THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 2, 1994 TAG: 9409290354
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE MAYFIELD, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 318 lines
On a pleasant late-summer afternoon, Alan Valmore Monette grabs the keys to his Cadillac and heads off for a spin through his Isle of Wight County neighborhood.
At the intersection of Monette Parkway and Monette Lane, he turns right. Then he bounces the car onto a tractor rut that cuts through cotton and sorghum fields.
Monette thrusts his right arm across the dash and points. ``Look at those turkeys,'' he says as four wild hens scuttle down a hill toward a grove of oaks.
A second later, he points left. ``There goes an eagle! See him through the clearing there.''
This 500-acre farm where the Pagan and James rivers meet is where Alan Monette has lived and worked most of his extraordinarily eventful life.
Down the rutted lane a bit is where young Monette went on a wild rope ride after lassoing one of his dad's prize Angus heifers. As teenagers here, he and his brothers marveled at the splintery showers they created by sticking dynamite under the stumps of oak trees. Here also is where Joe DiMaggio, public relations man for his father's food-brokerage empire, once cheerfully tooled round on a riding mower.
This place, a 10-minute drive from downtown Smithfield, was once home and headquarters for his self-made father, Valmore H. Monette, and his father's global enterprise, V.H. Monette & Co.
Now it's Alan Monette's home and the headquarters for the pair of companies he created and built into impressive operations in their own right.
Monette Information Systems Corp., one of America's leading providers of software for nursing homes and health centers, is the high-tech cornerstone of Isle of Wight's economy. Basse's Choice, a mail-order catalog named after the historic 17th century plantation where Monette's farm now sits, sells Smithfield's savory hams from coast to coast.
The companies, with their combined 55 employees, operate out of two office buildings on the farm. For Monette, work is just a short, looping drive away from his family's 1860 farmhouse-turned-manor overlooking the Pagan.
At age 51, barrel-chested, bespectacled Alan Monette (pronounced mo-NET) is one of his home county's most influential people. As the newly elected president of its chamber of commerce, he is the de facto first citizen of Isle of Wight's business community. He's active in Smithfield's downtown renovation and has been heading a highly popular campaign to persuade the local phone company to let Isle of Wight customers call elsewhere in Hampton Roads without paying toll charges.
``He's a natural leader,'' says Constance Rhodes, executive director of the Isle of Wight-Smithfield chamber. ``Tenacious. Ingenious. Enthusiastic. . . . If you have an enormous task, Alan is the person to give it to.''
Monette is also one of Virginia's most politically active businesspeople. In the past several years he has raised tens of thousands of dollars for Republican candidates. At a fund-raising party at their home in late August, he and his wife, Margaret, collected more than $10,000 for Oliver North's U.S. Senate campaign.
But the farm and all that is part of it - his family, his businesses, his memories of it and hopes for it - are unquestionably Alan Monette's first devotion.
For as long as he can remember and especially when he was away, he says, he has felt the farm's pull.
He is, Monette says simply, ``bound to this land.'' FOUNDATION FOR SUCCESS
Here on this farm more than 40 years ago, Val Monette started drilling into his son the confidence it takes to get big things done.
``He made us prove ourselves to ourselves,'' Alan Monette says.
Val Monette was a sixth-grade dropout, a poor boy from Massachusetts who talked his way into a contract to peddle Hershey ice cream toppings to Norfolk-based Navy ships during World War II. Upon that he built what ultimately became a $250 million-a-year business selling products to the military for dozens of big-name food companies.
Val Monette won audiences with popes and presidents, befriended corporate chieftains and university chancellors, and hired famous athletes and entertainers to pitch his company's products.
Hundreds of VIPs dropped for by the grand opening of the V.H. Monette & Co. headquarters building on the Isle of Wight farm when he moved the offices there from Norfolk in 1957. Football legend Sid Luckman and entertainer Arthur Godfrey were among them.
Despite his larger-than-life aura, Val Monette loved the small-town atmosphere.
He'd already owned the farm for 15 years and had moved his family to it long before relocating the business there.
Farming itself was a sidelight. But Monette took pride in his pampered cattle and delighted in the exotic peacocks and white deer that he imported. They helped earn him a nickname, ``The Baron of Smithfield.''
Away from the hustle and bustle, the farm made it easier for Val Monette to mold the children that he saw too little of. Hard work. Honesty. Clean living. Those were the values he stressed to them.
Above all, hard work. Alan Monette vividly recalls his first summer's labor on the farm. He was about 12.
``We worked 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, plus 7 to noon on Saturdays,'' he recalls. ``He started me off at $1 an hour. That was when minimum wage was $1.25.''
He and his brothers cut hay, built docks and boathouses, poured concrete for a swimming pool, fixed fences, cleared land.
They spent two years blasting stumps out with dynamite. Monette's oldest brother, David, still recalls suffering ``tremendous headaches'' after climbing into the holes left by their blasts. The smell of ammonium nitrate was that strong.
Alan was driving bulldozers and tractors by his early teens. His father let him motor round in a beat-up Jeep, ``till one day he saw me tearing across this field with my little sister sitting in the back on top of a case of dynamite,'' he recalls. ``That was the last of the Jeep.''
