Induction Year: 1997

Wallace R. Bunn

  • October 25th, 2021

In 1941, all Wally Bunn wanted was a summer job with his local telephone company.

He wound up instead with the career of a lifetime.

Wallace R. Bunn was born October 26, 1922, in Durham, North Carolina, to parents Wallace Raikes Bunn and Alda Beck Bunn. In high school, the man who would eventually serve as director of the Hall of Fame Bowl in Birmingham, Alabama, from 1980-1983 was an athletic youngster who became an all-state end in football, served as captain of the basketball team, ran track, and was sports editor of his high school paper. He was also student body president; participated in the chorus, Boys State, and dramatics; and was voted most handsome and most popular. The real high school interest that stayed with him through the years, however, was one Miss Margaret P. Seegers, a dark-haired beauty who caught his eye early on and became his bride on December 19, 1942.

But it was before Wallace and Margaret were wed that he took that first job out of high school, a summer position with the Southern Bell Telephone and Telegraph Company as a coin telephone collector in Charlotte, North Carolina. His original plan was to enter Davidson College in the fall of ’41, but World War II loomed ugly on the horizon, and the money Wallace was earning with the phone company, he decided, would help make entry into college somewhat easier financially if he postponed matriculation for a year. The threat of war did become reality, and Wallace was sent by the telephone company to work with defense installations in a neighboring state. Southern Bell later wrote a letter canceling the position’s military deferment so young Bunn could join up with the U. S. Coast Guard, with which he served from 1943-1946.

His country served, Wallace Bunn returned to the Tarheel State to find that Southern Bell had a job – and work credit of five years – ready and waiting for him. Years later he would talk to an Alabama newspaper about his decision not to take advantage of GI Bill tuition assistance and

pursue his college degree then, saying, “If someone wants to go to college, I would advise them to go. But if you don’t have the desire, then don’t go. I have regretted not going to college, but there are times when I can say I’m glad I didn’t … I got my education the hard way, and you appreciate it more when you get it that way.”

Thus began, for the second time, a career in telecommunications for Wallace Bunn – a career that would culminate in the 1980s when he oversaw the creation of one of the largest companies in the United States after the divestiture from American Telephone and Telegraph Company of two operating companies covering nine Southeastern states.

In 1948 Wallace and Margaret were blessed with the birth of their first son, Rodney. Son Russell would join the Bunn family in 1958, and in between the family would live in Shelby, Winston-Salem and Charlotte, North Carolina, and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, as Wallace began his climb up the Southern Bell company ladder, working as a manager, a district commercial

supervisor, and a district manager. Another promotion, this one to division manager, came in 1959, and with it a move to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. But Wally was not all work and no play; during this time, he also became involved with the Boy Scouts as a Scoutmaster and a trustee. His involvement with numerous civic activities would last through the decades and be one of the reasons cited for his induction into the State of Alabama Academy of Honor in 1984.

Over the years the Bunn family would live in fourteen different cities, with their patriarch serving in increasingly more responsible management positions with each change in locale. They would first call Alabama home in 1962 when Wallace was named assistant vice president of Southern Bell. After a move to Nashville, Tennessee, he would return to Birmingham in 1969, when he was elected a director of South Central Bell and appointed vice president of operations for its five states.

Then came a shift of coastal proportions; Wallace was transferred to Seattle, Washington, as president and a director of Pacific Northwest Bell, in 1973. While in Nashville and Seattle, he served as president of the Chamber of Commerce in both cities. He would return, again, to Birmingham in 1978 as president and a director of South Central Bell.

“There’s a story about us coming back to Birmingham so much,” the business executive once told a reporter. “I had an application in for the Birmingham Country Club for a long time and they finally took me in. I paid my initiation fee and everything. Then I was transferred to Nashville, and I didn’t think I would be coming back, so I gave up my membership. Then I came back to Birmingham and had to pay my initiation fee all over again to get back into the country club. And when I was transferred to Seattle, I knew I wouldn’t be coming back to Birmingham, so I gave up my membership again. Then when I came back the last time, I had to pay the initiation fee all over again – for the third time.

“I tell my wife when I die, to keep a non­resident membership in the Birmingham Country Club. I may come back.”

