Induction Year: 2002

Charles C. Anderson

  • October 5th, 2021

In its first year of operation in 1917, Anderson News Company had sales of about $2,000. Today the four companies that grew from that small beginning have combined sales of over $3 billion and employ more than 11,000 associates, 1,728 in Alabama.

Directing much of that growth has been Charles Caine Anderson, the son of the founder. Charles C. Anderson now is chairman of the Executive Committee of Books-A-Million, Inc., Anderson News Corporation, American Promotional Events, Inc., and Treat Entertainment.

Charles C. Anderson was born November 20, 1934, in Florence, Alabama, to Ruth Keenum and Clyde W. Anderson. He attended Coffee High School and graduated from the University of North Alabama with a Bachelor of Science degree in marketing. After graduating in 1956 from UNA, he entered the family business, Anderson News Company, full time. He had worked part-time in the business since high school.

In 1956 the company operated three trucks and wholesaled magazines and paperback books in the North Alabama area.

From this company four separate companies have emerged: Anderson News Corporation, Treat Entertainment, Inc., American Promotional Events, Inc., and Books-A-Million, Inc. Anderson remains active in the companies and is chairman of the Executive Committee and on the Board of Directors of each company.

In the early years, the company’s two newsstands in Florence handled tobacco, soft drinks, etc., and sold fireworks during the Christmas season. The fireworks portion of the business was later expanded to include wholesale to other dealers in the area and continued until the state banned fireworks in 1946.

In 1957, Alabama again legalized the sale of fireworks and the family re-entered the business. Company growth since that time has been phenomenal.

Charles was joined in business in 1963 by his brother, Joel, ten years his junior. The brothers continue to work together today. In 1976, Charles’ oldest son, Charles Jr., entered the business and is currently president and CEO of Anderson News Corporation, with Joel serving as chairman.

Anderson News Company’s three trucks in 1956 have grown to a fleet of 3027 vehicles today. Anderson News is the largest magazine distributor in the U.S., the second-largest music distributor, and one of the largest book distributors. The company currently services over 40,000 retailers each week (including all major chains) with full in-store service.

Today American Promotional Events is headed by Charles’ son, Terrence, its president and CEO, and is the largest fireworks importer and distributor in the U.S., servicing 42 states. It operates under the trade name TNT Fireworks.

Anderson was the first business leader in the U.S. to receive a personal invitation to trade with China in 1972 immediately after President Nixon’s visit and was one of the first American businessmen to visit China since 1948. He traveled to Mainland China on April 15, 1972. China is considered to be the birthplace of gunpowder, a major ingredient in fireworks.

In 1962, the family began a new business, importing and publishing numismatic and philatelic items, which usually require a magnifier to view in detail. In that same year, Whitman Publishing placed with Anderson the largest order for magnifiers ever placed in the United States. As the coin and stamp business grew the company began to publish price guides to complete its line of folders, albums, and magnifiers. The company, Treat Entertainment, is lead by Charles’ son Harold, the chairman and CEO. Treat Entertainment’s subsidiary, H. E. Harris, is the largest numismatic and philatelic distributor in the U.S. Last year H. E. Harris entered a license agreement partnership with the U.S. Mint to produce an official U.S. Mint line of products to be sold at retail to the mass market. Treat Entertainment also publishes children’s books under the name Dalmatian Press, located in Nashville, Tennessee. The company recently acquired C. R. Gibson Company, which publishes inspirational albums and journals. The company recently completed a 186,000-square foot C.R. Gibson distribution center in Florence.

In 1963, the company purchased the House of Coins, which published the Black Book Coin and other guidebooks. The name was changed to House of Collectibles and Anderson continued to publish the Black Book Coin and other guidebooks until they sold House of Coins to Random House Publishing several years ago.

In 1962, Anderson together with Chan Fu Yu formed A. Yu Far East Co. in Hong Kong. The company exports consumer products from the Far East, particularly China. It has offices in Hong Kong, Shenzhen, Canton, and Changsha with packaging facilities and warehouses in Shenzhen and Changsha. Today, Anco Far East is one of the largest exporters of fireworks from China.

