Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 14, 1990 TAG: 9007140043
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE KENNEDY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Easy to parody, hard to detest, he's a salesman with a penchant for music - and we'll just have to take him as he is.
The last time Kingma, 53, caught our attention was the spring of 1978. A devout believer in "possibility thinking," he had directed the New Virginians, the student song and dance troupe at Virginia Tech, for six years, Tech's choral music program for 14, and he was quitting.
The news stories said he wanted the university to go farther with the New Virginians than its administrators thought advisable.
Those stories noted that the troupe's performances always included "lots of shining teeth, bright costumes, contemporary music, flashing lights and special effects," and sometimes featured singers who roller skated on stage or twirled batons as they performed.
Kingma said he was heading to New Jersey for a creative position with Wheaton Industries, a glass and rubber manufacturer.
Now, after additional stops in Nashville and Winchester, Stan the Man is back in town with ideas aplenty. He and his wife, Marilyn, and their son, Joey, operate Kingma Productions, an ad agency and music production business.
Stan and Marilyn also operate the U.S. National Chorus, a tour group of 76 youth and adult singers who are paying $2,697 apiece to have the Kingmas take them traveling and performing for two weeks in Europe this month.
The chorus, which has no governmental affiliation despite its name, will present a concert Sunday night at 7:30 at the Roanoke Civic Center auditorium.
The Vinton Breakfast Lions Club is sponsoring the concert. The Virginia Gentlemen barbershop chorus, which Kingma directs, will perform, and so will members of this newspaper's July Fourth Music for Americans chorus, which Kingma also directs.
Stan Kingma did go to Wheaton, where he reached the rank of vice president for marketing. But he left there in 1987, when the musical life beckoned again.
Kingma was serving as director of the national chorus of the Future Farmers of America for its annual convention in Kansas City, as he still does. The FFA, an organization of 22,000 young people, wanted to produce a fund-raising television program.
Stan quit his job and moved with Marilyn to Nashville to help coordinate the production. Six weeks before air time, the show was canceled.
"It was a real education in the ways of the music business," he says, with a smile so bright you want to reach for your sunscreen. "It did not work."
The FFA lost money. The producers lost money. And Stan lost money - lots of money. He says he failed to check out the situation thoroughly.
The Kingmas landed in Winchester, where he spent two years working for Paul Noble, a former Roanoker who coordinates overseas musical tours and organizes musical events for the Six Flags theme parks.
In May 1989, the Kingmas came to Roanoke. In addition to their other business, Stan Kingma has formed Innovative Special Events to produce entertainment and information activities of many kinds. His partners are Kent Martin of SRO Productions, a Roanoke talent management and booking agency, and Kit Bond, a former Roanoker who is stage managing a tour for Robert Goulet.
Kingma wants to start a municipal chorus, and he wants to draw about 20 3 1 KINGMA Kingma of its members to create a professional troupe of adults who will entertain at business conferences at places like The Homestead in Hot Springs, the Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., and maybe even Richmond, Washington and other cities.
Stan the Man has lots of plans. No one said it better than playwright Arthur Miller: "A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory."
Positive thinker
Salesman-entrepreneur Kingma has always had big ideas and dreams of making money. He sold Amway products while working at Tech, and once he literally bet his house that he could attract enough singers to fill the airplane for his first choral tour of Europe. (He won.)
He turned his back on the lucrative job with Wheaton and left the company's chairman wondering why he left.
Kingma says the opportunity to be regularly involved with music again caused him to jump. It's the closest he will come to calling his departure from Tech a mistake.
One main reason Kingma left was the university's refusal to adopt his proposal that Tech become the nation's premier university in popular musical education. University officials agreed the musical program had to be upgraded, but chose instead to emphasize the classical side.
Kingma came off looking like an over-reacher. Not that he hadn't accomplished a great deal.
At 27, he had come to Tech from Indiana with a B.S. degree in engineering from Purdue and five years of work at General Motors. He had musical experience with the Purdue Glee Club, but even now his formal musical background is slight - a few voice lessons and five years of piano study as an adult, leadership of choirs and choruses since he'd been in his teens.
