|
"DICK GLOVER -
Chairman of the Board"
 Author:
Charles G. McGuigan
Published: September, 1997
Dick Glover's [former] home on Lydell
Drive is an unassuming brick rancher that sits on a grassy knoll. There's a late
model Chrysler Imperial and a blue Dodge Dynasty under the car port, and a red
and white Dodge pickup sits parked, its chrome gleaming, in the partial shade of
a small stand of trees on the back of the property line.
Dressed down today in khaki
slacks and a forest green short-sleeved shirt, Dick answers the front door. His
father-in-law, Robert E. Sadler, who has lived with the family since they moved
here nearly three decades ago, is taking small, slow steps across the living
room floor, his hands gripping a walker. He moves toward a chair next to the
couch and, with back stiff, slowly lowers himself to the cushion, then settles
in.
Dick gestures toward the
walker. "He said to me recently that his walker's become a creeper,"
he says. "You know he's lived with us since 1968 and it's been great. He
was with our kids and we always had him here. And we all learned from him.
America needs to get back to having three generations living under one roof. You
learn from those who have lived."
We enter his study and Dick
sits by his desk. He opens a drawer and roots through it until he finds a short
length of wood, rounded and pointed at one end like a horn. It is of dark
wood-walnut, perhaps-and smoothed and polished by continuous palming.
"That's a plant peg," says Dick, fisting it and holding it like a
dagger, then thrusting it into the imaginary earth. "If the ground was in
order, all day long you'd go along and punch holes every few inches into the top
of the hill and drop in the tobacco plants."
A COUNTRY BOYHOOD
Dick adjusts his aviator
glasses, lowers the well-worn plant peg to the desk. He's thinking about his
father and the tobacco farm down in Lunenburg County. He's thinking about
working in those fields as a boy.
When the tobacco-great pagoda
spires of leaves-began to mature, he would "pull" tobacco, starting at
the base of the stalk, tearing off four leaves from each plant, tucking the
leaves in the crook of his armpit, moving up between the mounds, until the load
was too large, and then carefully lowering the
valued leaves onto the
mule-drawn tobacco slide-a long narrow sled that kept pace with the progress in
the fields.
Dick bends down, and in a
rhythmic motion, starts pulling imaginary tobacco leaves, tucking them between
arm and torso, showing how it was done those many years ago. "I knew how to
pull tobacco," he says.
When the tobacco slide was
full, it was drawn to the barn, a building ringed in a series of flues that fed
back into a furnace box on the outside. All during that flue-curing process,
Dick's father would stoke the furnace box with pine logs until the temperature
inside was perfect.
Once the barn was filled,
keeping a watchful eye on the temperature became even more critical. So Dick and
his father would sleep in cots under a lean-to built along the outside of the
barn, would sleep through the summer's night as the tobacco cured in the barn.
All through the night the fires burned and Dick's father would periodically
check the temperature, adding more fuel when necessary, checking the leaves to
make sure they hadn't dried out and become brittle. And as soon as the leaves
throughout the barn were just so, his father doused the embers in the furnace,
loaded the tobacco onto a wagon and hauled it to the pack house where it was
stored.
Before he trucked it to the
tobacco auction blocks of Danville, South Hill or South Boston, Armstead Boyd
Glover would examine each tobacco leaf carefully. "In all," says Dick,
"I think he had about five or six different grades." The leaves were
then tied together and laid out in bundles, all ready for market. "You know
he just farmed three or four acres of tobacco, but it was just enough,"
Dick remembers "One year, his best ever, he got eighty seven cents a pound
and he was elated."
Though the Glovers never made a
vast amount on the crop, they supplemented their income by raising their own
vegetables along with a couple of cows and pigs, a scattering of chickens.
"We had our own smokehouse and we'd have to coat the meat with Skipper
compound to keep the bugs away. Till this day I won't eat any of that skin you
get on a smoked ham."
By the time Dick was eleven,
his parents sold the farm and moved to nearby Victoria, where his father went to
work for the Virginian Railroad, which merged ten years later, in 1957, with
Norfolk and Western. His father started as a pipefitter and eventually moved to
the yard.
The railroad was the core of
the town's economy. "There was a one million dollar payroll and only about
fifteen hundred people lived in Victoria," Dick explains. The voice of the
railroad yards, a shrill whistle, would punctuate the air each day at seven in
the morning, at noon, three in the afternoon and eleven at night, signaling the
changing shifts. "You didn't wear a watch in Victoria," says Dick.
