to start, Spears Fifth Avenue, near the Empire State Building.
We hocked the drugstore to get into this new business. Wortzel didn’t want to do it; I did. Another argument. But our resources were so slim, we had to do it together. I finally suggested a compromise. I said, “You stay with the drugstore, I’ll run this business, and we’ll be successful at it.” Reluctantly, he went along.
To get me up and running, Flink agreed to sell me merchandise on credit, basically setting me up to be his own competitor. It was the beginning of a personal relationship that continues to this day.
Unfortunately, Spears was on its way to bankruptcy and nearly dragged us under with it. Plus I had other troubles. Wortzel and I owed Flink and others a ton of money.
Meanwhile, another friend of mine, Bob Silverman, told me about Two Guys. “They need you desperately,” he said. “They are the best, but they are running the worst cosmetics business in the world. Maybe you can get a concession in their stores.”
So I went to the Two Guys store in Totowa, New Jersey, and walked it maybe ten times over a two-week period. I was astounded. Great Eastern Mills, another well-known East Coast discount chain of that era, was good. But Two Guys was better. I asked one of the employees, “Who runs this place?”
“That guy right there,” he said, pointing. “Herb Hubschman.” By a twist of fate, Hubschman was in the same store that I was visiting.
“Mr. Hubschman?” I said, interrupting him.
“Yeah?”
“This is the greatest store I’ve ever seen,” I said, exaggerating to keep his interest. “This is unbelievable.”
Flattered, he personally walked me from department to department, telling me, “I buy this” and “I do this” and “I bought this for this” and “I bought this whole company out.” When he finished, he turned back to me and said, “Well, what do you have to say about that?”
And I said, “For the smartest guy in the world, you are the biggest schmuck I ever met in my life.”
He looked at me, stunned, a hurt expression in his eyes. “What are you talking about?”
“Look at how brilliant and innovative you are,” I said. “You have food in the store, you have appliances, you have this and you have that. But your cosmetics department is the worst I have ever seen. It’s disgraceful! How can you let this happen?”
“Well,” he said sheepishly, “my brother runs it.”
“Now I know what’s wrong. Your brother runs it.”
“Herb,” I continued, “from now on, I will run this part of your business. What your brother is doing in sales now I will pay as rent and I’ll make a profit over that.”
“You can’t possibly make that deal,” he said.
What he said he believed and what he wanted to believe were two different things. I wanted that cosmetics department and he wanted me—enough for him to buy the concession departments I had at Spears and another store, Webster’s, for all of the debt that I owed, including paying off Henry Flink and Larry Wortzel. I separated myself from Larry—we weren’t talking at all at that point, anyway. I left him with the drugstore, and I went with Two Guys.
The owners of Two Guys, which was one of the foremost discounters in those days, bought our inventory and paid our debts. I took over the cosmetics department and in a short time did what I said I would do. They also gave me the sporting goods department, followed by major appliances. By the time I was 28, I was overseeing approximately $1 billion worth of business, all of the hard goods of the Two Guys companies.
I ascended the ladder of success at Two Guys by learning how important the folks are with whom you surround yourself. I loved teaching people the business. Why have I been successful my whole life? Because I’ve always surrounded myself with people who are better than I am. That’s one of the lessons that guided Arthur Blank and me when we started The Home Depot and one every businessperson in America needs to learn.
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I later became friendly with Wal-Mart’s founder, Sam Walton, and remain close today with the company’s current chairman of the board, David Glass. We have a lot of common experiences and interests.
One day, Glass and I were walking through one of his superstores in Georgia. I said, “You think this superstore of yours is a great invention, right?”
“Oh, yes,” he said proudly, having played a part in Wal-Mart’s birth.
“Well, we did this at Two Guys back in the early fifties,” I said. “We had a supermarket. We had linen and major appliances. We had a little restaurant. We had all of the things that you have here now. We didn’t have the systems that you have. We didn’t have the help that you have. Today, we have computers to help run these businesses. Back in those days, it was run by grunts, who did a lot of real grunting. It was a tough business. Everything in your stores is a carbon copy, it’s as though the world came around.”
David then remembered! He had been in Two Guys stores.
“Some of it worked,” I said, “some of it didn’t work.”
Seton Hall University in New Jersey did a study in the late 1960s and discovered that 70 percent of the appliances that were bought on the East Coast were bought in Two Guys stores. Something like 60 percent of lawn furniture was bought at Two Guys.
