James Coleman Lee, Jr.

• October 18th, 2021

Family pride, cutting-edge packaging innovations, and a fierce competitive streak have been the driving forces behind Jimmy Lee’s unparalleled success in his industry, a success made all the sweeter because this lifetime soft drink man made his mark ” with Pepsi – almost literally in Atlanta-based Coca-Cola’s back yard.

Born January 10, 1920, to parents Elizabeth Turley and James Coleman Lee, Sr., in Birmingham, Alabama, James Coleman “Jimmy” Lee, Jr. was also born to the world of sugars and fizz; his father was second-generation president and owner of the Buffalo Rock Company. As Jimmy grew up in this family with ginger ale bottling roots, he greatly anticipated the day he, too, could become a part of the business his grandfather Sidney Lee founded during the Civil War. “The Lee family is tied to the beverage industry totally,” said Jimmy, who as a small child had a drink stand in his neighborhood and would go with his father to the family plant and see the truck drivers off on their delivery routes each day. Later, at age 19 he would load those same route trucks during the summer. “I enjoy it, my entire family enjoys it,” he said. “I guess we were weaned on a soft-drink bottle.”

However, Jimmy’s dreams of joining the family business would have to wait; first came the pursuit of higher education at Birmingham Southern College and Auburn University. Then World War II erupted and his country needed him; Jimmy left college during his junior year and within three years of joining the U.S. Air Force in 1943 had climbed the ranks from private to first lieutenant while in troop carrier command in England. After military service, the young man came back to Alabama eager to become a contributor at Buffalo Rock. Sadly, it was not too long after Jimmy joined the company that it became apparent his presence was much needed; James Lee, Sr., had fallen ill, and many, of his goals were still unfulfilled.

When the senior Lee passed away in May of 1951, his son – shaken by the loss of the role model he loved so dearly – took the reins as president of Buffalo Rock. Only one month later, with company sales at approximately $1 million and with fewer than 100 employees, 31-year-old Jimmy set out to realize one of his late father’s goals: signing with the Pepsi Cola Company. Jimmy successfully bought into the Pepsi franchise, and thus he embarked on the journey that would lead Buffalo Rock to become one of the industry giant Coca-Cola’s fiercest competitors in the South as Jimmy skillfully guided his company into handling other national brand products, along with smaller regional brands.

Another move Jimmy made early in his tenure as president was to buy out the holdings other family members had in the company. “I wanted the flexibility to do well or not to do well,” he recalled years later. “If I took a chance and went broke, I didn’t want my family to suffer.”

That flexibility paid off: Jimmy bought into the Dr. Pepper franchise in 1957 and followed that move with the purchase of the 7UP franchise in 1962. Buffalo Rock received well-deserved accolades as it became the largest family-owned Pepsi-Cola operation in the country – a status it still retains today. In 1966, Jimmy moved to ensure the growth and success of his grandfather’s company by building the then-most up-to-date bottling plant in the United States on a 27-acre site on Oxmoor Road in Birmingham. Further raising the bar on its competition, Buffalo Rock also added two additional production lines to the newly opened facility and handled more flavors than most bottlers, including Pepsi Cola, Dr. Pepper, Mountain Dew, Yoo-Hoo, Hershey’s, Grapico, 7UP, Sunkist, Ocean Spray, and of course Buffalo Rock. The company now has seven production lines and has added Tropicana to its family of products.

It was also in the 1960s that Jimmy made his mark on the soft drink industry with the first of his bold packaging innovations. In 1967 Buffalo Rock became the first company to market a 10-ounce non-returnable bottle – an innovation made even more remarkable because of its easy-open spin-top close feature. After that the number of employees at Buffalo Rock continued to climb steadily, totaling more than 1,000 over the next two decades thanks to acquisitions ranging from Dothan, Alabama, to Pensacola, Florida, and Columbus, Georgia. The 1980s were truly a time of success as Jimmy made another bold packaging move and introduced a product that would revolutionize the beverage industry: in 1984, consumers in the Birmingham market became the first to buy their soft drinks in three-liter bottles.

Strategic product innovations continued with a “best used by” date stamped on all cans in 1993 and the invention of Pourfection two-liter bottles in 1996. Buffalo Rock’s competition scrambled frantically as consumers embraced the easy-to-pour design, which Jimmy said he believed allowed for easier pouring for consumers of all ages. Once again, Jimmy left the competition to jump on his bandwagon as Buffalo Rock’s sales increased to $380 million.