"You just listened for the whistle."
BROADENING HORIZONS
Throughout his youth, Dick
Glover heard the trains, watched the engines straining with their burden of coal
cars coming out of West Virginia destined for Tidewater and deepwater ports. On
October 29, 1953 at age 18, Dick Glover left his family home and reported to
Bainbridge, Maryland. He left school before his senior year to enlist in the
Navy, and in his voice, still, there is a hint of regret. "I can relate to
a lot of young people who have difficulty," he says. "I'd simply lost
interest in school. But after I finished with the Navy I went back and finished
high school. And in that one year of high school
I learned more than I learned
in all previous years."
During his two years in the
Navy Dick Glover also learned a thing or two. He was a country boy, whose
universe until that point had been delineated by the boundaries of his native
county with occasional trips to Richmond and Danville, South Boston and other
neighboring towns and cities.
That changed abruptly. After
completing basic training in Maryland, he and other raw recruits took a train
out to San Diego. At Imperial Beach he attended radio school for 16 weeks.
"And then I went off to Guam," he says with mounting excitement in his
voice. "It was all something to see. Each village celebrated the feast of
their Guardian Angel! They kept their doors open twenty-four hours, forty-eight,
and some seventy-two hours. They were amazing celebrations."
He talks about the mosquitoes
and the iguanas and the snails on the island. "Guam is a coral
island," he says. "And you could walk five hundred feet out in the
water to the edge of the reef where the surf was breaking . You had to wear
rubber shoes, though. The coral would cut you."
On the pistol range one day
Dick had to fire 21 rounds from his .45 sidearm at a target. "It was a
massive target," says Dick, then adds with a grin, "I only hit it
three times." A Marine Sergeant gave Dick a little advice. "He told
me," Dick remembers, "'If you ever encounter the enemy, don't fire,
just throw the gun at them.'"
When he returned to Virginia he
finished his senior year of high school. "I went to South Boston because
they had chemistry and physics labs there," he says. "They didn't have
that in Victoria." After graduation, Dick moved to Richmond with the intent
of studying pharmacy at the Medical College of Virginia.
"I'd been accepted and I
was supposed to start on September fourth," he says. Two days before he was
to begin classes, at the entrance of the building housing the School of Pharmacy
he struck up a conversation with an older man. "I didn't know who it was,
he turned out to be a dean or a professor," Dick remembers. He told the man
that he had reservations about pharmacy. "Well," this man told him,
"if you're not sure about pharmacy, you probably shouldn't study it,
because it requires a lot of work and commitment."
Dick took his advice and
enrolled in a business program at Richmond Professional Institute, now Virginia
Commonwealth University.
"I studied for about a
year and then I fell in love," he says.
Joan Sadler worked for C &
P Telephone and lodged in the home of Dick Glover's aunt on Noble Avenue in
Ginter Park. At the urging of his aunt, Dick visited Joan. "I met her on
July 13, 1957; I proposed on September 22, 1957-her birthday; and we were
married on February 1, 1958," says Dick.
"We've been married forty
years now and I've told her, 'If you ever leave me, I'm going with you.' I
thought she was the prettiest thing I had ever laid my eyes on and I still do.
She has always supported me, and has been a wonderful wife and mother."
PLACE AND PRESERVATION
Dick invites me for a tour of
Brookland District. It is a diverse area, a mixture of commercial and light
industry, retail and residential-from modest homes to massive estates.
As we drive along the perimeter
of the district, it is evident that Dick knows quite well the area and its
inhabitants. He ticks off name after name as we drive. As we pull into Tall
Timbers, Dick explains how the street names were derived from an Italian woman
named Contessa Attems who had owned a portion of the land that makes up the
development. "Behind everyone of these names there's a history."
The preservation of historic
places is of great importance to the Brookland District Supervisor. He's proud
of the deal he helped negotiate that added historic Walkerton to the county's
real estate holdings. He laments the razing of the old Forest Lodge on Mountain
Road, wishes there was something he could do to preserve the old Laurel School
at Hungary and Purcell roads.
Dick pulls off old Washington
Highway in front of the old Glen Allen Elementary School. There's a spray of
loose gravel and crunching under the tires as we come to a stop. Construction
workers are hanging duct work in the main part of the building. Two carpenters
set a new window in place and Dick smiles at the work.