In 1964, the family purchased a retail bookstore in Huntsville and later opened a second in the Huntsville Mall known as Bookland. Bookland continued its growth and entered the superstore business under its Books-A-Million banner. Books-A-Million became a public company on November 2, 1992. Books-A-Million stock is traded in the Nasdaq National Market under the symbol BAMM. Books-A-Million is one of the nation’s leading book retailers and sells on the Internet at www.booksamillion.com. The company presently operates 204 stores in 18 states and the District of Columbia. The company’s wholesale operations include American Wholesale Book Company and BookSmart, both based in Florence; and NetCentral, Inc., an Internet development and service company located in Nashville, Tennessee. The company today is under the leadership of Charles’ son, Clyde, its chairman and CEO.

In 1980, the family purchased Hibbett Sporting Goods, an Alabama sporting goods chain of fourteen stores. Hibbett began a rapid growth that culminated in the company going public on October 16, 1996, and the family sold most of its interest.

Anderson is a former director of First National Bank of Florence and First United Bancorp, the University of Alabama International Business Advisory Board, and the U.S. Space and Rocket Center Board. He is a member of The University of Alabama President’s Cabinet and the University of North Alabama President’s Cabinet. He is a former member of the Board of Visitors, International Advisory Board, The University of Alabama; former member of the State Democratic Executive Committee; a charter member of the Board for the Shoals Economic Development Authority; former president, National Pyrotechnics Distributors Association; former president, Alabama Numismatic Association; and a former member of the Board of Directors, Heritage Trust Fund.

Anderson has given freely of his time and financial resources to many charitable causes and civic projects. For more than twenty years he has taken an active interest in the Salvation Army and is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Salvation Army of the Shoals and Selma, Alabama. Mr. Anderson and his family have had a long-standing interest in literacy and recently made a substantial contribution to the Florence-Lauderdale Public Library. He has made many contributions to universities, schools, and many other charitable causes through the Charles and Hilda Anderson Foundation and the Anderson Foundation. He also recently founded The Hobo Foundation for the benefit of animal shelters in North Alabama.

Mr. Anderson has been married for 50 years to the former Hilda Claire Barbour, his high school sweetheart.  Their home in Florence is a testament to their love of nature and wildlife, which includes walking trails, fishponds, and native plants. They attend Westminster Presbyterian Church. They have four sons: Charles C., Jr., Terrence C., Clyde B., and Harold M., and 11 grandchildren.

G. Mack Dove

  • October 5th, 2021

Mack Dove, by his own admission, as a young boy loved to say, “vvvrrooommmmm!”

That same noise might well be used to describe the sound of the family business, AAA Cooper Transportation, of Dothan, Alabama.

Today AAA Cooper Transportation is one of the largest transportation companies in the nation, with 74 terminals that serve more than 15,000 cities and communities in 15 states. AAA Cooper owns and operates a fleet of more than 1,900 tractors and 4,300 trailers and employs nearly 5,000 people. Over the past 40 years, the firm’s revenues have increased at an 18 percent compounded growth rate.

Mack Dove was born in 1936 in Dothan, the second son of John Hal “Red” Dove and Sybil Bentley Dove. Red Dove grew up in Mississippi hauling timber with mule teams and oxen before moving to Model T Ford trucks in the 1920s. Red Dove moved to California for a short while, then returned to the South and settled in Dothan, where he began hauling whatever needed to be hauled.

Mack Dove attended Dothan’s public schools and began his working life bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly on weekends. His father’s business gradually expanded as Dove Truck Lines until 194 2 when it was sold, and Red Dove bought another truck line and named it J.H. Dove Transportation Company. Two years later the firm merged with D and D Transportation Company in Atlanta, extending its reach down to the Florida Panhandle. That company was sold in 1951 and in 1954 he bought a small trucking company and changed its name to AAA Motor Lines.

Meanwhile, Mack and his older brother Earl were earning degrees in transportation from the University of Tennessee and both became active in the family business. Mack was active in the Reserve Officer Training Corps, and after a stint of active duty in the U.S. Army, served seven and a half years in the reserve, where he attained the rank of captain. The ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s were a period of tight regulation by the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Dove family decided the best way to expand the company would be through buying operating routes or companies that were not operating their routes to the greatest potential. A turning point in company history came when AAA Motor Lines bought Cooper Transfer of Brewton, Alabama, in 1969, to be operated as a wholly-owned and independent subsidiary of AAA. Mack became president of Cooper and moved the firm to Dothan. Earl took over as president of AAA. The two sons, in 1973, merged the two companies and bought all of the stock in the resulting company from their father. The company then became AAA Cooper.

