On this episode of Our American Stories, Bill Rhodes, President and CEO of Autozone, tells us his life story and how he came to be a part of the largest aftermarket automotive parts and accessories company in the United States. Dr. Charles Kemper of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, has seen generations come and go in his small town, but while he may have retired from his profession, he certainly hasn't from his hobby-watching birds.
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Time Codes:
00:00 - Bill Rhodes: A Memphis Boy's Road to Autozone
35:00 - Charles Kemper: Chippewa Falls' 100-Year-Old Doctor
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
By the way, we'd love to hear your story. Send
them to our American Stories dot com. There's some of
our favorites. Bill Rhodes, a Memphis, Tennessee native, has been
the president and CEO of AutoZone since two thousand and five.
(00:32):
Today Bill joins us to tell his life's story and
the journey that led him to AutoZone. So, my father
in the early years was with Orcan Pest Control, and
my mother and father moved nine times in ten years,
(00:54):
and one of the stops was Greenville, which is where
I was born. After I was six weeks old, we
moved to Meridian, mississip and after about another year we
moved to Dallas, Texas. In nineteen sixty nine. April of
nineteen sixty nine, our family moved from Dallas, Texas to Memphis, Tennessee.
The reason we moved to Memphis, Tennessee was my mother
(01:17):
and father didn't want to keep moving every year. He
was a branch manager with working and so they kept
moving year after year after year. There was a new
startup company in Memphis Tennessee called termin X. At the time,
Terminex had just a handful of branches, and they hired
(01:37):
my father to be the first ever multi store manager.
So he came to Memphis in April nineteen sixty nine
as the regional manager for Terminx, the only one that
they had, and I lost him a couple of years ago,
so I can't hardly talk about him without getting a
little choked up. But the vast majority of the lessons
(01:59):
I learned about leadership came from my mother and my father.
People want to talk about leadership and how sophisticated it is,
and which books do you read. I think leadership starts
with care and truly caring about people and living your
values out every day. My father used to go to
work every Saturday, and many of those saturdays, he'd allow
(02:23):
me to come along with him, and I'd sit in
his office and I'd listen to the conversations that he'd have,
and i'd watch him roll off these reports off these
antiquated printers, and he'd sit there and study those reports,
and then he'd pulled me around on the side of
his desk and he'd says, so, here's where we're doing well.
And here's what we're not doing well, and here's what
I need to do to help incentivize or encourage this person. Yeah,
(02:45):
my dad, My dad is my hero. My father loved sports.
I and junior high and so played basketball and football,
and I wasn't good enough to progress to the high
school level, so pivoted and turned my attention to golf.
(03:06):
So I end up going to the University of Tennessee
at Martin, and it's about two and a half hours
two hours and fifteen minutes northeast of Memphis, Tennessee. It's
about eight miles from the Kentucky border. In Martin, Tennessee,
at the time of a very small town, and certainly
for a kid coming from Memphis, Tennessee, it was a
town of five thousand people that at the time had
(03:27):
about fifty five hundred students. I got to Martin because
I played golf. I wanted to play collegiate golf, and
I had the opportunity to be recruited by quite a
few schools in the mid South, and ultimately the golf
coach at University of Tennessee Martin, Grover Page, offered me
a compelling scholarship to come and play golf at UT Martin.
(03:53):
So I went to UT Martin. My fraternity my first
year was a golf team, and I loved the golf team.
We had a very good golf team, and we played
Division two golf and we're always on the verge of
being able to go to the NCAA Championships or not.
My first three years we got to go. Unfortunately, I
wasn't good enough to make those trips the first three years.
(04:16):
But golf was a big part of my existence in school.
I studied accounting while I was at the University of
Tennessee at Martin, and I can remember talking to my
mom and dad. People these days wouldn't remember these phone calls,
but back then, we didn't carry a phone with us.
(04:37):
We didn't have a phone in our dorm room. We
had to go downstairs and wait in line for one
of the two or three phone booths that were in
the blobbe level at the dormitory. And I would call
home two or three times a week, and my mother
and father, this is something people wouldn't realize today either.
They would both jump on a landline at home and
(04:58):
we would have a three way conversation without having to
merge a call, And I can remember one particular phone
call my freshman year and my father, as I mentioned,
was big into management, and I knew I wanted to
go into business because I wanted to be my father.
(05:20):
And I can remember this phone call. He said, son,
if you decided on a major, and I said, yes, sir, Dad,
I have And he said, okay, what is it? And
I said, I'm going to be an accounting major. He said,
what You're going to be an accounting major? You know
those people, they kind of sit in the corner. They
(05:41):
wear a green ice shade and a green arm band
and all they do is count the numbers. He said,
so why do you want to be an accountant? And
I said, Dad, is my understanding that accounting is the
most difficult business degree that they have here at UT Martin,
and so that's why I chose it. He said, that's
good enough for me. That's good enough for me. It
(06:06):
would have been good enough for my dad too. And
a very similar philosophy about life and his father finally
moved to Memphis for one reason, to not move anymore.
