In a panic, I wondered how the HELL she found out about THAT!
In my young life, since high school, other than a pregnancy scare that turned out to be an ovarian cyst, there was no event more stressful than taking the oral portion of my comprehensive exams to graduate from Millsaps College. In my young life, since high school, except for a pregnancy scare that turned out to be an ovarian cyst, there was no bigger secret than what Shirley Olson, my management teacher, asked as the final question in the oral portion of the comprehensive exams to graduate from college.
In high school, the most stressful event had been interrupting my girlfriend’s dad during his suicide. I was not able to stop it, a matter I always considered a personal failure, but that’s another story.
Comprehensive exams used to be a regular part of most liberal arts educations, but over the years, many colleges dropped it as being too stressful. Millsaps kept the tradition but limited it to questions about your major. Poor life choices led my faculty advisor to resign his position at Millsaps and all of his other business interests in Jackson and take up Christmas Tree Farming in the pine belt. In my last year at Millsaps, they moved me to Carl Brooking, who I liked, but it was really too late to make much difference.
My father had been chairman of the board at Millsaps most of my life. Even though I was a pretty poor student, I made a genuine effort to be friends with my professors because, besides my education, they were very involved in my church and my community, and they were pretty interesting people in their own right.
Leading up to my comps, I took the time to have conversations with my professors about “please don’t take it easy on me because of my dad and his relationship with George Harmon” but also, “please don’t take it out on me because of my dad and his relationship with George Harmon, either.” Whenever anyone has a problem with the current or other presidents of Millsaps, I usually just point out that I worked with George Harmon for twenty years without any ill effects. They’d have to work pretty hard to be half as controversial as Harmon.
Shirley Olson, I knew prior to Millsaps because her daughter was in my sister’s class. Years after I graduated, a band came out with a song called “Stacy’s Mom,” which was about a guy who discovered that the mother of the girl he knew was everything he ever imagined in a woman. That was my initial experience with Shirley. I was lucky; she terrified most students. They had remarkable respect for her, but it was backed with a sincere desire not to invoke her ire.
I squeaked by on my written exams, but I passed. If I failed my orals, I’d be willing to take another semester of classes to raise my GPA and take them again. Since I lived in Jackson, it wouldn’t be a big deal, but I was hoping for the best. And then my last question in my oral exams turned out to be an issue I had been researching for my father, but the only people on the planet who knew this were my father, Rowan Taylor, my cousin, Robert Wingate, and probably my mom, even though we never discussed it. My parents had been exclusive since they were thirteen. They had few secrets. Dr. Olson’s final question might have just been a coincidence (it was), but I was a little freaked out.
I suppose the real secret was that I was studying all the wrong things. All I really wanted out of life was to write my stories and make art, but I desperately wanted to please my father, and there was something of a group effort to convince me that what I wanted from life was the most risky trajectory in life. Campbells weren’t failures, but if I followed my own path, I’d be a failure, so I studied business instead.
One of my father’s life strategies was to plan life and business in five-year segments and plan three segments ahead. Fifteen years was long enough to accomplish anything. He learned this from a man named Dale Carnegie, for whom he was an acolyte. In the thirties, Carnegie had written a book called “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” which my father had given me as a freshman. As Carnegie made no mention of beer or pool, I wondered how much he could really know about winning friends and influencing people.
My father returned from his mission in the Air Force to protect us from the Russians while most other Mississippi servicemen fought on Heartbreak Ridge and Chosin Reservoir in Korea. Daddy had a lifelong love affair with flying machines, so after ROTC in both high school and college, he chose the Air Force for his service. The airforce wanted men they could train to operate their fancy new Microwave radar installations on the border between the free west and the communist east. Had the Russians ever acted on their threat to come over the border, my parents would have been among the first to die. Since the Russians stayed put, they were in far less danger than others serving in the Korean War. You pays your nickle, you takes your chances.