Kingma unabashedly told people he sought the Tech position - initially, he taught math half the time and directed the choral music program the other half - after reading Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich."
Later he would tell an interviewer he had read 150 self-help books. He even required students on his first European tour to read about - and be quizzed on - possibility thinking.
Now, Kingma says he has mellowed - and that the bumptiousness he sometimes displayed was a reaction to not feeling good about himself.
He has learned some lessons.
Lesson one came when he left the limelight.
"The thing that happened to me was that nobody knew me in New Jersey, period."
He was "a new hire." He was "a worker at the plant" - one of 5,000. But he learned he could survive, becoming a chamber of commerce president and earning praise from his boss.
"Anything he did, he did well. Let's put it that way," Frank Wheaton said by telephone from his office in Millville. "He is excellent on his feet talking and he commands the attention of people."
Lesson two came from watching Wheaton guide his empire. It wasn't easy, by any means. Kingma saw that wealth is no passport to happiness.
Lesson three came in Nashville. He lost money, but he says he realized that he has a solid marriage of 30 years and the support of his three grown children.
He doesn't say he has given up ideas of getting rich. He does say that if he had a lot of money, he would probably give more of it away than when he was younger.
He still speaks highly of Amway and its products, but says he is not as active as he used to be. He made good money through his distributorship, "but the huge rewards didn't come."
"I think I've changed quite a bit," he says. "I think Napoleon Hill was wrong where at one time I thought he was right. His philosophy works - it's almost demonic in the way it works."
But there's more to life than growing rich, Kingma says. "Things are a burden."
Thinking big
Kingma is never happier than when he's directing a chorus - the bigger the better. In fact, there were times during the recent rehearsals of the Music for Americans group that he seemed to be having more fun than anyone. The three-hour sessions might have been shorter if he had enjoyed them less.
But a compressed preparation time demands long rehearsals. The U.S. National Chorus will have had only a handful of rehearsals at Roanoke College before Sunday night's concert and Monday's departure for Europe.
Kingma chose its members from tapes they sent, from references they submitted and from honors they'd received. His first criterion was attitude, then commitment and finally communication, diction and tone quality.
There is no joy without music, he is fond of saying, and there is no music without joy.
It sounds as if he is selling the sizzle instead of the steak.
"One hundred percent of every audience can see, and 90 percent judge the entire performance by what they see," he says. "And only 10 percent hear critically."
Kingma says he and Marilyn send out 30,000 pieces of mail related to the U.S. National Chorus each year, and that their profit margin on 75 members is not that great. He'd like to have twice as many singers, but getting the word to prospective members is difficult.
"We still have a percentage of music educators who look very much askance at this kind of activity," he says. It's one of the few topics that makes him bridle openly.
People who have never been entrepreneurs are suspicious of people who are, he says. If it weren't for the people who start businesses and pay tax dollars, "those who teach would not have a job."
"I know that we provide a great service that school systems cannot."
Kingma's supreme self-confidence and habit of thinking big might make some think he has a big ego. That charge strikes "a raw nerve," he says. "What your friends call your self-confidence, your enemies call your conceit."
Kingma is a maximizer; for him, everything has to be big, big, BIG.
Some who have worked with him complain about the money he spends. As Frank Wheaton puts it, Kingma is "probably a little high-handed on expenses."
"You hit a sore point that I think I'm proud of," Kingma says. Wheaton complained about expenses but then took pride when the projects were completed, he says.
Wheaton speaks admiringly of his former employee's organizational talents. Kingma's last project was to organize the company's 100th anniversary dinner for 7,000 guests. Former President Gerald Ford was the featured speaker.
"He handled the whole works and just did a fabulous job on it," Wheaton said.
The two were, and still are, friends. Kingma's ad agency is doing some work for Wheaton's glass division, in fact.
"I used to tell him we both missed our calling," the chairman said, with a laugh. "He and I should have started a new religion. He has the gift of gab, and he could have gotten up there like Jimmy Bakker."
U.S. NATIONAL CHORUS: 7:30 p.m. Sunday, Roanoke Civic Center Auditorium. $7. 342-0400.
by CNB