But in the end, they blew it.
Herb Hubschman, the founder of Two Guys, died. And when his brother subsequently exited the business, it was taken over by outsiders who destroyed it by overexpanding.
One of their last smart decisions was acquiring Vornado, which was probably the largest fan company in the world at the time. Two Guys was the major buyer of their fans. When they ran into bad times, our private company, Two Guys, bought their public company, Vornado, and created a new public company under the Vornado name. I subsequently went out selling their product to other people.
Another acquisition, Food Giant, a supermarket company in California that built emporiums and discount stores, was the arrogant move that destroyed Two Guys. We overexpanded and paid a heavy penalty for it. Guys like me were drowning in the mess of it all. The rising waves of red ink made me sick.
As a conglomerate, Two Guys was a disaster. People in the company focused on their own careers, not the customers. As a result, the customers disappeared and careers sank. The history of retailing is filled with once-great companies that disappeared off the face of the earth, Two Guys included. I carried the lesson I learned about the importance of customers throughout the rest of my career.
I left Two Guys in 1968 because I couldn’t deal with it anymore.
I’d had it with cold weather, anyway. One freezing, miserable day, there was ice on the ground, snow and sleet were falling, it was disgusting. My car window iced up while I was driving. I pulled over, got out of the car, and as I scraped the ice, some of it went down my sleeve. Just then, a car whizzed by and sent a wave of ice over my head and down my back. “That’s it,” I shouted to everybody and nobody. “I am out of here! Next chance I get, I am gone.”
A week later I got a call to go to California.
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In June of 1968 I joined a manufacturing company called Odell, Inc., as president and chief operating officer. Odell was a $50-million-a-year manufacturer of consumer products such as Esquire shoe polish, Tintex, and Tidy Bowl.
I stayed at Odell for two years, enduring a hostile-takeover battle with Papercraft. In June 1970, I read the handwriting on the wall and left Odell for Daylin Corporation as a vice president in its North Bergen, New Jersey, offices. My initial responsibilities included supervising the 34-store Millers/Gulf Mart Discount Stores operation, working with Dave Finkle, chairman of the executive committee, to coordinate the corporate-wide merchandising of our hard-goods lines, and supervising drug and toiletries merchandising in the chain of Great Eastern Discount Stores—a direct competitor of Two Guys.
I never had any real money to speak of in those days, despite holding lofty titles in some of America’s best retail companies. And by 1972, I had an ex-wife, Ruth, two kids in college, Fred and Suzanne, and a new wife, Billi, and another child, Michael Morris. No matter what I was paid, it wasn’t enough. Real money is in equity, and that I didn’t have.
But when I was handed the reigns to another Daylin chain, Handy Dan Home Improvement Centers, it forever changed the course of my life.
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Arthur Blank: I grew up in the borough of Queens in New York City. We lived in Sunnyside until I was 11, then the family moved to Flushing.
People assume that because we cofounded the world’s largest home improvement chain, we must be real whizzes around the house. But I never had the opportunity to be handy because I was raised in an apartment. I was always out in the street, playing ball and running around with my friends. There was nothing made of wood around our house—everything was cement, bricks, and block. I didn’t live in a single-family home until I was 31 years old.
My dad was a very kind person. You couldn’t help but notice how everybody liked being with Max Blank. He was just an easy person to be around. And while he worked hard, he was always available to play ball or do whatever I asked.
One of the things I have always remembered about Father was his natural affinity for speaking Spanish. When I took Spanish in high school, he would help me with my homework after dinner. He would sit on the corner of my bed, shake his head, and say, “How come you don’t get this?” It came so easily to him and so hard to me. I was a good student when it came to science and math, but I couldn’t get Spanish. “Why is this hard for you?” he would ask. “What is the matter here?” (In 1998, when we opened our first store in Chile, I was reminded again of how useful it would have been to learn Spanish.)
I have such fond memories of my father. As a pharmacist, he was always helping people. Back then, a pharmacist was kind of a secondary doctor. Medical doctors weren’t as accessible or as abundant as they are now, so my father spent a lot of time talking to people about their health, giving them advice. It’s somewhat ironic that my partner, Bernie, has a grounding and experience as a pharmacist.
When my father worked for his brother, it was only a couple of blocks from where we lived. Mother would make his lunch or dinner and I would take it to him at the drugstore. I would sit there and watch while he mixed prescriptions—the way pharmacists really used to do it—and he talked to me between customers and sneaking a bite of food.