In the early ’70s, it began to become obvious that the trucking industry was in for

a big change in the form of industry deregulation. Congress deregulated the telephone and airline industries before turning its attention to trucking in the late ’70s. Deregulation meant that services and rates that had formerly been tightly regulated were thrust open. Truckers, telephone companies, and airlines were set free to devise services and set prices as they saw fit. Massive industry consolidation was the result in each industry as companies expanded services to include areas formerly reserved and protected for other carriers. AAA Cooper expanded its service area beyond Alabama, Georgia, and Florida to Texas, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Virginia. Growth was explosive as new routes were added.

In 1989 Earl retired from the business. The company continued its ambitious expansion plan, purchasing nine terminals from Bowman Transportation Company, and moving outside the Southeast to Chicago, Minneapolis, and Philadelphia, then to Texas, and eventually began “truck-to-ship-to-truck” service to and from Puerto Rico. The expansion has not come at the expense of the company’s customers in its home territory. As deregulation became reality, a number of AAA Cooper’s competitors immediately began looking to the bigger markets in the North and West.

“So when they went to Chicago, we went to Charlotte,” Dove said in an interview with Southern Motor Cargo. “When they went to Los Angeles, we went to Dallas. Our strategy was to continue to be an LTL carrier, and when their attention got diverted to other, more exciting areas, we concentrated on where they were and were fortunate enough to get their business.” Dove has always had an interest in education, especially when it involved AAA Cooper employees. Employees are offered reimbursement of tuition for all academic and job-related technical courses, providing they maintain an acceptable grade average.

Under Dove’s leadership, AAA Cooper has established itself as a leader in safety in an industry that is fraught with danger, from hauling hazardous materials to making sure a vehicle is properly chocked. In addition to his degree in transportation from the University of Tennessee, Mack Dove also received the university’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 1982. He completed the advanced studies program at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Business and has been named a Paul Harris Fellow by the Rotary Foundation of Rotary International. The award was created in memory of the founder of Rotary as a way of showing appreciation for those who contributed to the foundation’s humanitarian and educational programs.

Dove has served his community and state as faithfully as he has the trucking industry. He is a past chairman of the Alabama Trucking Association, was a member of the policy and finance committee of the American Trucking Association, is currently on the executive committee and the board of directors of the American Trucking Association, and is chairman of the Litigation Center, American Trucking Association.

M. Miller Gorrie

  • October 5th, 2021

The “Can-Do” motto of the Sea bees best summarizes the philosophy of Miller Gorrie, who served for three years in the Civil Engineering Corps of the U.S. Navy after graduating from Auburn. Gorrie never forgot the positive Seabees attitude and made it one of the cornerstones of his life and his business.

Gorrie was born in Birmingham on October 20, 1935, to Magnus James “M.J.” and Margaret Miller Gorrie. His father’s family emigrated from Scotland to Montgomery soon after the Civil War. His mother was the daughter of Dr. Walter Taylor Miller, a DeKalb County physician. Miller Gorrie and his father, an electrical engineer, often spent time together, and when Gorrie was about 14, they decided to build a small cabin on the family farm near Trussville. This project ignited Miller’s interest in construction as a career.

Gorrie grew up in the suburbs of Birmingham until 1943 when IBM transferred his father to New York. After returning to Birmingham three years later, he attended Lakeview Grammar School and Ramsay High School and was graduated from Shades Valley High School in 1953. Starting with a paper route and later summer construction jobs, Gorrie began working and saving money, investing it all in IBM stock. Over the years this stock multiplied in value and became the nest egg that financed his business a decade later.

As a senior in high school, Gorrie was awarded an N.R.O.T.C. scholarship and he chose Auburn, enrolling in 1953 as a civil engineering student. He became a member and later president of the Sigma Nu fraternity. At Auburn, he met Frances Greene of Troy, and they were married following his graduation in 1957. Gorrie has often said that the best decision he ever made was to marry Frances.