From 1981 until the historic breakup of the Bell System January 1, 1984, Wallace Bunn was one of the top twelve Bell System officers involved in the planning and execution of the complete divestiture of the Bell Operating Companies from AT&T. Until his formal retirement, he served in Atlanta, Georgia, as the first chairman of the board and chief executive officer of BellSouth Corporation, the largest of the then-newly created “Baby Bells” and the fourteenth largest corporation in the nation, with 125,000 employees at the time. In 1985 he relinquished his position at BellSouth but remained on its Board of Directors through April of 1991 – fifty years after a summer of shaking the nickels out of coin telephones.

Over the years the gentleman named Young Man of the Year by the Hattiesburg Junior Chamber of Commerce in 1958 has served on twelve corporate boards, including those for such companies as AmSouth Bank, Holiday Inn, Morrison, Incorporated, and, currently, Altec Corporation. Civic and philanthropic affiliations have included Chambers of Commerce in many cities, the Salvation Army, Junior Achievement, Urban League, United Way, Rotary Club (including a still long-running stint as Poet Laureate of the Birmingham club), St. Vincent’s Hospital, Baptist Medical Center, and numerous economic development and governmental advisory bodies.

In 1988 this leader in his career field was honored by BellSouth with the creation and endowment of the Wallace R. Bunn Chair of Telecommunications at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The chair provides leadership for the university’s Center for Telecommunications and Education Research, and Wallace Bunn – who spends his days now golfing, fishing and painting, the dark-haired beauty still by his side – believes that is vital.

“The hallmark of this business is that the progress has never stopped,” he says of his life’s professional work. “I pray it never will.”

Ehney A. Camp, Jr.

  • October 25th, 2021

Ehney Camp graduated from The University of Alabama in 1928 with a perfect grade point average.

He was just as successful in every other area of his life.

Ehney Addison Camp, Jr., was born May 9, 1907, in Maylene, Alabama, the son of William Wheeler Camp and Pearl Eugenia Hendrick. His father would pass on early in the boy’s life, and his mother would remarry, giving Ehney as a stepfather William Levert Christian. After graduating from Shelby County High School in Columbiana, Alabama, young Camp would head to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where he would begin an incredible career of academic and civic success.

He was a member of the elite academic and social honoraries – Phi Beta Kappa, Omicron Delta Kappa, Beta Gamma Sigma, Alpha Kappa Psi, and the Jason’s. He joined Sigma Nu Fraternity, forming bonds that would last a lifetime. When he received a degree from the state university’s school of business, it was accompanied by that college’s Outstanding Student Award. Ehney was also honored with the university’s coveted Algernon Sidney Sullivan Award in recognition of his outstanding scholarship, leadership, and record of service.

The summer prior to his graduation, Ehney worked with the Birmingham firm of Ward, Sterne, and Company, now Sterne, Agee, and Leach. After his summa cum laude commencement, he obtained permanent employment with the group, and in his own words (from a History of the Investment Division of Liberty National Life Insurance Company, written in April 1973), “had an opportunity to learn something about bonds and stocks.” After a year he received an offer to open in Tuscaloosa a branch office of Bankers Mortgage Bond Company. Almost immediately after his relocation, the stock market crash of October 1929 occurred, and the company decided to assign him the task of managing the tremendous number of foreclosures and fore­closed properties that were resulting because of the flattened economy. Again, from his History: “Liberty National had previously acquired some mortgages from Bankers Mortgage Bond Company, which the latter firm was servicing for Liberty National. When Bankers Mortgage Company finally went into receivership, it became necessary for Liberty National to take over these mortgages and handle them directly. Because Liberty National had no one with the time or experience to handle these details, I was ‘thrown in’ with the deal and began employment with the company on March 21, 1932.”

And thus began the second chapter of incredible success for Ehney Camp, Jr., this one writ on his professional success.

In his career with Liberty National, which would later become a part of Torchmark Corporation, Ehney would rise through the ranks from his initial position as the first investment employee to become company treasurer in 1935, then a member of the board of directors in 1940. Three years later he was named vice president, and in 1960 was made executive vice president. After his death on January 20, 1993, Torchmark representatives called Ehney Camp “one of the key contributors to the growth and success of Liberty National Life. He was the company’s first chief investment officer … Under his direction, the company’s investments grew from some $2 million to $1 billion.” In 1984 he was named to the Torchmark Gallery of Leaders.