I remember how hard he worked when he started his own business, Sherry Pharmaceutical, a mail-order pharmaceutical company selling direct to hospitals, doctors, and nursing homes across the country. At night he would come home and be on the phone for hours doing deals.
One of the great losses in my life happened when my father died in 1957 of a heart attack. He was just 44 and I was 15. My uncle also died of a heart attack sometime later. My brother, Michael, who is two and a half years older than I am, was always convinced that he would never live past 44. Really. He just “knew” that he was going to die because Dad died so young. Today, Michael is 60 and still in good health.
I never had that fear. I have always pushed myself hard, but it was never because I thought I wouldn’t live a long life. I do, however, think one of the reasons I have had an extreme emphasis on health and exercise in my life is my father’s death. In the mid-1970s, a doctor at the Scripps Clinic in San Diego warned me against smoking. “You have one big strike against you,” he said. “Your father’s heart condition.”
That had a big effect on me. On the plane ride home, I read Kenneth Cooper’s first book, Aerobics , all about running and staying in shape. When I got home, I ran a mile. Cooper had a test in which your physical fitness starting point was running as far as you could in twelve minutes. I was able to run a mile in twelve minutes, which today is ridiculously slow. Then, it was a major accomplishment. The next day, I did it again. Pretty soon I was running a mile or two every morning. People would see me out running—this was before it became national obsession—and they would say, “What were you doing? What is that about?” It was such a strange thing to do then.
So I think my father’s death affected me in a lot of ways. Maybe at some level, deep down inside, I have always had a sense of urgency about getting things done and accomplishing things and moving on with things, and maybe some of that has come from him. But I never consciously had a fear of dying at an unusually young age. In fact, I am probably in better condition and fitter than most men half my age.
One of the great losses that I feel I have is that I never really knew my father as an adult. There have been times when I had been under stress and I took great comfort in recalling childhood conversations with my father and imagining how we would discuss the current issues in my life.
When you see a person through your eyes at age 15, and that is the end of the relationship, you don’t really know him as an adult would know him. And as I have gone through the growth in life, my first marriage to Diana, our three children, Kenny, Dena, and Danielle, all the business situations, building The Home Depot in the last twenty years, my second marriage to Stephanie, and our son, Joshua, I wish my father could have been there through it all.
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My mother, Molly, was 37, a young woman, when my father died. How much his death affected her, nobody will ever really know for sure, but I think it was probably greater than any of us ever suspected. Not only because she had to go into his business and run it with no experience, but because it was really a small business then that she built from the ground up. If she had tried to sell it right after my father died, it wouldn’t have been worth very much.
She was concerned because she had to put two sons through college, both in expensive private schools. The issue of being able to support us was paramount for her.
My father did not have a lot of life insurance. The life insurance that he had was in dispute because he had taken it out only a year or so prior to his heart attack. There were questions of whether or not he had made a full disclosure about his health.
So Mother became the breadwinner, trying to, as she put it, “be a mother and a father to two sons.” Of course there is no way that a mother can be a father to boys, anyway.
The pressure our situation exerted upon her was enormous, and it took a lot out of her over the years. My father’s death affected her, not only because she lost her husband, but because it put much more stress on her and made her life a lot more difficult in many, many ways. It changed my relationship with my mother, who is a very remarkable woman. She is a very bright lady, a principled person, a perfectionist, with strong social-liberal leanings.
My mother, who really had no business experience, went into the business and ran it as best she could. And she did a very good job.
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I have always been athletically inclined. Today I run marathons; back in high school I was a baseball and football player, as well as running track.
Being competitive has always been at the core of my nature, although it didn’t kick in with regard to academics until I got to college.
In high school, sports were my consuming passion. I did okay in school in terms of academics, but mention sports and my attention was truly riveted. In baseball, I started off as a centerfielder, but I eventually threw my arm out and couldn’t make any long throws. So I became a catcher, a position that suited me because I was in the middle of almost every play.
I apparently got my athleticism from my father. He went to Columbia University, where he set then–New York City records for both the mile and the 100-yard dash, an unlikely feat today because athletes tend to specialize in distance or sprint races.
When I started at Babson College, a small business school just outside of Boston, I took school seriously for the first time. And there’s nothing like applying yourself: I was elected vice-president of my junior class, president of the senior class—I did everything in school that you could possibly do, plus, I was a straight-A student and made the dean’s list.