Bit by bit now, this old
school, which had been boarded up for years, is undergoing a transformation to
become the Cultural Arts Center at Glen Allen. It was Dick who convinced fellow
board of supervisors members that it would be a crowning jewel for Henrico. When
completed sometime next spring it will be the largest municipal cultural arts
center in the state and home to theatre, music, the visual arts and more.
Dick remembers how the idea
came to him. While attending a play at Belmont Recreation Center, he noticed
that the actors, after finishing a scene and exiting, would somehow emerge
through the side door of the building in time for their next appearance on
stage. There is no back door to the small Rectangular building at Belmont, so
Dick was perplexed. After the production concluded he asked Someone how this was
done and was told that the players had to climb out a window backstage and run
up to the side door.
"I thought, why can't
Henrico County in all its splendor be able to provide adequate services for the
creative element in our community," he says. He immediately thought of the
auditorium of the old Glen Allen School and in time his vision grew. "Why
not build a center that would house all the arts? We have all these wonderful
buildings that should be preserved. Let's do it. This will give the budding
artists throughout central Virginia an opportunity to express themselves. It
will be great for both participant and spectator."
He convinced the board of
supervisors to commit more than $8.5 million for the renovation. And since then
the county has created a foundation for the cultural arts center that will
solicit funding from area businesses and corporations to make the facility a
public-private partnership. In the words of a salesman, Dick had closed the
deal.
We backtrack and head over to
the RF&P Park tucked back behind Meadow Farm. "If you take care of kids
and seniors, you're doing what a county government should do," Dick says as
he pulls into a complex of playing fields which includes a football field and
seven baseball fields-three of which are designated for girl's softball. There's
adequate parking along with rest rooms and concession stands, lighting and even
wiring for video cameras. There's an RF&P boxcar, deep blue, for equipment
storage. And off to one side a cellular communications tower. "They needed
a sixty by sixty foot piece of land," says Dick. "We gave it to them
and they donated sixty seven thousand dollars to the complex. We lease the whole
park from RF&P for something like one dollar a year. It took a lot of
negotiating. It's the kind of thing that goes on behind the scenes."
IT'S THE SALESMAN IN DICK
GLOVER
It's the salesman in Dick
Glover, his ability to negotiate and look for ways that the county can provide
exceptional services at reasonable costs. Which all makes sense when you
consider that Dick Glover worked, for the better part of his life, as a salesman
and an entrepreneur.
Shortly after he was married,
Dick understood that he enjoyed sales, the meeting with people. "In those
days I was selling insurance and doing very menial jobs," he says, "I
was trying to find my niche, was looking for an ideal sales job."
He went to work in 1958 for
Strietmann Biscuit Company in Scott's Addition as a warehouse manager's helper.
He unloaded cookies off boxcars and set them up for the sales staff for $72 a
week, $69 take home pay.
Bernard Powell, who was the
sales supervisor between Norfolk and Richmond at Strietmann gave me my first
chance to be a salesman," says Dick with apparent fondness. "He'd take
me out in the field and show me how to rotate cookies, how to make sure you
always had real fresh cookies on the racks. He showed me the ropes."
And soon, Dick was given a
sales area of his own. "They gave me the smallest territory in terms of
dollar value," he says and I turned it into one of the biggest areas in
terms of dollar value. I broke some records with Zesta Crackers. No one had ever
reached a thousand dozen in one month. And then I did."
His territory included most of
South Side Richmond, out Hull Street and Midlothian and down Jeff Davis Highway,
and then a good section of the Northern Neck. Miller's Tavern, Urbanna, White
Stone, Kilmarnock, Heathsville, Reedville and then back to Tappahannock. He'd
spend the night in Tappahannock, would often eat in the now defunct Ben Davis'
Quick Lunch. Fresh rockfish in season. Good home cooking.
"I liked to hear the way
the people talk in the Northern Neck, how they'd say, 'Deed, so, 'Deed it
is," says Dick. "It was a good time in my life."
He remembers selling to Ukrop's
out on Hull Street when they had only one store. "I remember Jimmy coming
out of William and Mary and going to work in the family business," he says.
"He was one of the fairest managers I ever called on. He was careful and
considerate of his employees. He began to develop himself into the role that he
would eventually assume. I watched as his professionalism showed through."