But Ehney was not focused only on helping his company become an insurance giant. He had a personal life, as well, and bits of that found their way into History. “I had been given the responsibility of personally preparing the annual statement,” he wrote. “My problem was to meet the deadline in getting the statement prepared prior to my marriage on February 25, 1933 … Also, since I was taking on the additional responsibilities of marriage, I apparently believed it important to render an annual report to the board … This report showed I had saved the company $1,933 whereas the company had paid my salary of only about $1,600 during the nine and one-third months I had been employed. If I had known that all the banks of the country would close their doors on March 4, 1933, only seven days after my marriage, my report probably would have been directed even more strongly toward the need the company had for my services.”

Ehney Camp married Miss Mildred Fletcher Tillman, and the two had three children, daughters Patricia Alice Camp Faulkner and Mary Eugenia Camp Boulware, and son Ehney Addison Camp III. At the time of his death the elder Camp had eight grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren, now numbering fourteen with one on the way. “The happiness of his family was the most important thing in his life,” said daughter Patricia. “The exemplary values he set for himself have been handed down to all of us.”

As his family grew, so did Ehney Camp’s civic and charitable commitments. In 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed him to his Special Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies and Programs. And the bonds with his fraternity and alma mater grew stronger with the passing years – he served as an advisor, then as a director of the Theta House Corporation, and as a member of the Sigma Nu Educational Foundation. In 1981 the chapter awarded him its Distinguished Alumni Award. A former president of the University of Alabama National Alumni Association, he was chosen as the 1973 Outstanding Alumnus by the Jefferson County Chapter of the Association, and in 1985 was honored by the national organization with its Distinguished Alumnus Award. The university presented him with an honorary Doctor of Laws in 1979; there is a scholarship awarded in his honor by the UA business school.

He served on The University of Alabama System Board of Trustees from 1959 to 1979, and in that capacity was instrumental in planning the growth of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He was also a member of the committee organized by the city of Birmingham in the mid-1960s to expand the medical center, and in that capacity provided critical assistance in acquiring the land occupied by the urban university. Camp Hall, an eleven-story residence hall on the UAB campus, is named in his honor.

A former president of First National Bank of Columbiana, Ehney Camp was a former president of the Mortgage Bankers Association of Birmingham. He was treasurer and member of the executive committee of Brown-Service Funeral Homes Company, chairman of the board of trustees of First United Methodist Church of Birmingham, past president of the Birmingham Kiwanis Club, and a life member of Kiwanis International. He was a member of the Newcomen Society of North America, a board member of Acipco, served as United Way campaign chairman, and was affiliated with dozens of other civic and professional organizations. He was inducted into the Alabama Academy of Honor in 1976.

Ehney Addison Camp, Jr., was a man committed to his family and friends, his faith and community, and his alma mater. And he was committed to his profession, as his own words show so clearly.

“Because life insurance contracts span several generations, the company is more than just a business. It is an institution, with tremendous obligations and responsibilities to literally thousands of families. Those who are charged with investing its assets must constantly keep before them the nature and full meaning of this trust.”

Ehney Camp was worthy of that trust.

James I. Harrison, Jr.

  • October 22nd, 2021

Jimmy Harrison got his start in the pharmacy business working as a soda jerk in his daddy’s drugstore.

Some five decades and 153 stores later, James I. Harrison, Jr., chairman, and chief executive officer of Harco Drug Incorporated, made the difficult decision to sell his $258 million company and bring to an end an incredible family tradition.

James Irving Harrison, Jr., a native and lifetime resident of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was born July 11, 1932, to James Irving Harrison, Sr., and Agnes Elizabeth Doherty. The young Harrison finished high school at age sixteen, then attended Baylor Prep School in Chattanooga, Tennessee, for a year before accepting a basketball scholarship to The University of Alabama. After two years at Alabama, he then transferred to Howard College (now Samford University) in Birmingham to study pharmacy – and keep playing basketball. The university’s athletic department still lists Jimmy as holding the school record for most points scored (48) in a basketball game. He was an honors student, inducted into such societies as Rho Chi, Kappa Psi, and ODK, and it was during this time that he and Peggy Thomas were wed, May 30, 1954.

