Phoning my son Carter, from my winter stay in Florida, to talk about our friend Bob Guion and our feelings of loss over his death last week,” I said, at one point, “I believe he was Logan County’s outstanding entrepreneur, for at least the last half of the 20th Century…”
“All of the 20th Century,” Carter interrupted me. “He had no rival in at least a hundred years. In starting new businesses, and making a success from scratch, there was no one else like him.”
“He never sought publicity, or talked about himself much, but he told me enough, when I was a kid, to understand something of what made him different.”
Carter (last name “Hancock,” from his mother’s earlier marriage) came into my life when he was five years old and I was courting his mother, then divorced and now my wife of 46 years. After our first date out, with this little boy and his sister Catherine, a year older, he told me, rather unforgettably, “I don’t think my daddy would like you very much!” I didn’t know his father, a farmer in Christian County , but Carter and I eventually became close in a blended marriage that has worked out well for three children with the help of in-laws and/or special friends like Bob and Joyce Guion.
Carter was 15 years old and Bob was 45 and retired for the first time when we moved across the street from the Guions at Main and Ninth to a three-story one time mansion, empty for several years and needing repairs. We bought this ghostly rundown old brick structure on the cheap, but it was the first home we owned and we grandly named it “Courts Hall.”
In those days, in good weather when Carter came home from school, Bob was usually sitting outdoors in a swing, wearing overalls and work shoes, perhaps pondering his next adventure in a business career that started when he was a shop student in high school making cedar boxes for Christmas gifts. That era ended, temporarily, when Bob resigned after a five-year stint traveling across the country as a top manager for US Industries. This was a national conglomerate that had bought Big Dutchman of Michigan, the onetime competitor and manufacturer of wire poultry cages after it had acquired Bilt-Rite Industries, the company that Bob founded when he graduated from high school.
Carter often found our big house empty on afternoons while both parents worked late to pay the mortgage and advance a stepfather’s ambitions to make up for lost time in a newspaper career stalled out by early years of drinking. But then he happily found an older welcoming friend in that swing in the front yard across the street.
Reflecting on that friend this week, some three and a half decades later, we realize that Bob also might have been lonely, perhaps missing the four children of his youthful marriage to Joyce who were already away in college or out on their own. Maybe like Al Smith in recent years, Bob regretted the intensity of business concerns that cost him precious time he didn’t spend with his kids when they were growing up. Whatever, always sparing in conversation and given to quizzical smiles between a few words, Bob eventually started to share some of his thoughts and personal story. He began taking into his confidence the lonely teenager in search of an older companion who cared.
Although Bob and I were friends before I met Carter’s mother Martha Helen, I knew little of his thoughts about life or the outlook on business innovation that Carter was to learn in those afternoon visits. I was aware that he came from a rural family of modest means, never went to college, married his first sweetheart, and with little startup money or capital quietly became wealthy before he was 35 years old. Apparently determined never to look affluent, and memorably driving most days in a beat up white truck, he was the perfect impersonation of an ordinary man, which he certainly wasn’t—but just how much he wasn’t he zealously protected from public view. I never had a clue about his net worth, but Carter, for one, realized that beginning with those cedar boxes Bob sold at Christmas, he was hooked forever on making things.
When Bob went into business fulltime, still a teenager, he invited his vocational teacher to join him. “I turned him down, because I had just invested in a filling station in Lewisburg,” that teacher, a Mr. Brown, told me years later. “That was the worst mistake of my life.” From cedar boxes, Bob began fabricating aluminum kennels, then venetian blinds, and, finally the wire products that became fences and cages for the industrial poultry farms that now lead Kentucky’s agricultural businesses.