He doesn't want to move his kids around from place
to place to place. The majority of the lessons about leadership.
I learn from my mom and dad, and it all starts,
Bill Rhodes says, from truly caring about people and watching
(06:29):
his father and mother do that and have that be
the anchor of their life. My dad was my hero,
Bill said. And then of course that line about accounting,
I understand it's the hardest major at the University of
Tennessee at Martin And of course that was it for
his dad and his mom. When we come back, more
(06:49):
of this storytelling Bill Rhodes story. By the way, we're
looking for your stories too, I mentioned at the beginning
of every show, But father and mother stories. We love
them for Father's Day, we love them from Mother's Day,
we love them all year long. Then your mother and
father's stories to our American Stories dot Com. When we
return more of Bill Rhodes's story here on our American Story.
(07:30):
Lee Habibi here the host of our American Stories. Every
day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across
this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns.
But we truly can't do the show without you. Our
stories are free to listen to, but they're not free
to make. If you love what you hear, go to
our American Stories dot com and click the donate button.
(07:53):
Give a little, give a lot. Go to our American
Stories dot com and give and we're back with our
American Stories and Bill Rhodes's story. Bill has been the
(08:14):
president and CEO of AutoZone since two thousand and five.
We just heard how much his father meant to him.
In fact, Bill chose to study accounting at the University
of Tennessee at Martin because it was the most challenging
business degree they offered, and he figured it would train
him to be at least half the professional that his
father was. Back to Bill, as I was pursuing my
(08:39):
accounting degree, I learned two things. One, I didn't particularly
like accounting. More importantly, it didn't like me. And so
in my senior year I was progressing it. I was
a pretty good student, and I'd made pretty good grades,
but I really had to work at it. And I
was taking this one class. It was called auditing, and
(09:02):
doctor Relda Baron, the head of the accounting department at
the University of Tennessee, was the professor, and she's very talented,
and we kept going through this class and I was
really working hard. I was close to graduating. Really excited
about graduating. I decided I was not going to be
an accountant and I was therefore going to go straight
(09:22):
to the University of Memphis to pursue an MBA. But
this auditing class, really I was struggling in and I
was going to see doctor Baron on a regular basis,
and I'd say, doctor Baron, you know I'm trying this.
I just don't get the concepts. And I worked it,
and she coached me and tutored me, and ultimately came
down to the end and I said, after the final exam,
(09:45):
I said, doctor Baron, I'm sorry, I did not do
well in this class. And I know that I'm on
the verge of an F or a D. And I
plead with you to give me. And I know it
would be a gift to give me my first ever
D in any class at UT Martin, because if you don't,
(10:06):
you're gonna have to deal with me again next fall.
And I don't think it's gonna go any better. And
I promise you, I promise you I will never be
an oddity. So I go on to the University of
Memphis and I'm going to grad school. I'm living with
my parents and I come home one day my senior
(10:29):
year in a ut Martin. I had a good golf season,
so I made academic All American despite my d and
I made an honorable mention All American. I got a
chance to Our team didn't make it to the NCAA's
that year, but I was invited as an individual to
play in the Division two national championships down in Columbus, Georgia.
(10:49):
And was you know, the kind of the pinnacle of
my career in golf. But there was a right up
in the commercial appeal about me. And after that right
up in the commercial appeal, the little article. I came
home one day from school, and back then you used
to write notes on the refrigerators, and there was a
(11:09):
note from my mom said, Mike Hopper called from Ernston Winnie.
You'd like for you to call him. So I picked
up the phone and I called him. Said, High, this
is Bill Roads, said High, Bill, this is Mike Hopper.
I'm in charge of the audit practice at Ernston Winnie.
Ernston Winnie was at the time one of eight large
public accounting firms. And this was in this portion was
(11:33):
in Memphis, Tennessee. In my hometown, and Mike said, I'd
liked it. I read about you in the commercial Appeal.
I'd like to talk to you. And so back then
public accounting, you wore dark suits, you wore white shirts,
you wore a tie. There was nobody in public accounting
that had facial hair. So I've go into this interview
(11:56):
with Mike Hopper, the head of the audit practice of
Ernston Winnie in Memphis, NC. And I put on my
best I put on my duckhead khaki's, my navy blazer.
I borrowed a tie from my dad. My dad's three
inches taller than I AMC has extra long ties. It
hung down too long. Put on my penny loafers, and
(12:17):
I had a full beard. And I went to Ernston
Winnie to interview with Mike Hopper. I looked way out
of place. I sat in his corner office and Mike
started interviewing me. Where'd you go? How'd you do in school?
That said, we're about three minutes in. He said, stop,
let me tell you why you're here. Ernston Winnie in Memphis, Tennessee,
(12:38):
has three different departments organizations. Got a consulting division in
the bond consulting business, we got a tax division. We
got an audit division. Mike said, I believe I've been
at the time, he'd been there twenty some odd years.