After Gorrie was discharged from the navy in 1960, he returned home and began working with Daniel Construction Company as a quantity surveyor and entry-level estimator. Two years later, he joined Rust Engineering but was not challenged by taking preliminary drawings and making cost estimates for the design department. After a year, he accepted a job at J. F. Holley, a much smaller company but one where he would have broader responsibilities, including project management.

In 1964, Gorrie purchased the construction assets of Thomas C. Brasfield, who began a small construction company in Birmingham in 1921. For three years, Gorrie operated the company under the name of Thomas C. Brasfield, but in 1967 he decided to change the name. By this time Gorrie was so identified with the company that he could have dropped the Brasfield name, but Mr. Brasfield was still alive, and Gorrie believed the name meant something to him and his family, although Tom Brasfield was never directly associated with the company. The new name became Brasfield & Gorrie.

The company grew steadily through the 1960s, constructing small office buildings, schools, churches, industrial plants, and hospitals. In early 1970, Gorrie ventured into building apartments, a move that proved disastrous and almost broke the company. Through hard work and the dedicated loyalty of his associates, he was able to prevent a total collapse and used the lessons learned to strengthen his company. In 1977, Gorrie moved his company into wastewater and water treatment work. The first years were not successful or profitable, but he persevered, and this work is now very important to the company.

In the early 1980s, fueled by reconstruction needs after Hurricane Frederick, Brasfield & Gorrie became heavily involved in the construction boom that came to the Alabama Gulf Coast and the Florida Panhandle, completing over 40 projects. Condominium construction pushed Brasfield & Gorrie to another level. The volume of work allowed the company to expand and develop a large number of experienced superintendents and foremen.

As work on the Gulf Coast dried up, Gorrie expanded the company into new geographical markets. He established offices in Orlando and Atlanta and guided the company through a restructuring process that decentralized the company into divisions and assigned sales and marketing responsibilities to division managers. Rapid growth resulted. The Orlando office gained local recognition when it built the Orlando City Hall. The Atlanta presence was strengthened by the completion of the concrete frame for the Georgia Dome, which involved pouring 50,000 cubic yards of elevated, formed concrete in less than eleven months.

Brasfield & Gorrie’s retail presence grew substantially after landing the Parisian account. The Parisian Galleria store was the first of 26 Brasfield & Gorrie built across the South and Midwest. In 1997, the company expanded by opening offices in Raleigh and Nashville and organized an industrial division to concentrate on that construction discipline. This year B&G was recognized for its role in reconstructing a bridge in downtown Birmingham at the 1-65, 1-20/59 interchange, completing it in 37 days after the bridge was damaged by fire.

From annual revenues of $800,000 in 1964, Gorrie led Brasfield & Gorrie to become a company in 2001 with annual revenues approaching one billion dollars and 2000 employees servicing clients in 15 states. B&G has been consistently recognized by Engineering News Record as one of the nation’s top domestic general building contractors, currently ranking 24th in the U.S. Between 1998 and 2002 Modern Healthcare magazine named Brasfield & Gorrie as the largest general contractor in healthcare in the country for three years and the second largest for the other two years.

Miller Gorrie is known as a man of few, words, a quiet, humble man who never draws, attention to himself. But when he does speak, his words are powerful and respected. Because he is so soft-spoken and one must concentrate to hear his voice, he was once called “Silent Thunder.” Miller and Frances Gorrie have three children: Ellen Gorrie Byrd, Magnus James Gorrie II (married to Alison), and John Miller Gorrie, and five grandchildren, Frances Ellen, Ginny, and William Byrd, and Magnus Miller II (Mills) and Alie B. Gorrie.

Gorrie currently is on the board of directors of Colonial Properties Trust and ACIPCO and formerly served on the boards of AmSouth Bank and Winsloew Furniture. Professionally, Gorrie was on the board and was president of the Associated General Contractors. He has also served on the boards of the Business Council of Alabama, the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce, the Metropolitan Development Board, and the Economic Development Partnership of Alabama.

An active supporter of many charitable civic and educational institutions, Gorrie has served on boards of the United Way and Alabama Symphony, as well as the Medical Center East, Baptist Medical Centers, and McWane Center foundations. He served on the Auburn Building Science Advisory board, the UAB Civil Engineering Board of Visitors, the UAB President’s Council, and the Samford University Board of Overseers. He and France founded a school in Atlanta to serve children with learning disabilities, and Gorrie serves as chairman of the board.