He and his bride returned to Tuscaloosa upon graduation in 1955, at which time his father, who had successfully owned and operated downtown Central Drug since 1941, purchased a second store. The senior Harrison turned over the keys to Druid Drug, located on the edge of the University of Alabama campus, to his son and gave him the freedom to run the operation. The stores used separate bank accounts, with Jimmy’s father managing the finances and paying the bills for both stores. Many years later the son would recount part of that experience to an Alabama business magazine.

“After he had a stroke, he was unable to manage the finances anymore,” Jimmy said, remembering. “I took over the books and discovered he was making me look good by paying some of my bills out of his store. I had thought I was so smart.” In the late 1960s James Harrison, Sr., retired, and James Harrison, Jr., took over the family business, which by then consisted of four stores in the Tuscaloosa area. Chain drugstores were then beginning to make an impact on the country, and, as Jimmy said, “We had to choose whether to get involved in this type of expansion or get eaten by it.”

He made the right choice.

Under Jimmy’s direction, the company began its expansion as a chain in 1969 with its first Harco Super Drug in neighboring Northport. Next came a store in Clanton, still in Alabama, but the first store outside of the immediate Tuscaloosa area. Again, Jimmy’s own words tell the story best: “Back when we first started, there were times when our cash position was very weak. We made the joke that every time we sold a pack of cigarettes, we made a deposit. In the early days, when we had six to ten stores, we opened three stores a year on a very small base of stores. We didn’t know what a risk that was.”

While Jimmy was building his company, which would grow to have stores in Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida, he and Peggy were also building their family. The two would have three sons, James I. Harrison, III, Ronald Patrick Harrison, and Kie Anthony Harrison; and two daughters, Rebecca Elizabethanne Harrison Fuhrman, and Cheryl Lynn Harrison Sisson. The family would grow further in later years, with the devoted father becoming as well a devoted grandfather to eleven grandchildren.

The company officer would also become more and more active in his role as a civic and industry leader. An active member of Holy Spirit Catholic Church, he served at various points as a board member for Hospice of West Alabama, West Alabama Rehabilitation, Druid City Hospital Foundation, and the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind. He is a past director of the Tuscaloosa County United Way and Tuscaloosa County Heart Association, and a current director of the Tuscaloosa County Chamber of Commerce. He is also currently chairman of the President’s Advisory Cabinet at The University of Alabama and a member of the UA Culverhouse College of Commerce and Business Administration Board of Visitors, and a member of the Samford University School of Pharmacy Advisory Board, as well as recipient of the 1987 Samford University Distinguished Service Award.

On the business front, he served as a board member for AmSouth Bank and Alfa Insurance, as past chairman of Affiliated Drug Stores and the Southern Drug Store Association, and on the executive committee of the National Association of Chain Drug Stores. Harco and Jimmy Harrison were named Employer of the Year by the Alabama Rehabilitation Association in 1996, Best Community Drug Store Chain 1995, and Retailer of the Decade (1990 award) by Chain Drug Review, as well as the 1986 Outstanding Small Drug Chain in the United States and America’s No. 1 Regional Drug Store Chain in 1996 by Drug Store News. He was recognized with a National Human Relations Award by the American Jewish Committee in 1997, the Bronze Oak Wreath Award for community contributions and involvement in 1990, and the Governor’s Volunteerism Award in 1989. He received the Alabama Gerontological Society Award for service to the elderly in 1986 and the Alabama Association of Elementary School Administrators Southeastern Award for contributions to education in 1996.

During the 1980s, Jimmy Harrison extended the family business to include a home health care business, Totalcare, with annual sales of about $6 million, which was sold in 1996 to American HomePatient; and Carport Discount Auto Parts, an automotive parts retail chain with forty-seven stores, which became a separate company in 1996. Even as the scope of the business expanded, however, Jimmy never forgot that operative word, “family.”

“We have always tried to run our business like a family, with a lot of interaction at all levels,” said the father whose five adult children all have roles within the operations. “Even though the family is much larger now we still strive to treat our associates with respect and with personal caring, just like you do in a family … keeping good people is very important in our business.”

