Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 25, 1994 TAG: 9412280037
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: F11 EDITION: HOLIDAY
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It often appears that the business attitude of "the tough get going" doesn't worry much about who gets squashed by the roller.
But there's a softer side of business, the one embraced by the first business owner I ever knew: my father.
Buddy Brown had a seventh-grade education but was a born mathematician. He could look at a tree and quote its board-foot yield almost perfectly, making him a natural for the lumber business.
In Virginia of the 1940s, the lumber business meant one of two things: You were a huge lumber yard that bought from small sawmill operations, or you were a small sawmill operation.
Buddy, his partner, George Lindsay, and a handful of laborers ran a small, portable sawmill business. As one stand of timber was being cut, the future site was being scouted.
In this type of business, there was no income for anyone in the company unless there was output. Rainy days and bitter cold weather were tough for sawmill operators. And the mill owners seldom had enough capital to buy the timber they cut, so they usually had to depend on the large timber companies to select them to cut their tracts of timber.
As a toddler, I learned the rules of a prudent business.
It is important to save some money for a rainy day.
It is important to find a way to help your employees through the down times so they will be there when the weather improves.
It is important to clean up after yourself, to make the roads cut into wooded areas as unobtrusive as possible, and to be a good citizen of the community in which you work.
It is important to help the less fortunate.
Sometime in the late 1940s, Buddy and George were cutting timber near Renan, a community in Pittsylvania County. To get to and from the mill, they and the workers had to drive by a little cabin amid some apple trees. The cabin looked about ready to drop, but children often were playing in the yard and would wave at the sawmill crew and the lumber truck drivers.
As soon as the apples appeared on the trees, the children always seemed to be nibbling on them.
One day my father came home and said he believed the children were hungry. Also, in addition to the three or four children often seen playing in the yard, the mill workers occasionally would see an obviously pregnant woman.
As the months went by, the workers - most of whom also lived on the edge of poverty - would share their lunches with the children and would stop at a nearby grocery some mornings to buy them treats. Once, when the workers bought ice cream, the children were afraid to eat it because they'd never seen anything like it before.
The mill workers began to suspect that the family had no income.
But the workers never stopped at the house and never asked the children questions about the family because it wasn't right to interfere with others' lives.
As Christmas approached, the weather turned bitter. It snowed and the mill couldn't operate. But the mill workers couldn't forget the children and the pregnant woman. I heard them talking about them when they came by the house to speculate about when the mill could run again, or to borrow some money against future earnings.
Closer to the holiday, Buddy said he couldn't stop thinking about the family and thought we ought to do something. He and George and everyone's families rallied to box up clothing, toys, food and other gifts for the family. I remember vividly the tentativeness of the group that ended up standing in the cold at the closed doorway to the tumbledown cabin.
Someone knocked, and the woman came to the door.
"We thought you might need these," was all my mother said.
The woman invited us inside to see the new baby, who was tucked into the covers of the family's only bed. The child was a few days old and was wearing its only diaper, the mother said. The diaper was so wet that it was yellow.
The family lived in one room of the cabin. The only other room, used by the landlord for storage, was half-filled with corncobs.
"I bet it's rats in here big as I am," a little girl my age said as she opened a door to show me the room.
In the spring, the mill moved to a new area, and we never heard what happened to the family.
And, as the years went by, my father became more prosperous. He installed a mill on his own property and no longer had to leave home before dawn to commute to remote sites. The logs were brought to him by the timber owners. His business even became international in a small way when he shipped logs to Japan.
But he never lost his tenderness for others. And that also made him a good business operator.
by CNB