The Monettes regularly entertained big shots at their home: baseball great DiMaggio, quarterback Johnny Unitas, corporate chieftain Milton Hershey. David Monette laughs about tossing a certain Miss America into the family's swimming pool.
But their father wouldn't let his five kids get starry-eyed. There were chores to be done, lessons to be learned.
For the most part, Alan toed his father's line.
He didn't dare smoke or drink - and still doesn't, but for an occasional glass of wine.
Under his father's strong influence, the boy developed into a quietly intense and unusually composed young man. That purposeful bearing continues even today: right down to the firm way Alan Monette talks, walks, even sits. From his tightly knotted tie to his hard-polished shoes, he has the look of a man who is never ruffled.
Friends and close business associates say they've never seen Monette lose his temper. And while he's good-humored, they say, he's no jokester.
Monette's weak spot has always been fast-moving cars and boats.
He zipped round the Pagan for years on water skis - up until a few years ago, when he turned to safer water sports.
As a teenager he was a self-described ``little devil'' on Isle of Wight's back roads. He constantly sneaked out to go drag-racing.
That vice ended only after Val Monette called Smithfield's Gwaltney Motor Co. one day to complain that the rear tires on his new Ford were worn out after 4,000 miles.
``We kind of in a nice way had to say, Mr. Monette, you might want to check with Alan on that,'' says Maynard Gwaltney Sr., then a young salesman at the dealership and now its president. ``He might know where some of that rubber is.''
At Smithfield High School, Monette remembers being ``moderately popular.'' He was elected class president one year. He played fullback on the football team and galloped the mile and half-mile in track, winning the school's Athlete of the Year award as a senior.
Yet despite his achievements, he was still known principally as Val Monette's son. His father was happy to run his life. Alan strived for an identity of his own.
The turning point came one spring day of Alan's senior year of high school. Val Monette was on the phone in his office with the then-lieutenant governor of Virginia, fixing to send his youngest boy to William & Mary come fall.
``He said, `Sit down over there and think about it and . . . in three minutes I want an answer,' '' Monette recalls. ``That really got to me.''
Three minutes later, ``The only thing I could think of was he didn't have any contacts in North Carolina.'' Chapel Hill, Alan blurted out confidently, is where he wanted to go. He'd never been there.
He majored in business and signed up for Naval ROTC with an option to join the Marines. His senior year at UNC, he was named commander of the 300-man naval battalion, beating out the university chancellor's son for the job.
As his college days waned, it became clear that Monette's Marine hitch would soon land him in Vietnam. In 1966, as a 23-year-old second lieutenant, he was shuttling between hot spots like Da Nang and Hue as a supply liaison.
``Everybody I knew who was in the Marine Corps volunteered to go,'' he says. But as more and more of his fellow Marines were killed all around him, Monette grew bitter about what seemed to him to be a lack of commitment by America's political leaders to win the war.
``To this day,'' he says, ``it still has an effect on me. . . . We were there to win, could have won and should have won. But they didn't turn us loose, they didn't back us when we had to have the backing to allow us to pursue.'' TO THE RESCUE
A world away from the steamy jungles of Vietnam, dusty El Paso, Texas, reinstilled in Alan Monette a sense of purpose.
A month after his discharge at Quantico, he was plopped in the middle of a preposterously unsuccessful Mexican-foods company called Ashley's. In an unusual misstep, his father had bought the company a few years before. The first job of Alan Monette's business career was to fix it.
He arrived in El Paso July 1, 1968, hoping to slowly grow into the role of general manager. He found out immediately that the factory's manager had been stricken with cancer. The man died six weeks later.
The bank was on the verge of calling a loan. Inventory was missing. Production machinery was broken. Employees were dispirited.
To make matters worse, Monette's marriage of just a few years was collapsing. He and his first wife divorced while he was in El Paso. She returned to Smithfield with their two young children.
Three months after detailing his son to what looked like certain disaster, Val Monette made one visit.
``I said, `Dad, you've got two choices. Walk away and lose your investment or turn it around - and it won't be easy.' Neither one of us liked to quit.''
Alan Monette almost giddily describes the rescue.
First of all, he had the good fortune of soon finding a new wife, Margaret, who knew a lot about business, having worked as a secretary for his father's company. She eagerly helped in Ashley's turnaround.
From their adobe home on the factory property, the couple set off to towns all over the West. He'd size up the local grocery markets during the day. At the motel that night, she'd type up the sales program that would be presented to grocers the next morning.
Rivals ``would go into our markets and literally buy everything off the shelf, put their product in and take command of the whole section.''
Falling back on his military training, he retaliated with diversionary tactics. He'd feign an effort to steal away a competitor's largest customer. While his rival was distracted, he'd sneak in and sign up a smaller grocery chain.
Jim Currey, an El Paso business acquaintance, still marvels at Monette's self-assurance.
``He's incredibly patient, honest,'' Currey says, ``and probably the most controlled person I have ever worked with. . . . Alan has discipline beyond what is reasonable to expect from a person.''
``I just felt challenged by it,'' Monette explains. ``I felt like I owed Dad something for . . . bringing me to the point in life where I was.''
