BusinessTN

Who are Tennessee's greatest business people, living and dead? It's a question we put before our readership a few months back. Their input served as a starting point in selecting the first-ever inductees into BTN Hall of Fame of business leadership.

What qualifies this first class? They made a lasting impact on their industries. And they made a lasting impact on business in Tennessee. The current and past business titans represented on this list may not have been born and bred in Tennessee. But they have created the businesses that define Tennessee's business fame past and present. (Conversely, American business icons born in Tennessee but whose influence on the marketplace occurred elsewhere, such as aluminum foil magnate Richard S. Reynolds or oil service company tycoon Erle P. Halliburton, do not qualify.)

Readers will quickly notice that this inaugural list of 13 inductees is heavy on history and light on modern-day business leaders--and understandably so. Today's top CEOs would be hard-pressed to match up with the over two centuries of business history in Tennessee that preceded them. We do expect, however, that as the years pass and new ballots are cast, history will catch up to the present day and more and more living, active Tennessee businesspeople will take their rightful places in this hall of honor. Until then, all hail the inaugural class.

Clarence Saunders 1881-1953 • MEMPHIS Founder of the self-service concept in retail, it could be said that Saunders revolutionized the way we shop and live. A former grocery clerk and wholesale salesman, Saunders opened his first self-service Piggly Wiggly grocery store in Memphis in 1916. Staples of modern retail shopping that he originated include shopping baskets, checkout stands, high volume/low profit margin retailing, refrigerated produce cases, employee uniforms and modern aisle displays. Saunders' patented self serving store concept became the industry norm and allowed him to grow "The Pig" into a 2,600-store nationwide chain that traded publicly. (Today the Dallas, Texas-based company has 600 stores.) Through a series of stock transactions, Saunders eventually lost control of his company. He died before realizing his dream of opening a fully automated store.

Robert Reed Church 1839-1912 • MEMPHIS The son of a white steamboat captain and a slave seamstress, this one-time fugitive slave was the South’s first African-American millionaire. A real estate maven whose business interests included a saloon, restaurant and hotel, Church also eventually founded Solvent Savings Bank and Trust Co. At a time when the city of Memphis provided no recreational civic space for African Americans, Church spent $100,000 of his own money to open a park and 2,000-seat auditorium, which became the cultural epicenter of black Memphis and helped transform Beale Street from a European American neighborhood to a commercial street for Memphis’ black population. President Theodore Roosevelt once spoke to an audience of 10,000 there.

Abe Plough 1891-1984 • MEMPHIS Just 16 years old, Plough borrowed $125 from his father and, utilizing his experience as a drug store employee, started mixing chemicals in dishpans. First successful with a “healing oil,” Plough went on to enter the drug patent business, achieving his first big breakthrough with the purchase of baby aspirin maker the St. Joseph Co. Over a nearly 70-year career, Plough grew his company into a multinational juggernaut, pharmaceutical giant Schering-Plough Corp., with products ranging from Coppertone to Maybelline. During the Great Depression, while other companies were crumbling, Plough was adding employees and raising employee salaries. A pioneer of safe products for children, Plough is also the man behind one of Memphis’ major private philanthropies, with over $163 million in assets and annual giving at around $7 million.

Jack C. Massey 1904-1990 • NASHVILLE Massey is the only businessperson in American history to take three unrelated companies—Kentucky Fried Chicken, Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) and Winner’s Corp.—public. A druggist turned surgical supply company owner, Massey’s real successes in business only began to occur later in his life—in fact, after he came out of retirement. After buying Harland Sanders’ chicken recipe in the early 1960s, Massey grew KFC into a nationwide chain, playing a key role in the modern fast-food industry. In 1968,at age 64, he co-founded HCA, pioneering for-profit health care. He also began Massey Investment Co., forerunner to Massey Burch Capital Group. In the ’70s, he aided the rise of Wendy’s restaurants and later founded Mrs. Winner’s fried chicken. Belmont University’s business school is named in his honor.

Roy Acuff 1903-1992 & Fred Rose 1897-1954 • NASHVILLE The founders of the first music publishing company in Nashville, and the first exclusively devoted to country music, Acuff and Rose can be credited with establishing Nashville as the “third coast.” The two were among the first four inductees into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Acuff, a country crooner and national superstar beginning in the 1940s, and Rose, an Academy Award winning songwriter who wrote songs for the likes of Gene Autry, launched their company in 1942. An overnight success, it became the repository for most of the popular songs and songwriters over the next 20 years (and even to this day). The company signed then unknown Hank Williams Sr. to its stable of writers in 1946. The historic Acuff-Rose catalog, chock-full of country music standards (alongside other Acuff-Rose properties), sold to Sony Music Publishing in 2002 for $157 million.