Gorrie was inducted into the Alabama Engineering Hall of Fame in 1997 and was awarded the Cornerstone Award by the Association of Builders and Contractors for Lifetime Achievement in the Construction Industry in 1998. He has recently been honored by the naming of the M. Miller Gorrie Construction Center to be built on the Auburn University campus being made possible by a lead gift from Brasfield & Gorrie employees.

Benjamin C. “Ben” Stimpson

  • October 5th, 2021

Logging and sawmilling have always been hard and dangerous work, and the lumber business has its share of legends. In the Southern lumber business, few legends are bigger than Ben C. Stimpson, who has spent his life cutting timber, processing lumber, and promoting wildlife conservation.

Ben Stimpson was born in Mobile, the son of Frederick Taylor Stimpson and Mary Edna White-Spunner. He graduated from Murphy High School and attended The University of Alabama where he was a member of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity.

He began his lumbering career in 1940 when as a teenager he worked for his father’s lumber company in South Alabama in a summer heat so fierce that at the end of the day even his high-top shoes were soaked with sweat, a sight that Stimpson says made his father howl with laughter. But the hard work and sweat paid off.

In 1941, his father was operating Stimrad Lumber as well as a thriving piling business that furnished pilings for the foundations for the bulkheads and docks along the Gulf coast. That same year, his father, a savvy businessman, decided to form yet another new company called Southern Logging Company, with Ben and his two brothers as the owners.

But World War II put the logging business on hold and in 1945 Stimpson completed cadet training and received his wings as an Air Corps pilot at the University of Tennessee. But before he could be deployed, President Truman ordered the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima and that brought the war to a close. Stimpson returned to South Alabama and the three brothers returned to the lumber and logging business.

During that same period, Ben May, a close friend and business associate of Stimpson’s father, had purchased a lumber concentration yard in Mobile to process timbers and lumber for use in World War II. Timber was cut from the forests around Mobile and sawn into green lumber by “peckerwood” sawmills and then trucked to Mobile for further processing. The 1umber concentration yard was known as Gulf Lumber Company.

After suffering operating losses for several years, May sought new management and contacted the Stimpson brothers to gauge their interest. So after working in numerous capacities under the tutelage of their father, Stimpson and his older brother Billy and younger brother Gordon assumed management of the company and agreed to split the profits 50-50 with Ben May.

With clearly defined responsibilities each brother performed his duties and meshed into a management team that was the envy of the industry. They were held in high regard by their peers for their work ethic and the ability to get along, but more so looked upon with awe as three brothers that were best friends. Under their management, Gulf Lumber Company evolved into one of the most innovative lumber companies in the nation respected for its high standards for quality. Having the responsibility for sales and marketing, Ben Stimpson steered Gulf into niche markets of treated lumber and machine stress-rated lumber while serving first in the capacity of vice president and later as president.

Today, independent logging crews haul more than 400 loads of logs per week to the Mobile plant, most of them from timberland Gulf manages in southwest Alabama, northeast Florida, and southeast Mississippi. The logs undergo a complicated process of weighing, debarking, sawing, trimming, sorting, drying, planing, and grading before the finished product is shipped. State-of-the-art computers are used in each area of the processing to assure that the quality standards are met.

Gulf Lumber Company, one of the largest sawmills in Alabama, annually produces 105 million board feet of yellow pine products shipping primarily into Midwestern and Northeastern markets. About 80 percent of the product is sold to treating plants and truss manufacturers, with about 10 percent going to retail lumberyards, and 10 percent being exported into countries in the Caribbean. Additionally, the company produces 40 million board feet of treated lumber in its own treating facility and recently began an import lumber division to bring in pine lumber from South America.

In 1973, following the death of Mr. May, the three brothers acquired the ownership of Gulf Lumber Company from the May estate. In 1992, Ben Stimpson and his brothers turned the reins of leadership over to the third generation of the sawmilling Stimpsons.

As might be expected of a man who made his living from timber and timberlands, Ben Stimpson has been active in organizations dedicated to protecting timber resources. He has served as a director of the Alabama Forest Products Association as well as a director of the Southern Forest Products Association. He also served on the board of the Southern Pine Inspection Bureau for nine years, three of which were as chairman.