In addition to setting industry trends, Jimmy, married since 1986 to the former Rose Marie Rezzonico and father to James C. Lee III, Peyton Leigh, and Donaldson Lee, focused on maintaining employee relations. “We have an open-door policy,” Jimmy said. “Employees can walk into my office, and we treat our employees as individuals, not numbers.” In 1976 he further backed up that philosophy by beginning a 401(k)/profit-sharing plan approximating $40 million. Strong employee relationships are even more important to Jimmy today as the company, with a payroll of $70 million, employs more than 2,400 employees and serves 5 million people with 14 distribution centers in Alabama, Florida, and Georgia.

Although he did not complete his own college degree, Jimmy’s firm belief in the value of higher education and in giving back to the community led him over the years to serve as president of the Board of Trustees of Birmingham Southern College and head for four years of the President’s Council of the Uni­versity of Alabama at Birmingham. He is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of Leadership Birmingham and the Southern Research Institute, and a member of the University of Alabama President’s Cabinet, and is also a director of the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama.

Through the years Jimmy’s hard work and success as a business leader and his dedication to his community have been recognized through numerous awards, including the first Birmingham Service Award in 1983 and his induction into the prestigious Alabama Academy of Honor in 1987. In 1972 he was the recipient of the Distinguished Service Award by the Alabama Soft Drink Association, and in 1978 received the Beverage Man of the Year Award. One of his crowning industry glories came in 1987 when he was inducted into the Beverage Industry Hall of Fame.

But there is another industry glory even more important to Jimmy Lee, now chairman of a Buffalo Rock that ended 1997 with $400 million in sales. Thanks to him, his children, and their children uphold a family tradition by going to work each day for a company that began making its mark on the soft drink indus­try in the 1800s – and will continue to do so long into the next century.

John T. Oliver

• October 18th, 2021

John T. Oliver, Jr. knows intimately the road less traveled.

In the early 1980s the son of John Thomason Oliver, M.D. and Sara Crumpton Oliver chose to lead his beloved First National Bank of Jasper off the beaten financial path as the key player in the formation of a bank holding company, and in doing so carved for himself a place in the wall of financial greats in Alabama history.

John Thomason Oliver, Jr. was born April 19, 1929, in Birmingham, Alabama. Growing up in Tuscaloosa, he attended Tuscaloosa High School and the Marion Institute, then college at The University of Alabama, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1949. Three years later he followed that with a UA law degree – and marriage November 4, 1952, to Barbara Bankhead of Jasper. Together the couple would raise five children: sons John Thomason Oliver III and William Bankhead Oliver, and daughters Melissa Oliver, Beth Oliver Lehner, and Rebecca Oliver Haines.

After a term with the U.S. Army as a first lieutenant in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps from June 1952 to December 1954, John began the next year as vice president of the First National Bank of Jasper. Almost four and a half decades later he still keeps the statement of condition reflecting the bank’s total assets as of that long-ago January 1, 1955: $9,793,853. That he has done so is reflective of the attention he has paid to detail and organization throughout his successful career. Another reflection is the statement of the bank’s total assets as of January 1, 1998: $443,927,380.

One of the early details John paid attention to was personally knowing each of his cus­tomers by name. That commitment and dedication to the bank, a part of the North Alabama mining community of Jasper since 1905, soon earned him the job of president, a position he assumed in December 1958. As president, John firmly believed it was his responsibility to provide the most sophisticated financial services available to his customers. His determination to provide top-notch service inten­sified as he was elected chief executive officer of the bank in January 1967.

While John Oliver was leading his community bank to financial success during the 1970s, he also found time to begin serving his state as a member of the Board of Trustees of The University of Alabama. John joined the Board in 1971 and is still on it today. Among his accomplishments during his more than 25 years of service to education have been his leadership of the search for a president for the Tuscaloosa campus in 1995, his three terms of service as president pro tern of the Board, and his tenure as interim chancellor of the entire University of Alabama system, 1996-1997. In that unpaid position, he oversaw the $1.3 billion, three-campus system and coor­dinated its academic, legal, and financial operations. His civic duties were not performed solely in the education arena, however; over the years he has been a leader in such organizations as the Jasper Area Chamber of Commerce, St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Jasper, Central Alabama United Way, and the Warrior-Tombigbee Development Association, and was one of the originators of the concept of the Walker Area Community Foun­dation. He now serves as president and director of that foundation, which at his suggestion was begun with an initial endowment of $6 mil­lion from the proceeds of the sale of Walker Regional Medical Center to Baptist Health System in 1995.