For generations, there had been remarkable pressure for Campbell men to achieve in life. Young Robert, my great uncle, set the bar pretty high when he lost his life to mustard gas in World War I. More than anything, my father wanted to stay in the Air Force and work with airplanes, but he returned to Jackson to do his duty in the family business. Mississippi, he reasoned, needed people who would work for it. He wasn’t wrong. He came home and started having babies.
The first child, a boy, was named after my father. Adding Jr. to a child’s name can be a disaster. I don’t recommend it. Having grown up as Alexander Boyd Campbell the second, I know what I’m talking about.
Faithful to Dale Carnegie, Daddy began making five-year plans for his recently circumcised first child. It’s hard to make plans for children as they have a mind of their own. By the time they got to the fifteen-year point in the plans for my brother, it was pretty clear things were going wrong.
At fifteen, my brother replaced the Campbell Family drive to succeed with pretty pronounced chemical addictions. We didn’t know it yet, but those addictions opened a pathway to pretty pronounced schizophrenia. Although I was convinced of it from the beginning, my mother kept making the point that there was no proven link between drug use and schizophrenia. Psychologists have since confirmed that, while they don’t understand the mechanism that causes it, there is absolutely a statistical link between schizophrenia and drug use, particularly among young men who begin experimenting with drugs at key points during puberty, which my brother did.
My brother was my idol, mainly because he had a very genuine talent for art, which I wanted to cultivate in myself. When we lost him to drugs and then to schizophrenia, there became some concern that if I continued following my creative path in life, I might end up the same. The part I never talked about was that having seen my father deal with having to redraw the expected trajectory in my brother’s life; I began having a feeling that I wanted to make up for it.
Showing an interest in my father’s business, he began showing an interest in me. The sheer force of his career meant that we lost most opportunities for father-son adventures. We had signed up for a YMCA program for eight-year-olds called “Indian Guides,” which was meant to build relationships between fathers and sons; only my father was rarely in town to make the meetings. Eventually, I made up a reason to ask my mother if I could quit going. I made up a reason because I didn’t want to say the reason was that going by myself to a father-and-son event was a bit painful.
Working for my father was brilliant. I finally had an opportunity to grow close with him and my grandfather, even though it meant I had to be at work at six-thirty in the morning; I could be with them, by myself, every day I wanted to.
Through my father, I met some fascinating people. One of them was Bruno Bich. A Frenchman invented the ballpoint pen generations before, but it didn’t work very well or last very long. Bich’s father figured out a way to make ballpoint pens work much better, and then Bruno used the burgeoning plastic technology that came after World War II to invent the world’s first disposable pen. The Bic Pen is still the most successful office product in history.
In time, there became concerns that disposable pens were contributing to the solid waste problem in the world, but as digital technology took over most of the office supply business, people began buying fewer and fewer pens, so the problem began to solve itself. Thousands of years from now, archaeologists will uncover Bic Pens in landfills and wonder what they were for.
A Frenchman, Bich both sailed and painted. So did I. Meeting him gave me hope that I might find a way to combine the career my father wanted me to have and my own creative gifts. It didn’t really work out that way. Most of the jobs I had for my father involved hiring people to do things I wanted to do myself.
A close friend of my Uncle Boyd was the most successful Stationer in Atlanta. Ivan Allen Jr. was between the ages of my father and grandfather. Atlanta had an awful lot in common with Jackson, Mississippi, particularly in terms of dealing with the duality of race in the South.
Like my father and my uncle, Allen believed in the concept of “for the public good” when it came to business. His trajectory in life eventually led him to run for Mayor of Atlanta, which he won. Like my father and my uncle, Allen wasn’t particularly politically liberal, but one thing he believed absolutely was that there were too many black citizens of Atlanta for the city to ever prosper and reach its potential unless they did too.
