Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 3, 1994 TAG: 9404020007
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
There was nothing wrong with selling cars, he said. It just didn't give him enough time to do other things.
Trying to pin George Logan down on what he does is a lot like swatting at a fly. Logan is all over the place.
The Salem native says he spends about 50 percent of his time on volunteer work, which includes serving on the boards of Roanoke's Western Virginia Foundation for the Arts and Sciences and Mill Mountain Theater and as chairman of the finance committee for the Southwest Virginia Second Harvest Food Bank. He's also finance chairman for the foundation.
He used to be on the Roanoke Symphony board until orchestra conductor Victoria Bond bought a car from another dealership after driving a loaner from Logan's place for several years.
Logan says his resignation from the symphony board "was a matter of principle. I've put it out of my mind."
He shows the same tendency to move on with business projects.
"I can't do one thing," Logan said. "I'm not good at it."
While he still owned Valley Motorsports he got involved with a local group that is starting the proposed Valley Bank and, with out-of-town partners, a project to build industrial warehouses in Warsaw, Poland. He and his son, Willis, are going to Poland in April to see the project, which Logan said already has an anchor tenant, Johnson & Johnson, the New Jersey-based pharmaceuticals and health products company.
In May he goes to Costa Rica to teach a graduate business course at Instituto Centroamericano de Administracion de Empresas near San Jose. The school, born out of John Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, is run by the Foundation for Management Education in Central America. Logan has taught there since 1989.
Although he sold Valley Motorsport Nissan-Volkswagen in February to a company headed by First Team Hyundai owner George Pelton, he still has an office at the dealership. That's because Logan isn't sure where he wants to go next.
Before the car venture, he ran his family's wholesale business, Frigid Freeze Foods in Salem, now PYA Monarch. Before that there was a stint with Fairchild Publications' Women's Wear Daily in New York City and later with its W magazine.
Logan likes having many irons in the fire. While head of Frigid Freeze he also helped start Furniture/Today, a weekly trade newspaper for the furniture manufacturing industry.
It seems he has already had a lifetime of ventures, but he's just 49.
\ Logan's business instincts were shored up by a graduate degree, with a concentration in finance, from the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business Administration. However, he was one of just two people in his class who didn't have a job at graduation - maybe because he wore blue jeans to the receptions at which students met potential employers. Always one to seize the moment, Logan left the folks at Darden American Express as his address in case a company wanted to contact him about a job, and then he and a friend went to Europe.
The company that finally wrote led him to a job in New York at Capital Cities Broadcasting,which was owned by Fairchild Publications.
Logan says he hasn't gotten rich, but that he has "been blessed with more successes than I have failures."
Frigid Freeze, which his late father, Joseph Logan Jr., helped found in 1944, was certainly one of the successes.
Joseph Logan was a tobacco buyer in Turkey from 1922 to 1933, but by 1935 he and a partner had bought a Martha Washington candy franchise and opened Old Dominion Candy Co. on Jefferson Street in downtown Roanoke. The partners then expanded into frozen food. In 1947, when the partnership ended, Joseph Logan took over Frigid Freeze.
After the senior Logan's death in 1950, when his son was 5, the Bank of Salem operated the company for the family. However, in 1973, the family - including a brother, lawyer Joe Logan of Daleville, and a sister, Anna Lawson, a writer and teacher - decided the business had to be sold or someone in the family had to run it. George Logan left New York and came home.
Frigid Freeze employed 35 people and had annual sales of $4 million when Logan took over in 1973. By the time the family sold it, in 1986, to Sara Lee Corp.'s PYA-Monarch division, it had 110 employees and sales of $35 million.
Logan said he is just as proud of how Frigid Freeze operated as he is of how much business it did. He said the first item listed in the company budget each year was "the fairest compensation we could deliver to employees. We built the rest of the budget to service that."
Alvin Peters, who worked at Frigid Freeze for 34 years and spent 15 of them as general manager, sharing an office with Logan, said the company was aggressive and, for a private company, one of the better ones to work for. Wages and benefits were highly competitive "to attract good people," he said.
After the sale to PYA-Monarch, Logan and Peters stayed on until 1988 to help the company's transition and increased annual sales by another $2 million, Peters said.
The sale of the company was "a window to jump through," Logan said. As he tells the Central American students, who he says have an "aversion to risk": There comes a time when you just have to follow your instincts.
He didn't know what he wanted to do after selling Frigid Freeze. He thought about going back to UVa to study for a doctorate degree. But during a stay abroad (he and his wife, Harmon, a music therapist, took their son and went to The Hague in Holland for four months; they had friends there and used it as a base from which to tour) he decided he wasn't an academic.
"It's not rough and tumble enough for me," he said.
Harmon Logan says her husband "is not a cyclone whirling all the time. He can sit for hours and read and never move a muscle." However, she says, Logan gets energy "from people."
Peters, who came out of retirement to help Logan run the auto dealership, says Logan is "one of the finest people I know, but he can't take one company and be satisfied."
Logan says his strength is in taking someone else's concept and making it work. "I'm not good conceptually."
Not true, said Stephen Pond, who was a founder and president of Furniture/Today and now owns The Education Center, an education materials company in Greensboro, N.C. Pond said he'd never "characterize George as not being good at anything. He could convey the wholesomeness of the idea and the value of what we were doing."
Pond worked for Home Furnishings Daily in New York at the same time Logan was at Women's Wear Daily. Pond was 29 when he, Logan and Bill Peterson, who now lives at Smith Mountain Lake, started Communications Today Ltd. in High Point.
Pond said bankers would look at him and wonder "who's this kid?" But Logan, who was only 30 but looked older, could "make them believe."
Furniture/Today, although successful from the first issue, was not just a business but a mission, Pond said. "We weren't starting a newspaper for us," he said. "We were starting a paper because the furniture industry needed it."
Communications Today, parent of Furniture/Today and three other trade publications, was sold in the 1980s to Cahners Publishing, a division of Reed Publishing USA of Newton, Mass.
"If I look back on my first business, George added enormous credibility," Pond said. "George sort of being George ... he comes into a room and you feel like you're dealing with a person with a whole lot of integrity. There's something about George. I'm not sure what it is, but he's effective with other people. He's persuasive."
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