But it was in the early 1980s that John Oliver made the tough – and at the time fairly radical – decisions that would later define him as so much more than a solid, successful community banker and leader. The financial industry at the time was turbulent with consolidation and deregulation, and John found himself worried about the future of his bank; Walker County and the city of Jasper were slowing down economically. Determined to increase his institution’s value rather than to allow it to slide in performance and growth, instead of following the banking pack John took that road less traveled and in 1983 formed a holding company: First National Jasper Corp., anchored by the First National Bank of Jasper.

“We were making 1.7 or 1.8 on assets, our capital position was very strong, and we had over half the market,” John Oliver told American Banker in the late ’80s. “But we were worried about whether we would be big enough to offer the new products and generate the non-interest income necessary in the future … It was either do something or sell. We came up with, I think, the best of both worlds.”

The initial plan was to use available funds from the Jasper bank for loans through newly founded subsidiary banks in high-growth markets in Alabama. Along with helping the new subsidiaries get off the ground, that would bring a higher return on First National’s available funds. In June 1985 First National Jasper Corp. changed its name to First Commercial Bancshares, Inc., and in September 1985 a first took place in Alabama banking: the opening by a bank holding company of a de novo bank, First Commercial Bank in Birmingham. Two more de novo banks were opened in the late ’80s, The Bank of Tuscaloosa in 1988 and Sterling Bank in Montgomery in 1989. But even as the company continued to grow, John Oliver remained focused on preserving the community aspect of banking that had served him – and his customers – so well over the years. “Ours is a relationship strategy for banking, not a pricing or a marketing strategy,” he said.

That strategy played out nicely as the holding company continued to grow, adding First Commercial Bank in Huntsville, and perform well – during this period, First Commercial Banc­shares was recognized as one of” America’s Best Banks” by Financial World. Such acco­lades and the bottom line attracted the attention of potential partner Synovus Financial Corp., and in April 1992, John Oliver seized the opportunity to merge his $865 million company with Synovus, increasing that concern’s assets to $5 billion when the merger was completed in December. As part of the transition, First Commercial Bancshare retained the names of its banks, and John Oliver was named chair­man and chief executive officer of Synovus Financial Corp. of Alabama. His financial expertise and leadership during the merger earned him the prestigious position of vice-chairman of the executive committee of Synovus two years later, at which time he also became chairman of First National Bank of Jasper.

John Oliver could boast of many things he has accomplished. But boast he does not. Instead, he will turn the conversation to his wife and their fondness for another unbeaten path, one that led them physically out of the country to southern Ireland, where they built a home overlooking the Irish Sea. “The Irish are gentle, quiet people,” John said. “They love to talk, and they love Americans. I tell them that just as in Ireland, the best part of our country is the South.”

John Oliver, too, is a gentleman, in every sense of the word. And history will remember kindly this community banker who chose the road less traveled – and in doing so made all the difference.

Arthur R. Outlaw

• October 18th, 2021

Arthur Outlaw is a man whose roots run deep in lower Alabama: the first elected mayor of Mobile in the latter half of the 20th century, the impact he made on that city’s political and business communities have forever made his name synonymous with success in Alabama’s port city.

Born September 8, 1926, to parents Mayme Lily Ricks and George Cabell Outlaw, Sr., Arthur Robert Outlaw lived on a farm outside Mobile until his family’s move into the city when he was 14. Arthur’s father Cabell was one of the found­ing fathers of Morrison’s Cafeteria in 1920 and an exemplary role model for his son to follow. In his early years, Arthur received a Catholic education through his second year of high school at the McGill Institute before transferring to Riverside Military Academy in Georgia. The man who would later give hope to Mobilians and rebuild their shaken trust in local government enlisted in the U.S. Air Force Cadet Program after his 1945 graduation and served his country for two years during World War II.