One of the ways I paid for my college education was running my own landscaping business. Freed from the confines of city life, I discovered a love of being outside. I ran my own laundry business as well, picking up laundry on campus several nights a week.
My brother, Michael, earned a degree in pharmacy from the University of Michigan. On paper, our skills sounded like the perfect combination for taking over the family business and finally relieving our mother of the pressure caused by Dad’s premature death. Michael would be more on the technical side, I would handle the business side.
But after graduating with a bachelor of science degree in accounting in 1963, I postponed joining the family business a while longer and took a job with the Big Eight accounting firm of Arthur Young & Company. I was the youngest staff person they ever recruited in New York City and I stayed for almost five years.
Some of the work I did at Arthur Young was in management consulting. I was 20 years old when I started, so I was never the senior person on major assignments, but I did do some consulting, as well as staff accounting. I enjoyed that, and I was very good at what I did. It was important for me to get some outside experience in the business world so I could eventually bring a greater expertise to our own company.
I was on the verge of becoming an audit manager in 1968, when I chose to join the family business instead. The company had been growing and doing well, and my mother and brother were anxious to have me finally take my place beside them. One of my father’s brothers was involved with it, as was a cousin. It truly was a family business.
It was very different than what I had expected after all those years. I was prepared to roll up my sleeves and do what it took for the business to be successful, and I understood the responsibilities that I would have then would be very different than what I had at Arthur Young, and they certainly were. The environment, certainly, was very different. But that was okay with me. And I enjoyed my work when I was there. I worked very hard, very long hours. But it was not a growth situation from a professional standpoint.
It was hard for me to work with my brother and my mother. I loved them both very much, but it was impossible. I spent a couple of years working there, and then my mother sold the business to the Daylin Corporation on June 1, 1968. When my father died in 1957, it was a very small business. By the time she sold it, my mother had built the company up to several million dollars in volume. Daylin was a conglomerate centered in the retail business, with an emphasis in pharmacy and health goods.
If you have a family where family members can work together, that is wonderful. But it doesn’t often happen, and it didn’t happen in our situation. I love my mother, I love my brother, but we were not meant to work together every day. And I think Mother finally saw that, too.
I think selling the company was the right decision for her. As a widow and mother, her primary interest was not building a huge business but conserving its equity and resources. She was too concerned about her own future at that time to think in terms of risk and expansion.
When Daylin took over, we all stayed with the business for a while longer, but I really didn’t feel that staying in that business was what I wanted to do long-term. It was still hard for me to work with my mother.
Fortunately, Daylin was a company of infinite opportunity.
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In 1970, Daylin named me chief financial officer of Elliott’s Drug Stores/Stripe Discount Stores. Two years later, I became president of Elliott’s/Stripe and relocated the company and my wife and our three children to Griffin, Georgia. They actually call it “The First City South of Atlanta.”
Between 1972 and 1974, my responsibilities at Elliott’s/Stripe included being named assistant treasurer of the parent company. Max Candiotty, the president of Daylin, and Leon Beck, the corporation’s senior vice president and lead financial officer, adopted and mentored me. They saw potential in me and were very supportive during my career there.
When I became president of the division, it was kind of a shock to the rest of the Daylin organization because I was a very young man in my late twenties. I hadn’t run a business of that magnitude. I had only been involved in business at Arthur Young from the work I had done there, and, of course, my family business. So it was a major move, but it turned out well. I did a good job for them, and I grew the business and gave them the kind of earnings they were looking for.
I remember having many good personal relationships at Daylin in those days. It was a less structured, less hierarchical corporate environment, a family culture where people supported each other and cared for each other.
Becoming president of that division at an early age fed my entrepreneurial spirit. It encouraged my capacity for starting and running a business, for wanting to make decisions, for wanting to be a part of everything.
In July 1974, Daylin was going through some very difficult times. That’s when it decided to sell off some divisions, one of which was mine, the freestanding drug stores. I said, that’s fine. I’m 32 years old—I’ll do something else.
That’s when Bernie called me from Handy Dan. We had met a few years earlier at Daylin corporate events and established a solid rapport. He named me corporate controller of Handy Dan; later, my title changed to vice president of finance.
In baseball, the pitcher is often the center of attention. That was Bernie. But the catcher is in the middle of the action, helping set the pace of the game. During our time at Handy Dan and subsequently at The Home Depot, Bernie and I have been effective as team players in roles in which we both feel comfortable.