But that business, one of tonics and powders and personal caring, is no longer theirs. In July of 1997, the announcement was made that Harco and New Orleans-based K&B would both become part of Rite Aid, in an acquisition estimated at worth $325 to $340 million. “I approached Jimmy Harrison,” said Rite Aid Chairman and Chief Executive Martin Grass, whose company is based in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. “He was not aggressively selling the business.”

As his family’s business was nearing its fiftieth anniversary some years ago, Jimmy Harrison commented that he was only “a small part of what has happened. If I can take any credit, it’s in putting together a group of talented people.”

That group of talented people would probably disagree. History will record Jimmy Harrison as a leader in retailing, in pharmaceuticals, and in the ranks of family businesses. And those who knew him well will remember best his devotion to family, both immediate and extended – very extended.

“He’s always referred to the company as an extended family,” said son James I. Harrison, III. “The people who have worked for him would probably describe my dad as more of a father figure than a boss – he’s a mentor, a teacher, a warm human being.”

Ray E. Loper

  • October 22nd, 2021

Friends say Ray Loper likes to refer to himself as an “old lumberjack.”

And while perhaps that phrase aptly depicts the gentleman’s career roots, it belies his tremendous ensuing success in the fields of the lumber industry and in philanthropy.

Ray E. Loper was born May 20, 1904, in Meehan Junction, Mississippi – in Scott County, near the more familiar and bigger city of Kosciusko. His parents were Robert Emmett Loper and Nora Bell McEwen; at age twenty Ray went to work checking log tallies for his father, then a logging superintendent for the W.P. Brown & Son Lumber Company in Zama, Mississippi. An article he wrote for the company newspaper, “Cutting the Cost,” indicates that even as a young payroll clerk Ray understood what it would take to get ahead in business. “The men who are handling lumber could save quite a bit if they would stop and pick up a board instead of running over it or lay it to one side of the tram till the pick-up crew could get around and get it,” he wrote. “It doesn’t matter if it is nothing but a 1 x 4 x 4 feet No. 3 with bark on one side. Save it! We can get something out of it.”

By the time that Zama plant closed, in 1932, young Ray was plant manager. As one of his last responsibilities in that position, he very profitably liquidated the Zama inventory and equipment, prompting company CEO James Graham Brown to ask him to become plant manager at a sawmill the corporation had just purchased in Falliston, Alabama.

After a few years there, in 1935 Ray Loper moved to Fayette, Alabama, headquarters for Mr. Brown’s southern operations, and assumed the responsibility of supervising the operations of all wood products plan, owned by Brown Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. A letter he wrote to a friend many years later captured his mood at the time: “I felt this was a tremendous responsibility at my age,” wrote. “I talked to my father and brother, Leo Loper, and expressed them how much of a responsibility I felt this was and asked them to look after getting the timber and lumber to the plants with as few mistakes as possible and I would do my best to look after plant production … It is my opinion that my brother and my father did a better job looking after their responsibilities than I did.”

His actions and subsequent progress, however, told a much different story. For nineteen years Ray would make Fayette his home base, traveling to various operations during the week and spending his weekends in the office with the ace books. By then some of the operations sites, including ones in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Fayette, bore his name. During this time he would purchase timber, mineral rights, and land until W.P. Brown & Son owned approximately 125,000 acres of timberland. In one of the areas where Ray Loper had made a substantial land purchase, Escambia County, Alabama, oil was discovered in 1951 – and the company profited with some twelve wells.

In 1954 Ray moved the base for southern operations to Bay Minette, Alabama where he had negotiated the purchase of a sawmill, pole peeling plant, and several large tracts of timber. Over the years he guided the Brown organization as it became a very important part of that small town and the area surrounding it, and in 1975 Ray Loper was honored as Man of the Year by the Bay Minette Chamber of Commerce.

In 1969, James Graham Brown passed away. His will left very specific instructions: The James Graham Brown Foundation would be incorporated as successor to all his holdings. And Ray E. Loper would be named president and chief executive officer of that $100 million charitable foundation. In addition to the prestigious Foundation positions, Ray was also named a trustee of that body, and selected to head the Brown operating companies, as well. It is worth noting that this concern at the time included the largest estate in Kentucky, lumber mills, three creosote traveling companies, the Mobile & Gulf Railroad (which served as a common courier), vast real estate holdings, oil wells, three hotels – one which was the famed Brown Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky – and 26,000 shares in Churchill Downs.