Arthur left the military in 1947 to attend The University of Alabama, where he studied for one year before completing a business degree at Spring Hill College in Mobile. His friends are quick to point out that the degree should have been in golf, for although it was not Arthur’s formal course of study, he excelled in it to such a degree that his alma mater’s golf team had an undefeated season his senior year. And while he is proud of that college accomplishment, Arthur himself is quick to point out that it was not his greatest one while at “The Hill”: that, he says, was marrying Dorothy (Dot) Smith on November 23, 1949. The couple would go on to have three children – son A. Robert Outlaw, Jr. and daughters Karen Outlaw and Mary Gay Outlaw.

While still a college student, the already ambitious Arthur took a position with the Mobile accounting firm of Holiman, Childree, and Ramsay, which held the Morrison’s account. He quickly advanced, and after graduation was employed full-time. It wasn’t long before this aggressive young businessman joined the Morrison organization itself, as a full-time assistant auditor in 1951. His initial work centered on modernizing the company’s accounting system, and later he enlisted IBM to help structure payrolls and handle food inventory and billing for warehouses. This technologically advanced arrangement occurred long before the computer age, marking Arthur as an executive with a great deal of foresight.

As he made his way up Morrison’s career ladder, Arthur found himself increasingly interested in politics. In 1964, while serving as assistant secretary and treasurer for Morrison’s, Arthur was also an adviser to Republican Jim Martin in Martin’s bid to unseat long-time U.S. Senate Democrat Lister Hill. Although Arthur’s man lost the race by a narrow margin, the race made a lasting and dramatic impact on the development of an active Republican Party in Alabama.

That same year, Arthur endured another loss – one of a more personal and tragic nature – when his beloved father passed away. Despite all this, Arthur refused to accept defeat, coming back in 1964 to help prominent Republican Jack Edwards in his successful bid that year for Congress. Then in 1965, taking a leave of absence from Morrison’s to run his own campaign, Arthur defeated eight opponents and took office as public safety commissioner of Mobile. For four years Arthur worked diligently with his fellow commissioners to increase the city’s revenues by some 60 percent, revising the gas tax and redistributing funds based on a per-capita system. But after just one term, at the urging of his brother Arthur returned to Morrison’s in 1969. And as if he had never left, within four years Arthur was named secretary and treasurer of the company. The next decade marked a period of exceptional growth for Morrison’s, which grew to encompass more than 100 cafeterias; a food service division with contracts with health care industries and hospitals, schools, and even movie sets; Admiral Benbow Inns; Morrison Imperial House Restaurants; and food service equip­ment companies. With its warehouses, coffee plant, Morrison Assurance Company, and plants for the manufacture of stainless steel, furniture, and china, Morrison’s became the most vertically integrated company in its industry.

In a display of remarkable business acumen, in 1982 Arthur supported Morrison’s acquisition of fledgling restaurant chain Ruby Tuesday, which at that time consisted of 12 units. Arthur’s vision of expanding the business his father founded quickly became a reality, and today there are more than 350 Ruby Tuesday locations. In 1984, Arthur was appointed vice-chairman of the board of Morrison’s, and while this was a major step in his business career, the Mobilian’s strong devotion to his city would again lead him into local politics. He easily found success when he ran for the post of city finance commissioner, serving out the term of the incumbent who had been ousted from office – and jailed – for fraud and extortion. Arthur was quoted at the time as saying, “None of us are very proud of the events that have taken place in the last few months, and we are certainly concerned about the image it has projected on our fine city I can­not sit on the sidelines.”

During his seven-month term, Arthur worked with the state legislature to change Mobile’s form of government to a mayor/council system instead of one based on three commissioners. Following the city residents’ vote to make this change, Arthur ran for mayor in 1985 and won, becoming the first elected mayor of Mobile since 1911. A local who understood the needs of his community and envisioned reviving the declining city, Arthur’s eight-year strategic plan for Mobile included the downtown redevelopment of a waterfront convention center, constructing a naval home port, solving the stormwater drainage problem, and developing a “Keep Mobile Beautiful” campaign. After breathing life back into his hometown during his one term as mayor, Arthur returned in 1989 to the family business, now Morrison Restaurant, Inc., as vice-chairman of the board, which is where he remains today. Seven years after his departure from politics, his company was spun off into three independent entities: Morrison Fresh Cooking, Inc.; Morrison Health Care, Inc.; and Ruby Tuesday, Inc. Arthur also currently serves as vice-chairman of the Ruby Tuesday Board of Directors.

Arthur’s successes also continued on the personal front. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from the University of Mobile in May 1994 and was appointed to the Board of Directors of the Alabama Institute for the Deaf and Blind in 1995, two additions to a list including well more than 15 civic and service appointments and accomplishments.