In addition to his interest in preserving the wise use of timber resources, Stimpson has been passionate about wildlife management and conservation. Having been taught by one of the deans of wildlife conservation. Ben Stimpson knows well that wildlife management is as much about managing people as it is about managing wildlife.

Highly respected for his knowledge in this area, he served as president and a member of the board of directors of the Alabama Wildlife Federation and in 1964 received the Governor’s Conservation Award as well as the M.O. Beale Scroll of Merit for his contributions to wildlife conservation. Additionally, he served as a member of the Governor’s Advisory Board for the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources from 1971 until 1985. Like his father before him and his two brothers, Ben Stimpson is an avid outdoorsman, hunter, and fisherman. Stimpson’s hunting passion is the wild turkey and few can match his bream fishing expertise.

Much of the Stimpsons’ personal life revolves around Choctaw Bluff, a private family enclave overlooking the Alabama River in Clarke County where Ben has been president of the Choctaw Bluff Hunting Club. The tradition began when Stimpson’s father began acquiring land in the 1920s. Ben and his brother have continued to add tracts over the year.

During the late 1940s, he was given the responsibility for renovating an old home, the Big House, on the property for the family’s use. In 1975 Ben built his personal home on the property which he named Stonewall after the nearby Civil War-era Fort Stonewall. On weekdays, Ben and Nedra, his wife of 47 years, find peace and solitude within the confines of Stonewall.

Weekends and holidays are different. On any given weekend one or all the couple’s five children, Ben C. Stimpson and John C. Stimpson, Nedra S. Crosby, Mary S. Turner, and Greer S. Stephens, could be present. In tow could be all or some of the 16 grandchildren.

Though devoted to his family and business, Ben Stimpson has always found time to give to the Mobile community. For 29 years he served on the Board of Trustees of the Mobile Infirmary while chairing numerous committees and helping direct the hospital in its growth from a 300-bed facility to 700 today. He was also instrumental in forming the infirmary’s holding company, Infirmary Health Systems.

In 1970 Stimpson was elected to the Board of Trustees at St. Paul’s Episcopal School. At the time it had grades kindergarten through grade five. It is no secret that Ben became passionate about St. Paul’s School. During his 22-year tenure on the board during which he served as chairman for one term St. Paul’s has developed into the largest Episcopal college preparatory school in the continental U.S.

Ben Stimpson has worked hard but has played hard and enjoyed life. He and his brothers, sons, and nephews have gambled on the Southern forest and invested in the future of the land they love. His hope is that he will be judged as having been a good steward of the resources and talents entrusted to him, and his dream is that his children and grandchildren will strive to be good stewards as well.

Lee J. Styslinger, Jr.

  • October 5th, 2021

When Lee Joseph Styslinger, Jr. left The University of Alabama at age 19 to take over the management of his father’s truck equipment company, no one could have predicted he would tum the company into a worldwide leader in its industry.

Styslinger was born in Birmingham in 1933 to Lee J. Styslinger, Sr., and Margaret McFarland Styslinger, where his father had moved at age 33 because it resembled his hometown of Pittsburgh. There, at the start of the Depression, Lee Styslinger, Sr. founded Alabama Truck Equipment Co. with 20 employees in a building that had originally been a furniture manufacturing plant. The company manufactured flatbed trailers for Fruehauf and customized trucks for industrial use, making a name for itself as one of the first to use non-rusting aluminum truck parts and hanging on through the Depression and the years of World War II when both men

Lee Styslinger Jr. always intended to follow in his father’s footsteps. He attended St. Paul’s elementary school and graduated from St. Bernard Preparatory School in Cullman. He then attended The University of Alabama with plans to graduate with a degree in mechanical engineering. Instead, his father’s death in 1952 left him responsible for the management of Alabama Truck Equipment Co. sooner than he had anticipated and steel was in short supply.

When he took over as general manager of the company, it employed 12 people, and its sales were approximately $100,000 a year. The business was owned by his mother and operated as a proprietorship. The company manufactured utility bodies for Alabama Power Co., a line of bottler bodies for CocaCola and Buffalo Rock, a line of dairy bodies, dump bodies, bakery bodies for McGough Bakeries, van bodies for Baggett, and Jack Cole Motor Freight, and a special type bod a business needed.