Ray Bobo, former vice president, and general manager of the operating companies of the J. Graham Brown Foundation remembers Ray Loper in his then-new position. “Mr. Loper continued to work tirelessly and was a pivotal leader for the company, demonstrating his skills in marketing and the sale of lumber, pressure-treated utility poles, and other southern pine products to many states in the South, East, Midwest and the northern United States, as well as exporting timber products to many foreign countries,” Mr. Bobo said. “He has a mastermind, yet maintained a genuine compassion for his employees.”

He also truly cared for and about his neighbors, as is evidenced by a story Dr. Thomas J. Davidson III of Gulf Shores, Alabama, tells. The physician was a young neighbor of Ray’s in Bay Minette in the 1970s, and the lumber executive found out the man was about to enter medical school with no financial assistance, something that would be difficult for his family. Ray Loper ensured that the Brown Foundation provided Dr. Davidson with support from 1977-1981 while he studied at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, asking in return only that the youth return to his Baldwin County home to set up shop.

“To me that says that Ray Loper, even with all of his business success, has never forgotten that the most important thing in life is how we touch those around us,” Dr. Davidson said. “He set quite an example for an impressionable young man.”

In his role as president and chief executive officer of the foundation, Ray Loper would also establish with others his well-deserved reputation as a wise and caring benefactor, along the way guiding the organization’s growth to some $200 million. Some of the organizations with which he has been personally associated over the years include the United Way, Special Olympics, the Jemison House Foundation and the Tuscaloosa Preservation Society, North Baldwin Hospital, and First United Methodist Church in Tuscaloosa. In 1988 The University of Alabama received $1 million from the James Graham Brown Foundation to establish the Ray E. Loper Endowed Chair of Geology to honor Mr. Loper as a leader in the forest products industry.

Ray Loper is in his 90s now but keeps a home and office in Bay Minette, and a home in Tuscaloosa, where he is well known because of his business and civic activities through the years – particularly his avid support of scholarships at The University of Alabama through his support of the football team. Until 1996 he also had an office in Louisville, Kentucky, which required his attention for bimonthly administrative meetings and duties. He is married to Mary Frances Bird and has three children, son Graham Brown Loper, who is now vice president of the James Graham Brown Foundation, and daughters Cynthia L. Kelly and Connie M. Chambers.

“He is a giant,” said Ray Bobo of his long­time friend and associate, “not only in his working career, but in his care for others and his genuine interest in the well-being of those he lived with, worked with, and enjoyed life with.”

Earl M. McGowin

  • October 20th, 2021

Earl McGowin decided early on in his career as an elected official not to play political games with the voters of Alabama.

“I went out to the people of Butler County with a number of disadvantages,” he recalled late in his life. “I was inexperienced, young, and I had a mustache.” That mustache, wrote Alabama journalist James Saxon Childers, told a story about McGowin that nothing else could tell so well.

When he was thinking of running for office, a friend told him to shave it off. Earl said, “It’s my mustache. It’s a part of me. If I should shave it off, I’d be doing a political trick and I’m damned if I’ll start by tricking them, by pretending something merely to get their votes. They’ll have to take me with my mustache and all my other detriments, or else they’ll have to leave me out.” They took him.

Earl Mason McGowin was born November 18, 1901, to James Greeley McGowin and Essie Stallworth McGowin in Brewton, Alabama. A product of the public schools of Chapman and Greenville, Alabama, he received a degree from The University of Alabama in 1921, graduating Phi Beta Kappa. Out of fourteen candidates from Alabama, he was elected a Rhodes Scholar and attended Pembroke College at Oxford University in England from 1922-1925. Earl’s zest for politics, friends said later, was kindled during that time. Again, words from journalist James Childers: “Earl would go to the House of Commons to listen to the debates … always it was government with McGowin. That was what he was studying at Oxford.” Although Earl returned home to the family business after his experience abroad, his ties with the British institution and the program remained strong. The well-stocked McGowin library at Pembroke College, donated by the family in 1974, is one of the prominent landmarks of the campus, and Earl served for many years as secretary of the Alabama Rhodes Scholarship selection committee.