His friends say, Arthur Outlaw, with all of his personal and professional successes, hasn’t changed much over the years. Throughout his triumphs as both businessman and politician, he has remained loyal to his principles and fought for his beliefs. “I believe I’ve spent the majority of my career working on problems I see as solvable,” Arthur once said. “If a problem is solvable, a little action will usually uncover the necessary solution.”

Arthur Outlaw’s life has been one of just such action, and he will be remembered for the problems he solved.

Elton B. Stephens

• October 11th, 2021

Elton Stephens believes anyone can successfully sell anything.

Founder and chairman of the board of EBSCO Industries, Inc., Elton Bryson Stephens was born August 4, 1911, to parents Clara Stuckey and James Nelson Stephens in Clio, Alabama. A small-town boy, 11 Elton quickly learned the value of money. “When I was four, I had pneumonia, and I remember my father often standing over my crib and entertaining me,” Elton once recalled fondly. “He once tried to swap me a nickel for a dime saying it was bigger and had more value. He kept asking me why didn’t I want it, but I didn’t fall for that one.”

What Elton did fall for was a love of busi­ness. As a youngster, he would rise early to milk the family’s cows, then bottle and sell the milk before school. He also sold an odd mix of newspapers, suits, sandwiches, and Cloverine Salve, thereby setting a pattern he would follow with EBSCO in the years to come; it would not seem odd to him that a company known for its printing and distribution capacities could also excel in the manufacture of fishing line.

In 1928, after graduating from Barbour County High School, Elton set off for Birmingham-Southern College with just $125. To cover the rest of his costs, the enterprising young man worked full-time as a salesman in a local dry goods store. Summers were spent working for Butterick, selling subscriptions to that once-famous dress pattern maker’s magazine, and in 1930 Elton and five friends hitchhiked north to Michigan to sell subscriptions door-to-door all day. “That first year, I saved $500 and that’s like several thousand today,” he remembers. “That meant I didn’t have to work as much during the school year, so I could study more.” Study and concentrate on his college romance with Alys Varian Robinson, whom he dated for seven years before the two married. That marriage, which lasted until Alys Stephens’ death in 1996, took place in 1935, after Elton had graduated from Birmingham-Southern and before he completed his last year of law school at The University of Alabama. The couple had four children: James T. Stephens, Jane Stephens Comer, Elton B. Stephens, Jr., and Dell Stephens Brooke.

Elton had continued selling subscriptions as he worked to complete his education, even hiring other students to work for him, including fellow Barbour County boy George Wallace, who would later become governor of Alabama. After graduating from law school, Elton found that he could earn only $75 a month as a lawyer while selling magazines would bring in some $100 a week. He chose the magazine route and kept selling and hiring others to sell. In 1937 he obtained a franchise with Keystone Readers Service, a middleman between subscribers and publishers of such magazines as the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies Home Journal. Basing his operation in Birmingham, Alabama, Elton soon had salesmen hawking titles all over the Southeast, including – as World War II began – at nearby Fort McClellan. That went so well he branched out to other military bases and was able to save to start his own business.

EBSCO quickly expanded; Elton saw the need for magazine racks at Fort McClellan and other places and formed Vulcan Industries to make them. Soon after, along came an EBSCO publishing and bindery company to help keep the racks full of reading matter, and later a printing plant. Then there was the need for military recreational equipment and furnishings for the officers’ clubs, so EBSCO eventually found itself handling carpeting and drapery, with a plant in Georgia, and managing military entertainment, with the purchase of National Billiard, America’s old­est pool table company.

And so it went through the years, one thing leading to another. EBSCO Industries is now so diverse it deals with everything from investments to library periodicals, plastic fishing lures to steel joists, indoor advertising to realty, with Elton’s love of selling seemingly forever moving the company forward into new markets. With headquarters still in Birmingham, EBSCO sells its products throughout the United States and has operations in more than 30 states and almost 20 foreign countries, including Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Korea, South Africa, Taiwan, France, Greece, Canada, and Turkey.