Styslinger, at only 19, wanted to appear grown-up as possible so one of the first things did as manager was buy a hat and wire-rimmed glasses. Four years later, he was named president of the company. Styslinger convinced his family to form a corporation and allow him to buy 51 percent of the stock. The company was incorporated for $ 6,000, not including the land, which still belonged to Styslinger’s mother, and the name changed to Altec, Inc.

Styslinger, who had been studying accounting in night school at The University of Alabama at Birmingham, decided the company could no longer afford to be in the manufacturing business. When the company incorporated, it switched to distributing equipment made by other manufacturers. Altec also decided to narrow its focus to products for the utility industry.

By 196 3, Altec’s sales volume had increased 35 times over 1952 figures, and the company had more than 100 associates. With more money to work with, Styslinger returned again to manufacturing. Styslinger formed Altec Manufacturing Co., a separate entity, to manufacture the bodies that were part of the total utility equipment package. Altec, Inc. continued as a distributor of digger derricks and aerial platforms. By 1967, Altec had increased its sales 50 times over those of 1952 and had 175 employees.

From the mid-‘ 60s through the early 70s, Altec began to stretch its wings. A Northern Division was established in Indianapolis to provide sales and assembly services to the booming Indiana and Illinois markets, and a service center was opened in Atlanta. Despite an energy crisis, by 1973 sales were at $20 million, and Altec employed 400 associates.

In that year, Altec made the risky decision to go into competition with its own suppliers and constructed a factory in St. Joseph, Mo., where the company began designing its own products. The decision was a good one. By 1979 the company’s Midwest Division was a full-scale manufacturer of digger derricks and aerial platforms for electric and telephone utilities.

Today, Altec Inc. is the holding company for Altec Industries, Altec Worldwide, Global Rental, Altec Capital Services, NUECO, Altec Hiline, and Altec Ventures. Altec has more than 2,300 associates working in sales, service, and manufacturing facilities throughout the United States and in several foreign countries. The company’s total revenue is just south of a billion dollars. Altec sells and services equipment in more than 87 countries around the world and offers an extensive product line for the electric utility, telecommunication, tree care, and other related industries.

Altec has continued its growth under the Styslinger family’s leadership. Styslinger has three sons with his wife of 42 years, the former Catherine Smith, and all three, Lee Joseph III, Jon Cecil, and Mark Joseph are employed by Altec. Lee J. Styslinger III is now president and CEO of Altec, and Jon and Mark are both senior vice presidents. Lee III and Mark are located in Birmingham, and Jon is in Kansas City, Missouri

Lee Styslinger, Jr. has proven his commitment not only to his business but also to doing his civic duty. He has held positions n the Board of Trustees for Highlands Day School and the Birmingham Symphony Association and has served on the Board of Directors of such organizations as the American National Red Cross, Children Harbor, Junior Achievement of Greater Birmingham, and St. Vincent’s Hospital. He is a past member of the Birmingham Music Club, the Birmingham Council of the Boy Scouts of America, and the Metropolitan Development Board. Since 1998 he has served as finance chairman for the Birmingham Museum of Art. Styslinger and his, wife attend St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church.

Styslinger is also active in the business community. He currently serves on the board of directors for Advanced Labelworx, Inc., Electronic Healthcare Systems, Jemison Investment Company, Inc., and MeadWestvaco Corporation. In the past, he has served on the boards of a number of companies including Complete Health, Health Services Foundation, Regions Financial Corporation, Saunders System, and Southern Research Institute. He has served on the Board of Governors and Executive Board of both the United States and Birmingham Area chambers of commerce. He is a past member of the National Alliance of Businessmen, the Equipment Manufacturers Institute, and the National Association of Manufacturers. Styslinger has been named to the Alabama Academy of Honor and was an honoree for Re-Entry Ministries’ Builders of Birmingham.

Styslinger attributes most of the success of his company to the Altec associates and to his father. Altec’s philosophy about its associates is “Work should be to an adult what play is to a child – enjoyable.”

In a speech he gave to the Rotary Club of Birmingham on Altec’s 60th anniversary, Styslinger said of his father, “My hope is that I am able to inspire in others at least a fraction of the strength he left for me.” Styslinger’s hope has already become fact; he has passed a legacy of strength on to his sons and a strong, growing corporation on to the world.

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