At about that time, the Ukrops
opened the store at Buford Road and Midlothian Turnpike. "It was a nice big
store, probably the largest one in Richmond," says Dick. "Jimmy began
to give me off-shelf displays. That's a big thing in selling in retail."
And, in part, because of Jimmy Ukrop's generosity in this regard, Dick was able
to sell [a lot] of crackers and cookies.
It was sometime in
September-"soup season"-and Campbell's was offering a deal that if you
bought a can of their soup and a box of crackers and sent them the labels, they
would reimburse you for the full price of the crackers. "Jimmy let me build
another display for the crackers," says Dick, "And let me tell you, I
sold crackers like you wouldn't believe."
Some time later, Jimmy Ukrop
again let Dick Glover build a display for cookies.
It was called the Treasure
Chest, a cardboard display describing a pirate's chest with the lid open. It was
filled to the brim with Fudge Stripes, Milk Chocolate Grahams, Penguins and
Fudge Sticks. Dick set it up on Monday morning, loading it with 35 dozen boxes
of cookies. By early afternoon it was sold out. He restocked the display and by
Saturday it was empty again. "It was a great day and they kept
selling," says Dick.
He vividly recalls a thin slice
of time, a Friday afternoon in the fall as he was finishing up his rounds along
Hull Street. He had just finished up at Ukrop's and was headed to the A&P
when the radio announcer said that President John F. Kennedy had been shot.
"I pulled off the road, "he says. "It was a chilling feeling. I
can feel it right now, but I can't really describe it. It was chilling."
It was about this time that
Dick decided he wanted to get into the sale of non-food products. "I had
built the territory up real well, but I needed a change," he says.
That's when he went to work for
Chapstick, which had recently been bought out by A. H. Robins. "I used to
call on virtually every drug store in Virginia," he says. "Except for
Northern Virginia, I did most of the state."
Chapstick decided to put
together a national sales force. "They sent me to Atlanta where I was
district manager," says Dick. "I worked with sales people covering
eight and a half states. We started hiring our own sales force and began letting
go of the manufacturer's reps."
Two years later, Dick was
transferred back to Richmond. He became manager of special accounts including
one with the Army and Air Force Exchange out of Dallas, Texas-a very lucrative
contract as it served virtually every base in the world, a lot of Chapstick.
GOING OUT ON HIS OWN
In 1971 he left A. H. Robins
and started his own manufacturer's repping business for the Southeast. "I
started it from scratch: Dick says. "And no sooner had I started it than I
said, 'Dick, what have you done?' He managed to get some manufacturers to let
him rep. He handled items like Protein Plus Shampoo-a generic. The price was
right. Unfortunately, shipping costs were prohibitively high. "I had a
bunch of those kinds of lines and pretty early on I realized I needed better
product lines," says Dick.
So, with brief case in hand, he
went to the New York Variety Show that August. He walked from one display to
another and managed to pick up quite a few lines. Leather Tree Watch Bands,
Ethical Rubber Goods Warren Pet Products and Blistex.
"Then I picked up Tetra
Min Fish Food, "says Dick. "I was one of their first reps. And it was
a great product." He quickly hired sales reps to handle the new product
line-in Charlotte, Richmond and Jacksonville, Florida. He gave the reps 70
percent of the commission and 30 percent went to him. Things were rolling along
just fine.
And then in 1973 came a sharp
spike in gasoline prices. "It really killed me," he says. Two years
later, he sold the company.
But in the interim, Dick had
bought Toppings Letter Service for $2,500 and embarked in yet a new
direction." It was repetitive typing," he says. "And though I
never got rich, I had some great experiences."
In that same time frame, Dick
became a broker for Scott Packaging and Import. That Import company had just
purchased 39,000 oil-based artificial Christmas trees. It was Dick's job to sell
them.
He lifts his hand from the
steering wheel and snaps his fingers. "I sold them just like that," he
says. "And they got so excited they ordered another 24,000 trees." He
shakes his head slowly. "The problem was that they didn't arrive until
December fifteenth," says Dick. "No one wants firecrackers after the
Fourth of July." And worse still, the goods were damaged. In the cold holes
of freighters steaming from China, the plastic spines of many of the trees had
split and cracked.
"My real loss was the loss
of time," Dick says. "It was devastating." He still has the
judgment he got against the importers-a judgment for more than $112,000. Dick
never saw a nickel of it.
Meanwhile, the repetitive
typing business was beginning to flourish. He used part-timers to type in
addresses, essentially personalizing letters for mass marketing. Things were
building slowly, but steadily.