As EBSCO grew into a worldwide empire, Elton was very clear about his goals. As listed in Who’s Who, they encompass both the capitalistic and altruistic aspects of his personality:

“Invest/reinvest earnings to create employment/profits for growth/expansion. Support worthwhile projects including but not limited to education, health, religion, needy, cultural arts, boys/girls clubs, law enforcement, conservation, nature, water resources. Share profits and protect the welfare and health of employees with a major catastrophic medical program. These philosophies built a company I started in 1943 with capital of $5,000 and sales under $1,000,000, and fewer than 20 employees to annual sales of more than $1 billion on June 30, 1997; over 4,000 employees and 100 profit centers operating worldwide with adequate capital to continue growth. Built with retained earnings and borrowed money.”

It was Elton’s frustration with borrowing money early in his business career that led him in 1981, at the age of 70, to begin a sec­ond career – as a financier. Tired of lenders who would refuse to lend against accounts receivable or not discuss long-term debt, he went looking for cheap banks in small towns, and purchased Citizens Bank in Leeds, Alabama, with $21 million in assets, for $2 million in borrowed funds and $600,000 of his own money. His aggressive selling techniques translated well in the banking arena, and a decade later the bank’s assets had more than dou­bled, to $46 million, leading Elton to form the company known as Alabama Bancorp. In 1986 he bought Fort Deposit Bank in Fort Deposit, Alabama, for $3.6 million; then, with $4.2 million – about two-thirds of which was from him and his family- he started Highland Bank in Birmingham in 1988. Another decade – and another career success later – Elton announced that he would sell Alabama Bancorp and all its associated holdings, worth some $280 million, to Bancorp South.

In addition to a lifetime of business and financial endeavors, Elton has committed his life to enrich the world around him. He has been involved with the Southern Research Institute, Waste Water Facilities Development Committee, Y.M.C.A., American Council of the Arts, United Arts Fund, Birmingham Area Chamber of Commerce, United Way, Methodist Hospitals, American Cancer Society, Alabama Development Office, and most especially the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. The building where the orchestra performs – the Alys Robinson Stephens Performing Arts Center – is named in honor of Elton’s beloved bride.

Elton has also never forgotten the importance of education, and in the mid-1990s funded the nation’s largest endowment for a chair of library sciences, at The University of Alabama. He has served as chairman of the Board of Trustees for Birmingham-Southern College and had numerous scholarships established in his name at both his alma maters; his honors and accolades abound.

After more than 80 years of business and financial endeavors, Elton says working is still his favorite hobby. “You can take any business, any product, anything and sell it,” he says. “You have to stay with it, learn from mistakes, know what you’re doing and you’ll succeed.”

Elton Stephens succeeded.

Adolph I. Weil, Jr.

• October 11th, 2021

In a world where cotton was king, no one was ever more worthy of the title of crown prince than Adolph “Bucks” Weil.

Born February 8, 1915, to parents Rossie Schoenhof and Adolph I. Weil, Sr., in Montgomery, Alabama, Adolph I. Weil, Jr. would rise through the ranks of his family’s business to become a legend in the rough-and-tumble cotton industry, and along the way become firmly ensconced in the ranks of the most noted philanthropists of his hometown and state.

Christened with the nickname of Bucks by a camp counselor impressed with the child’s “million-dollar smile,” young Adolph began compiling a prestigious education dossier at the tender age of five upon his enrollment in Miss Gussie Woodruff’s classes. From there he went on to Barnes, another Montgomery private school, and to Culver Military Academy. At 16 Bucks graduated from the academy and was admitted to Dartmouth, one of the youngest in his class. He spent summers in Weil Brothers-Cotton, Inc. offices in New York and Montgomery, and traveling abroad, refining an appreciation for art that would later be reflected in an impressive collection in the firm’s Montgomery offices. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1935, with Harvard Law School next on the agenda.

But his heart was not in the law; family and friends said he played bridge more than he attended classes, and clearly had little interest in becoming an attorney. However, upon his graduation from Harvard in 1938 Bucks did make an application and was admitted to the Alabama Bar Association that same year. Later his tax law training would help him in business.

Bar association membership obtained, the young man went to work for his father and uncle at Weil Brothers-Cotton, a company founded by Bucks’ grandfather in 1878 in Opelika, Alabama. Bucks started at the bottom of the company as a “squidge,” sweeping floors and learning the art of grading cotton. Adolph, Sr. told Bucks that the younger man could not instruct others to do things unless he himself had done them and that others would not follow him unless he had done them. Earning $65 a month, the standard squidge wage at the time, Bucks began to diligently work his way to the top of the company.