Without the positive stories in the press, the flattering praise of the Chamber of Commerce and, most of all, the favorable tax incentives (industrial bond issues) that were lavished on the “outside” companies like Rockwell and Emerson Electric, Bilt-Rite grew on its own as the length and shadow of its founder. Flying his own airplane on sales calls all over America, Bob Guion became the kind of self-made man written up in books and business magazines—except he didn’t talk about his story, unless, perhaps, it was to the teenage boy looking for company until his parents came home for supper. In Bobby, Carter had someone to pay attention to him, to be a mentor and muse about the world in which he had already done enough hard work for a lifetime.
“Everything for him began with a hammer,” Carter said this week, “hitting a nail to make something happen…”
“He told me he had three beliefs about making things, about entrepreneurship:
“Find something in your own back yard. Look for something no one else wants to do, or has done and go for that. Give it all you have, then, when that becomes popular and everyone wants in, get out!”
When I mentioned that Bob had told me about creating work in one’s own community, I added that he said he kept a “Book of Ideas,” sketches of projects to try out, to make and sell. “If one doesn’t work,” he told me. “I just flip the page and think about another idea.”
“I’ve seen that book,” my son said.
“I was still in high school when he showed me a machine he first sketched out in that book—it was a machine for making wood lattices. He sold it to a lumber yard in Chicago which then made many dollars worth of wood lattices they sold to a nationwide home improvement chain. I think Bob eventually owned shares in that lumber yard, but he never talked about it—or the farms in Allen and Logan County, the commercial buildings he put up and rented.”
About those buildings, Pete Mahurin of Bowling Green, the Hilliard and Lyons chairman who knew Bob back in the day when Pete was a young stockbroker, remembers him as “so efficient, he could put up a huge building and move the leftover scrap in a wheel barrow.
“He was so sparing in the use of materials, sales, words, people—he was the ultimate efficiency expert.”
When Martha Helen and I moved to Washington in 1980 for a spell of federal service, Bob and Joyce assumed a watchful eye on Carter, then 19, in a summer job with a construction company and living alone in Courts Hall. Every night when he came home from work, warm-hearted Joyce called him over for supper, except once --when he failed to go to work after a “night out with the boys.” When he crossed the street, Bob stood in the door and waved him away. “No work, no supper,” he frowned.
As Martha Helen and I returned to Kentucky, Bob had gone back to work himself, building the most modern “pig parlor,” on the planet. It was an elaborate, germ-free farrowing facility in Simpson County, complete with a modern sanitation system for the breeding of genetically superior swine. The Pig Improvement Corp. was foreign owned, but as the European managers learned what Guion could do, they sold him an interest and made him an executive. As Carter recalls, this became one of the first American agricultural corporations to export products (which I called “high-tech hogs” for breeding in a story I wrote) to China.
In 2004, Bob and Joyce were honored by my old paper as The News-Democrat’s Logan County’s “Citizens of the Year.” I don’t remember if the paper listed all the companies like Bilt-Rite and ABC Supplies or the old First Federal Savings and Loan, names now vanished, or dug up the shrewd but silent investments, or cited Bob’s missionary work, building schools in Belize, a Central American country with no public school system, or his service at home on the local school board, or how he employed ex- felons no one else would hire and gave them back their self- respect. But there was generous recognition for this aging couple who had founded the annual “Kiddy Parade,” a popular July 4th event for children who marched to the Public Square, with music and flags, then ended at the Guion home where “Grandma Joyce and Grandpa Bob,” their own kids living elsewhere, served ice cream and lemonade to the children still growing up in Logan County.
Carter, now living in Louisville, says he treasures a hammer Bob Guion gave him when we left our nearly grown son more or less in his care as we moved to Washington.
“I think I will wrap it in tissue, take it to the memorial service for Bob Saturday and return it to Joyce,” Carter told me in our phone call.
I didn’t say so, but if he does, I hope she gives it back.
--Al Smith, of Lexington, was an editor and publisher in Russellville from 1958 to 1980 and sold his publishing company in 1985. Now retired as the founding host-producer of KET’s Comment on Kentucky, he has written two memoirs, “Wordsmith, My Life in Journalism,” and “Kentucky Cured: Fifty Years in Kentucky Journalism.”