And then Phil McKown, who used
to own Custom Mailers, approached Dick and asked if he could handle 32,000
pieces in six weeks. "I had never done more than seven thousand in a month,
"Dick admits, "But I told him yes I could but I'd need a purchase
order so I could borrow money to buy a couple of pieces of equipment."
The equipment he needed was
actually dated technology at the time-autotype, pneumatic typewriters. And
though the technology was almost passé, the price was right. Dick went to
Chicago, learned how to use the new equipment, then returned to Richmond and
began to work. But there were problems keeping the paper straight in the platens
of the typewriters. They needed constant adjusting and they were driving Dick
nuts.
"Two weeks had already
gone by and I had only done about three thousand letters," he says.
"The September 2 deadline was creeping up."
Phil McKown, understandably,
was getting nervous. It was, after all, his contract. Three weeks into the job
only about 10 percent of it was completed. Finally, though, Dick got a handle on
the technology. "I began to really produce and I began to understand the
system," he says. "I would stay in the office over on High Point
Avenue twenty-four hours. And we made it. I got it done and delivered at 4 p.m.
on September 2."
A steady stream of smaller jobs
continued to flow into the business. Then, someone from Avon in New York called
and asked Dick if he could produce 76,000 letters in ten weeks. "I said,
'Yeah', I never said no to anyone," he explains.
To achieve this number, Dick
went to Bela Kurper in Silver Spring, Maryland, a man who owned the patent of
the Edit Writer and who had upgraded the magtype systems of the day. "He
was really knocking out some letters, "Dick says. He leased six of the
machines and finished the job which lasted four months instead of ten short
weeks.
Avon called again. This time
they wanted 66,000 letters in three weeks. "It was the first time I
hesitated," says Dick. "But then I said, 'I think so.'" Dick went
down to Norfolk and purchased a much faster system. He bought two of them-each
for $19,000 with the understanding that if they didn't cut it, the man who sold
him the machines would put his own staff to work to finish the job. From then
on, Dick Glover did 66,000 letters for Avon each quarter. This, in addition to
the 10,000 pieces he was handling every week.
"I became a sizable
business and moved out to Highland Springs in 1978," says Dick. "You
always had to stay out in front with the technology. The largest order I ever
did was one million one hundred and seventeen thousand pieces in seven
days."
In 1982, he sold the business
but continued running it for three years. And as part of the sale agreement, his
two sons, one of his daughters and his wife worked for the company. Dick went on
the Planning Commission in 1984," he says. "And I was first elected
Supervisor in 1987 and I soon realized it was a full-time job."
We drive down Lakeside Avenue
and Dick pulls briefly into Axselle's Auto. Bob checks under the hood, talks
with Dick, nodding his head. "I want to see this area take off, "Dick
says. "I know these people, I live with them, I go to church with them over
at Hatcher and I have to look them in the eyes.
The hardest thing about being a
supervisor is not being able to provide all things to all people at all times.
We have a lot of the money in place now for the Enhancement Plan on Lakeside.
Construction's going to start in October sometime, I think. Next year I'll be
able to get another lump from the board hopefully. This year it went to other
projects in other districts."
As we ride back toward Laurel,
up and down the hilly terrain of Woodman Road, sunlight flickering like a strobe
through the tree limbs, Dick says, "I want Brookland to be a safe
residential community from Lakeside to the Chickahominy. I want to see a
harmonious community where people can live and recreate without difficulty of
getting where they want to get. We need to deeply examine our educational
system. Our government should do things that people have difficulty doing for
themselves--building roads, education, public safety. Basic needs. If the rock's
too big, one person can't move it."
He stops at the traffic light
at Parham Road, the right blinker light flashing. "I am a
conservative," he says, "Not a libertarian, though I don't think we
should over-regulate. I never have a problem defending my positions because I
get people involved in making the decisions. I want their input. I represent
these people and the public makes good decisions when they're aware of what's
going on."
We pull into his drive back on
Lydell. He opens his door, stands there for a second, blinks his eyes, smiles,
extends his hand as if he's about to close a deal. He looks down at his shoes.
He toes at the gravel. "I've had enough hard knocks in my life to relate to
other people and their problems," he says with the sincerity of a country
boy.
-Charles G.
McGuigan
September, 1997 * NORTHSIDE
MAGAZINE
| 