In 1939, Bucks transferred from the Mont­gomery office to Dallas to broaden his knowledge about the cotton industry. Like everyone else, he had to trade cotton to get paid. In An American Harvest: The Story of Weil Brothers-Cotton, Bucks recalled a hands-on learning experience with his Uncle Leonel, with whom he traded cotton. “He tested me with a lot of questions, and I thought they required very involved answers when they were really very simple,” Bucks said. “He always reduces a problem to simplicity before he does anything.” The younger man would always remember that advice, even as he later became president and chairman of the board.

In 1941, Bucks was drafted into the U.S. Army Medical Service Corps. At the end of World War Il, in 1945 he returned from Europe to Weil Brothers and Butler, a branch of Weil Brothers-Cotton, Inc., in New York. It was a dedication to and preoccupation with the cotton industry that caused Bucks to almost miss the opportunity of a lifetime. While conducting business in New York with Daniel F. Rice and Co., Bucks fell in love with a picture of a lovely young lady on Ralph Kaufman’s desk. The young lady turned out to be Kaufman’s daughter, Jean. On their second date, Bucks’ unspoken worries about a tremendous crash in the cotton market dismayed the young lady, who found her beau boring and later told him she never wanted to see him again. These contretemps soon passed, however, and the couple married on February 4, 1946. They had three children: Adolph I. Weil, III, Laurie Jean Weil, and Jan Katharine Weil.

Before his marriage to Jean, Bucks faced one of the biggest challenges in his career. The company’s records had fallen into disarray, and Bucks’ job was to put them back in order. In addition to endless days of analyzing records, Bucks still found time to take on tasks no one else seemed to have time for. His father’s words of leading by example were truly exemplified during this time as the younger man reorganized the books and successfully continued to conduct business. After many taxing months, Bucks had become a true cotton man and a leader by example.

Continuing the family tradition, in 1950 Bucks and his brother Bobby became directors and officers of the company. They served as their father’s and uncle’s assistants and deputies and became increasingly involved in top-level decisions. While working with Weil Brothers, Bucks became heavily involved with industry organizations, serving as president of the American Cotton Shippers Association and Atlantic Cotton Association, and as a director of the New York Cotton Exchange and National Cotton Council. Fol­lowing their father’s death in 1968, Bucks became chairman and his brother president of Weil Brothers-Cotton, Inc. With the cotton industry valued at $4.5 billion, Bucks and Bobby formed a holding company in 1980, Weil Enterprises and Investments, Ltd. The brothers assumed corresponding roles as Bucks became president and Bobby served as chairman of the holding company. In addition to expanding their grandfather’s business around the world, Bucks and Bobby were partners in Weil Hermanos, Inc., the Weil Selling Agency, and controlled the Swiss-based Unicosa. Working together, Bucks and Bobby built an empire in the cotton industry.

In 1995, tragedy struck the Weil family. Bucks, age 80, died December 12, 1995, because of a car accident in Montgomery. He left behind not only his wife, children, and five grandchildren, but also a legacy of philanthropy Throughout his career, Bucks donated generously – and often discreetly – to local endeavors. Bucks’ father had instilled in the younger man the belief of giving back to the community and set an example for his sons to follow with his anonymous donations.

Bucks more than fulfilled his responsibility to the community by serving as a board mem­ber of the Southern Research Institute, chairman of the Alabama Ethics Commission, and direc­tor of several organizations, including Goodwill Industries of Central Alabama, Tukabatchee Area Council Boy Scouts of America, Boy’s Club of Montgomery, American Cancer Society, United Way, and the Montgomery Food Bank, in addition to several other civic organizations. A project Bucks is most revered for was his personal crusade to save the Meals-on-Wheels program in the Montgomery area.

This Southern native’s commitment to and leadership in his hometown of Montgomery was recognized through several awards includ­ing the Alexis de Tocqueville Society Award; being named United Way’s Man of the Year, the Montgomery Area Council on Aging’s Senior of Achievement, and the Rotary Club’s Paul Harris Fellow; and the Montgomery Advertiser Citizen of the Year Award, which he shared with his brother.

Bucks was once honored by his daughter Laurie in a ceremony of the Jewish Federa­tion of Montgomery. She said her father’s life always reflected Jewish values – the order provided by God’s laws, emphasis on educa­tion and family, and dedication to service to others.

Bucks Weil lived his values to the fullest and will be remembered always because of that.