Ashley's was solidly profitable after five years. Sales had more than quintupled to $5 million. Val Monette started hinting about calling his son home.
The military-brokerage business had been slow to join the computer age. Alan - having learned a lot about computers in El Paso, having even co-founded a prosperous computer-consulting business on the side there - would be just the right person for the job at V.H. Monette & Co., his father figured. BACK TO THE FARM
His success in El Paso was more propitious than that. It laid the groundwork, it turns out, for just about all that Alan Monette has today.
Not that there weren't times of doubt.
Everything seemed on the verge of crumbling when on Oct. 11, 1974, Val Monette died from a heart attack. He was 71.
The Baron of Smithfield had never confided in his grieving sons and daughters, all of whom worked in his company at the time, how he'd planned for them to carry on with the farm and the business.
The company's assets, including the farm, were divided among 15 shareholders. They included Monette's widow and all five of his children by two previous marriages.
The splintered ownership made the farm's retention in the family look doubtful, Alan Monette recalls.
But providence intervened. Flush with cash from a runup in sugar prices, Holly Sugar Corp. was on an acquisition binge. Ashley's, the Mexican-foods company Monette had salvaged, was sold to Holly in 1975. The cash proceeds were used to buy out the edgiest of the V.H. Monette & Co. stockholders.
Over time, as they continued building V.H. Monette & Co., Alan and brother David bought out all the other owners of the brokerage business too, including their three siblings. And Alan realized his dream of returning to the farm.
He and Margaret, who are nearing their 25th anniversary, raised four children there. Moving home also put Monette close to his two other children by his previous marriage.
Under the Monette brothers' direction, V.H. Monette & Co. added $100 million a year in sales. The brokerage was a $250 million company in 1986 when they concluded it was time to get out.
With the defense boom over, rivals were ever more aggressively trying to pirate away their top customers.
Alan Monette says he and his brothers felt like the two heroes in one of his favorite TV westerns, ``Alias Smith and Jones.''
As the two cowboys were chased up a ridge by a band of gunslingers, one turned to the other and said: ``There's one thing, we've got to get . . . out of this business.''
The brothers sold V.H. Monette to Overseas Service Corp. of West Palm Beach, Fla., for an undisclosed price. ``Millions,'' is all David will say.
The sale didn't include the farm. Alan later bought out his brother's interest in that. And it didn't include one other business based on the farm: Monette Information Systems. FLYING SOLO
Alan Monette had started the technology company in 1978, using the computer smarts he'd developed in Texas. Today, he is the majority owner of Monette Information, which has annual sales of $5 million.
The company's largest customer is right next-door: Smithfield Foods Inc., for which it provides data-processing and a range of other computer services.
Monette Information is better known, however, for its elaborate software programs for nursing homes, medical practices and community health centers. It is one of a half-dozen of the largest software vendors to nursing homes and the No. 2 provider of computer services to health centers in the United States.
About five years ago, when Alan Monette got the itch to start another business on the farm, Basse's Choice was born. It's now a $1 million-a-year enterprise and has several other partners besides the Monettes.
Besides making money, the food catalog gives Alan and Margaret - she is the more active of the two in that business - a chance to trumpet the rich history of their farm.
At this place in 1621, Capt. Nathaniel Basse is believed to have set up one of Isle of Wight's first plantations. Basse was a judge and burgess in colonial Virginia and a trader whose reach extended from the West Indies to Nova Scotia.
Three and three-quarters centuries later, the same rural landscape inspires Alan Monette as he continues to widen his business horizons.
The land these days is mostly in crops planted under lease by a neighboring farmer. But there are woodsy parts and marshes all about. A long dock jutting out into the Pagan is the jumping-off point for boating and fishing, both of which Monette avidly pursues.
Monette says he feels ``in prime time when it comes to business.'' He's not planning to slow down anytime soon.
But he does think about what will become of the farm after he's gone. Will it go on to shape another generation of Monette achievers?
He hopes so. Some of his children have shown interest in remaining here to carry on the enterprises. RIDING INTO THE SUNSET
It's late-afternoon. Out on the farm, sunshine slants through tall oaks on a secluded knoll. A bluebird dances by.
Alan Monette seems entranced as he stops his car on the grassy hilltop.
``Pretty,'' he says softly, ``isn't it?'' ILLUSTRATION: IAN MARTIN/Staff color photos
Alan Monette regularly drives round his 500-acre farm along the
Pagan and James rivers in Isle of Wight County. He says he's been
``totally motivated since I was a young man'' to live and work
there.
``I'd like to see one of the kids build out here someday,'' Alan
Monette says of this secluded corner of the farm, above, where wild
turkeys and deer abound. At right, Monette with his wife, Margaret,
who's active in the Basse's Choice mail-order business. ``We both
don't mind working,'' he says.
IAN MARTIN/Staff photo
Alan Monette built the foundation for his success by learning from
his father's business, V.H. Monette & Co., on the family's farm in
Isle of Wight County. Today, Monette, shown in his office
overlooking the Pagan River, runs his two enterprises from there.
KEYWORDS: PROFILE BIOGRAPHY by CNB