George Lafayette Carter 1857-1936 • TRI-CITIES This Bristol-born rail and coal magnate whose name is synonymous with bringing industrial development to Southern Appalachia is the founder of modern Kingsport, which he envisioned as a consequence of his Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio Railway. It became America’s first economically diversified, professionally planned and privately financed city. Carter’s railroad, covering 277 miles and with 50 tunnels, was a marvel of turn-of-the-century engineering, connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Ohio River. Many cities and towns in addition to Kingsport were created or expanded as a result of Carter’s railroad (as were thousands of jobs). The industrialist also donated the land and lobbied for governmental support for the establishment of what became East Tennessee State University (ETSU) in Johnson City. Other interests included the Bristol Herald-Courier, a dozen banks and an ocean shipping company.

Kemmons Wilson 1913-2003 • MEMPHIS Already one of Memphis’ best known and most successful homebuilders with a knack for building larger, nicer homes at a better price than his competitors, Kemmons Wilson co-founded with Wallace E. Johnson the Holiday Inn motel chain. He did so in response to his frustration at having to pay a surcharge for his children at roadside motels during a family vacation in 1951. Hallmarks of travel lodging Wilson introduced included standard room rates as well as air conditioned rooms, free ice, and greater cleanliness. This high school dropout, who got his entrepreneurial wings selling popcorn in a movie theater, eventually sold the motel chain, which at one point numbered 1,700 locations, but launched several new companies under the Kemmons Wilson Co. umbrella that his family now runs.

Frederick W. Smith 1944-present • MEMPHIS Smith transformed the way the world does business by creating a new industry—overnight package delivery—based on a Yale term paper he wrote envisioning a nighttime airfreight system to accommodate time-sensitive shipments. Initiating operations in 1973 using 14 small aircraft at the Memphis International Airport, Smith’s company today is a $32 billion global transportation/business services/logistics behemoth operating 671 aircraft and over 70,000 vehicles in 215 countries, delivering six million packages daily and making Memphis the center of global distribution. The FedEx Corp., of which Smith is chairman, president and CEO, is one of the most recognizable brands in the world. Smith, who bought Kinko’s in 2004, employs 260,000 people worldwide—30,000 alone in Memphis.

Thomas “Tommy” F. Frist Jr. 1939-present • NASHVILLE A co-founder with Massey and his father and doctor, Thomas Frist Sr., of Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), Frist is credited with taking the business and making something out of it, growing it into a dominant player, which, at press time, had 182 hospitals and 94 freestanding surgery centers in 22 states, Switzerland and England. Earlier this year, Frist initiated plans in partnership with private equity partners to take the company private in a proposed $33 billion leveraged buyout, which would constitute the largest LBO in U.S. history. In 1989, Frist led a $5.1 billion leveraged buyout of the company, taking it public again in 1992.

Benjamin “B.F.” Thomas 1860-1914 • CHATTANOOGA Asa Candler, who purchased the rights to the Coca-Cola formula from druggist John Pemberton, was no dummy. But unconvinced of the upside potential of bottling his famous drug store fountain drink, he was persuaded to sign away the exclusive rights to bottle his soft drink to Thomas and fellow Chattanooga lawyer Joseph B. Whitehead in 1889. Thomas’ motivation derived from seeing a bottled Cuban fruit drink during his Spanish-American War experience. Following what is arguably the single greatest business deal in Tennessee history, the two lawyers split the U.S. into franchise territories, with Thomas operating from Chattanooga and Whitehead from Atlanta, where he partnered with John T. Lupton, who financed the plant openings. White also helped develop Lookout Mountain, form American National Bank and the Chattanooga Golf and Country Club.

Sam Phillips 1923-2003 • MEMPHIS Arguably the Tennessee businessperson who most influenced American culture in the 20th Century, the pioneering Phillips is largely credited with the launch of rock-n-roll. Phillips “found” Elvis Presley, nurtured the young artist’s sound, then took him to mega-star status, eventually selling his contract to RCA in an effort to both boost Elvis’ career and provide his record label, Sun Records, with the seed capital necessary to nurture future artists Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis, among others. Phillips was also a seminal figure in the recording of electric blues by African-American performers, including B.B. King. In all, Phillips is a key reason Tennessee’s brand in the global marketplace is so inexorably tied to music.

Andrew Jackson 1767-1845 • NASHVILLE A drafter of the state Constitution, Tennessee’s first congressman and America’s seventh president, to this day Andrew Jackson casts a well-chronicled shadow over both Tennessee and federal politics. He makes this list, however, for his lesser known status as Tennessee’s greatest land speculator. Executed in 1819, one year after the Chickasaw ceded West Tennessee to the United States, the Chickasaw Purchase—which meant to Tennessee what the Louisiana Purchase meant for the entire United States—led to one of America’s first land rushes. Jackson and fellow Nashville enterprisers John Overton and James Winchester, rightfully determined they could make a profit by forming the new river town. Thus the city of Memphis was born.