In the book Earl McGowin of Alabama, the story is told of the young McGowin’s return to Chapman to work at W.T. Smith Lumber Company. He arrived from Europe Friday, September 1, 1925. His father greeted him with warmth, but also with the admonition: “I’ll expect you at work Monday morning. Remember, you’re on your own.” Earl quickly became immersed in and conversant with the administrative acts of sawmilling, learning of lumber and mills, ripsaws, and railroads. He and his brothers, as operators of one of the largest lumber companies in the South, were front-runners in putting into practice the concept of the sustained yield – the idea of treating trees as a crop and adhering strictly to selective cutting to extend the lifespan of a forest indefinitely.

And some of the Oxford-educated mill worker’s most lasting accomplishments were in the area of resource management and forest conservation. He spearheaded the passage of legislation outlawing the practice of burning millions of acres of woodlands for pasture (Alabama’s “stock law “); improving forest fire protection and control programs; and forming the Alabama Forest Products Association. In 1941 he was elected president of the Southern Pine Association – at forty, one of the youngest executive officers in the group’s history. He was also instrumental in Governor Chauncey Sparks’ selection at the end of World War II of Auburn University as the site of Alabama’s School of Forestry.

And although the family sold W.T. Smith Lumber and its some 197,000 acres of timberland for approximately $50 million at the height of the concern’s success in 1966, Earl would remain in the lumber business, becoming increasingly active in the fight for improved lumber standards and quality control with the Southern Pine Inspection Bureau, of which he had been chairman of the board since 1960. He was simultaneously engaged in other efforts to develop uniform American lumber standards as chairman of the American Lumber Standards Committee of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

But Earl McGowin was not known in the public service arena strictly for his work regarding forestry issues. The gentleman began his political career in 1930 as an elected member of the Alabama House of Representatives, and throughout his five-term career as a state legislator, displayed a stubborn integrity – perhaps best exemplified in his refusal to have any dealings with the then-powerful Ku Klux Klan, and in his efforts in the reform of state government while serving as Governor Frank M. Dixon’s House floor leader. In recognition of his contributions, he was voted “Legislator of the Year” in 1939 by the Alabama Press Association, and Dixon also appointed him as a member of the State Board of Education.

While Earl was making his mark on state history as a legislator, he also added some extremely significant chapters to his personal history. He married Miss Ellen Pratt December 29, 1937, and the couple would go on to have two children, daughter Florence McGowin Uhlhorn and son Earl Mason McGowin, Jr. And in 1942, much to the chagrin of those in Butler County who would have had him remain at home in charge of a lumber concern that was then playing a vital role in the war effort, he volunteered his services to the U.S. Navy, turning down an opportunity to serve as speaker of the House.

Earl was accepted by the Navy as a senior lieutenant, and after a few weeks was assigned to open a Navy lumber unit in Jacksonville, Florida. He eventually became chief of the Memphis and New Orleans offices of the Central Procuring Agency and Navy Lumber Coordinating Unit, jointly operated by the Army and Navy, and was also in charge of a unit at Shreveport. The Alabamian’s contributions to his country while on active duty did not go unnoticed; he received a citation for outstanding performance of duty during World War II from Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal.

In 1949, at the age of 48, Earl declined to run for a sixth term in office. That did not, however, end his career as a statesman. In 1950 he was appointed director of the Department of Conservation, and he served as director of the Alabama State Docks from 1959 to 1963. It was during this time that Ellen Pratt McGowin, who had been fighting a battle with cancer, passed away in 1962. Earl remarried July 28, 1964, taking Claudia Pipes Milling, widow of New Orleans attorney Robert E. Milling, as his bride.

As a member of the legislature, Earl McGowin had led extensive efforts to reform and enhance education in Alabama, and his interest in this area continued throughout his life. He served as president of the University of Alabama National Alumni Association from 1950-51, was an emeritus trustee of the Alabama Association of Independent Colleges, and in 1970 at the age of sixty-nine was named the first chairman of the newly formed Alabama Commission on Higher Education. In 1975 his former political foe, Governor George Wallace, inducted him into the State Academy of Honor for these and other accomplishments.

So much could be written to memorialize the life of Earl Mason McGowin, but perhaps his own words best capture the spirit of the man. “In retrospect,” he said in the mid-1980s, “I have enjoyed a full life.”

Earl McGowin died June 2, 1992, at his home in Chapman.

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