Other Georgians would criticize Allen for allowing the Reverand Martin Luther King, Jr. to “fester” in Atlanta and allow his “movement” to grow. Allen remained undaunted. “The Negro must be allowed to grow to reach their potential,” he said in a speech. While he was known to make racist statements on other occasions, Allen’s feelings about the nascent civil rights movement were that it was good for business. My uncle and my father agreed.
Ronald Reagan removed interstate banking regulations, and he made it much easier for companies to raise capital, removing regulations put in after the stock market crash, intended to make it more stable. Among the first people to take advantage of these changes were people operating “big box” discount stores; the first of these to make an impression in the South was Sam Walton and his Walmart.
A stationer in Florida began applying these principles to the Office Supply Business, and my father saw the writing on the wall. Daddy wasn’t yet ready to give up control of the mostly family-owned business. Eventually, a cousin selling his shares would make the decision for him, but for the moment, rather than going public, Daddy had a plan to get companies of similar size to band together and begin buying together. He invited Ivan Allen to join the group, but as he had planned on going into the wholesale business and investing heavily in the cut paper business, he passed.
Eventually, six other Office Supply Companies joined the National Purchasing Association. That number would eventually grow to fourteen. In college, developing spreadsheets (since I was the only one who knew how) for the new venture became my first “real job.”
From the very beginning, there were whispers among members of the National Purchasing Association that Jim Campbell was plotting to buy them out. Some were for it. Most were against it. My father never missed an opportunity to dismiss these claims. He was lying.
By the time I was a junior in college, my father had begun adding “going public,” and buying out the other members of the National Purchasing Association became part of his fifteen-year plan. Three five-year segments out from our current position, I realized he was talking about a plan for the rest of his career—not knowing that his career would be cut short by a heart attack.
Sworn to absolute secrecy, I began doing research on how to accomplish this. I was pretty good at keeping secrets. You’d be surprised at the secrets I still know and will die with. When Shirley Olson asked me, “If you were going to take Missco Public, how would you do it?” as part of my oral comprehensive exam, I had to swallow hard. Did she know about the secret plan, or was she just asking a question a lot of people asked about family-owned businesses? In the end, she didn’t know, but it was sure a scare at the moment.
Jesus said that you can’t serve two masters because you’d love one and hate the other. In college, I did just that. Since my father didn’t check my college schedule, and my faculty advisor let me get away with anything, nobody really knew that I was padding each semester with classes in literature, art, and theater. As much as I loved my business professors, when I had time to have a cup of coffee or a smoke with a professor, I picked Lance Goss in theater or Lucy Millsaps in art.
I never loved one master and hated the other. I loved both masters but longed for more time with one and more success with the other.
I was a pretty terrible student. Suffering from both ADHD and Dyslexia, I honestly had no business at such a difficult college as Millsaps. The semester I took classes at the Raymond Campus of Hinds Junior College, I made better grades than I ever had in my life, and I never spent a weekend without some remarkably attractive creature in the copilot seat of my car. I wasn’t going to ever reach Campbell-levels of achievement in life with a degree from a community college, so I transferred to Millsaps College to continue The Education of Boyd.
Daddy died seven years into his fifteen-year plan. He just went to work one day and decided to die while dictating a letter to Rowan Taylor, Charlie Deaton, and Robert Wingate. Detailing plans to hire one plane for people and one plane for supplies to take the party fishing in Alaska, Daddy drew one breath and then never another.
Learning is still my life. I take every opportunity to explore the avenues people open up for me. In my comprehensive exams were the Dean and his wife, both of whom are gone now, my economics professor and my management professor, both of who are still with us, but both are retired.
Missco never went public. After Daddy’s death, we sold the company to a guy who had basically the same idea but was thirty years younger. Ultimately, it didn’t work out for him, and the whole thing collapsed. Digital technology changed everything about the Office Supply business. It became difficult for Office Depot or Staples to survive, too.
My life and my education became something very different from where it stood on that day when I was twenty-one. Most of the major players aren’t around anymore. It’s just me, missing them but still learning.
