Selling Missco
This is a tough one. After eighty years, we sold Mississippi School Supply Company because, after my father’s death, the struggle for position in his empire was tearing the family apart. Not my mother’s family, but the larger family. We had a lot of mouths to feed and a lot of egos to fuel.
One of the other families had a son-in-law who was more ambitious than he was smart. They should have known something was up when he made their good Methodist daughter become a Southern Baptist, then a Presbyterian. I don’t know where they ended up. Choosing what church you go to based on perceived social or political power is kind of evil.
He was sowing discontent and plotting a takeover. Everybody knew it. I used to stare at him so he’d know I knew what he was doing. One day, he said to me, “Boyd, you can’t expect to take over your dad’s job.” What he didn’t know was that my second-to-last conversation with my dad was about closing out what I was doing for him so I could move to California. I wanted to do it slowly so my staff could find jobs. One of them believed I had promised her lifetime employment, so she found a way to sue me, but settled for less than what I had offered as severance pay, and she had to pay her lawyer. Dumbass.
Everybody wanted to be Jim Campbell, but nobody wanted to pay the prices he paid. I knew more about my father's sacrifices than any of them, and I was one of those sacrifices. I was the only boy in Jackson who tried to do Indian Guides without a father. He was in Washington, or New York, or Chicago. He wasn’t in Jackson making shit out of popsicle sticks with me.
Six years before my father died, Missco posted its first after-tax profit in excess of a million dollars. Netting a million dollars might not sound like much to some companies, but for a company created in Mississippi, it was pretty good. We’d had really good years before, but the Contract Furniture Business comes with a lot of inventory write downs, and Pete Marwick made us absorb those losses in good years so we could hide them in bad years. The guy whose job it was to minimize those losses was the same guy who wanted to take over the company, even if it meant turning my own family against me.
He put together a group and expressed an interest in buying us out. They didn’t actually have the money yet. He offered to buy me out early as an annuity because every time I looked at him, he had to worry if I might strangle him. He wasn’t entirely stupid.
Putting together the financing to buy my mother’s family out, there was an implied agreement that they would keep the company going and keep on as many of the people as they could. It was implied in the agreement to buy me out on an annuity as well. I should have gotten it in writing.
Except for one year in the depths of the depression, Missco had always turned in a profit at the end of the year. Though we were doing well, the crisis that hit the dry goods, retail, and grocery businesses was coming to the Office Supply business. My dad knew it and was making preparations for it. That’s where the National Purchasing Association came from. Ed Deitrich and I were their first employees.
Once we sold Missco, they started posting massive losses. It's a pretty rough day to have to face people who worked for your family for generations, but lost their jobs because the people you sold to were idiots. My mother reminded me that, while murder was an option, it wasn’t perhaps my best option.
Believing I had an oral contract to take better care of my father’s company, I was preparing to raise more hell than had been seen in Mississippi since the Civil War. Who talked me out of it wasn’t my mother, but Bill Goodman, Warren Hood, Stuart Irby, and Robert Wingate. Rowan and Charlie Deaton both said, “Do what you gotta do, Boyd.” They were pretty mad too. I should point out that Bill Goodman was willing to represent me, but thought it was a bad idea. Paying him would have cost whatever I hoped to win, but watching people urinate on themselves when I showed up to court with Bill Goodman would have been worth it.
After being in business with First National Bank for more than eighty years, this ambitious son-in-law lied to Brum Day about the company’s finances. With Daddy dead and my mother’s family paid off, Brum had no problems cutting Missco off and calling the loan. Not wanting to see Mississippi School Supply end this way, some friends at Deposit Guarantee agreed to pick up the note and give the company a lifesaver line of credit. Five years later, the same sort of takeover that happened to us happened to them.
I’ve held my peace for a long time because I promised my cousin Robert Wingate and my mother I would. They’re all dead now. The entire company is gone, sold off in bits and pieces or just shut down because ambitious sons-in-law can be idiots.
I wanted to go to Hollywood and somehow become a writer and somehow escape everything in Mississippi that hurt me or didn’t believe in me. I even had my father's and mother's approval (although my mother was a hard sell). And then this happened.
I had just started college when Jeanne Luckett designed the “new” Missco logo. We used to have trucks all over Mississippi, but ambition greater than ability destroyed it all.
