Something I Learned From Maxey Jarman
He built a billion-dolar corporation, but neither success nor failure were crucial to his interior life. He treated those two impostors just the same.
Fred Smith
January 1, 1981
In our very first issue of LEADERSHIP, we ran an extensive interview with Fred Smith. It evoked the strongest response of anything we've published to date. We've had many requests since then to get Fred into these pages again.
It seems only natural for his first article this year to be about Maxey Jarman, who passed away last fall at age seventy-six. He influenced Fred a great deal. Here was a man who took a company from 75 employees to 75,000, making Genesco in the late '60s the world's largest apparel company. Yet when reverses came, Maxey maintained a tremendous spiritual resiliency and kept contributing energetically, without bitterness, to many Christian causes. He was a man who rose to the very top in business, yet was uncompromising in his spiritual commitments.
From his close relationship with him over forty-three years, Fred gives us insights into Maxey Jarman's character and practices.
I first met Maxey Jarman back in the mid-thirties when I was about twenty. I had been teaching a Sunday school class in a nurses' training program at Nashville General Hospital. One of the nurses became an industrial nurse, and she introduced me to her boss, the director of personnel. I said to myself, "I'd like a job like that." I had no training or experience, but I knew General Shoe (later Genesco) was one company in town where there might be such a position. So, I decided to meet Maxey Jarman, the president.
Maxey always bought gas at the station next to the plant. I waited until he drove up in his red Chrysler, then walked over and introduced myself. We just shook hands; he probably thought it was very strange, for in his early thirties he wasn't very gregarious.
Mary Alice and I had just married and rented out one of our two bedrooms ...
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