He was in the audit practice and charge the audit practice.
And he said, every summer we have a golf competition
(13:01):
between tax, audit and consulting. He said, Bill, every year
I've been here, not only has audit never won. We've
finished last. Every time I want to hire you, we'll
hire you as an intern. It's May of nineteen eighty eight.
(13:21):
The Golf Challenges is in July. You can work one
hour a week, you can work sixty hours a week.
I don't care. You can work through July, and after
the Golf Challenge you can quit, or you can work
through December when you graduate. But we won't hire you
full time because you just you know, you don't have
(13:42):
the grades from your college to be a full time
person here. And he said, what do you think? I said,
so I can write that I can work for Ernston
Winnie on my resume. Why in the world would I
not do that? And so I did. And it was
right when personal computers were becoming slumwhat mobile we called
(14:06):
them luggables. Ernst and Winnie National come out with us
new scheduling software. So they put me in charge of
figuring out how to use this new scheduling software and
I was pretty effective at it. It went well. July
came along and we won by a long shot the
Golf Challenge and it was the last year they ever
(14:27):
had the Golf Challenge, never had it again. So fast
forward to December of nineteen eighty eight. I'm graduating from
University of Memphis with an NBA. I've gone through a
year of testing with termin X, my father's company, and
I'm going to be a manager in training for my
(14:48):
father's company. And they had told me all along. My
father was a regional manager from Saint Louis to Knoxville
to Jackson, Mississippi, and they said, you know, you can
do your manager and training program for a year a
year and a half in Memphis, but beyond that, you're
gonna have to move outside of your father's territory to
become a branch manager. So we've decided you're going to
(15:09):
have to move to Philadelphia. And it was not Philadelphia, Mississippi.
It was Philadelphia, Pennsylvania within two or three weeks, so
it was a shock for a Southern boy from Memphis, Tennessee,
that you never really been that far away except when
I went to ut martin two hours and fifteen minutes away.
(15:30):
And remember Ernston Young had told me that I would
not be able to go to work there full time.
The same day that I was told I had to
move to Philadelphia, I got a letter in the mail
from Ernston Winning saying that they wanted me to come
on the audit practice as an auditor. They were paying
me about four thousand dollars more than I was going
to make living in Philadelphia working for termin X, and
(15:53):
so much against what I promised doctor Barron, and much
against what my dad really didn't want. I became an
accountant and I joined Ernston Winnie at the time full
time in January nineteen eighty nine. There's no question my
time in Ernst and Young was incredibly beneficial for me
(16:15):
in my career. I talked to kids all the time.
In fact, I talked to one of my nephews yesterday
who's considering going to work for Ernst and Young, And
I think it's an incredible place to go get an education.
How many other kids twenty three, twenty four twenty five
young adults have the opportunity to go in and see seven, eight, nine,
(16:39):
ten businesses over the course of a year, and see
which businesses and business models work, which ones don't work
and why. See which leaders are very successful and what
kind of traits do they have that lead to that success.
See which kind of leaders fail and where they lose
(17:00):
their support from their teams. Probably in my case, as
much as anything. See which cultures work and which cultures
don't work. So I call it one of the greatest
NBA programs in the world. And you've been listening to
Bill Rhodes tell one heck of an unlikely story. Accounty
(17:20):
didn't like me, and I didn't like accounting, and it
turned out, well, not so much to be true. He
gets that gig because of his golfing expertise. I love
what that hiring partner said. You can work an hour
a week, you can work sixty hours a week. I
don't care, but we won't hire you full time. And
of course that turned out to not quite be true.
(17:43):
When we come back more of this remarkable story, the
unlikely story of Bill Rhodes's journey to chairman, CEO and
president of AutoZone. Here on our American stories, and we're
(18:08):
back with our American stories in the final portion of
Bill Rhodes's story. When we last left off, Bill had
secured a job at Ernston Young formerly Ernston Winnie, despite
being told that after his internship there would be no
job for him. He returned to Bill, I was offered
(18:29):
a job to come to AutoZone from Ernston Young. I
was doing really well at ian Wy, enjoying what I
was doing. But here was this chance to go to
work for AutoZone. What a fortuitous decision for me. I'm
not sure it's worked out very well for AutoZone, but
it's worked out extremely well for me. So I joined
AutoZone on December fifth, nineteen ninety four, and I was
(18:52):
the manager of inventory Accounting. Quickly I moved into some
other parts of the organization, and the most fortunate thing
for me was the leadership team at AutoZone moved me
into a lot of different parts of the company over time.
So I started in inventory accounting, they asked me to
(19:14):
start an internal audit program, the first ever for autozonn
Then I was moved into our store operations team as
the store operations support person helping support our divisional vice presidents.
I was then moved back to finance. I guess I
got promoted to vice president while I was in store
operations support. I got moved back to finance in my
(19:37):
early thirties because they wanted our CFO was considering retiring
and I was moved back because they wanted me to
be the potential successor to the CFO. Four months into that,
I was promoted to senior vice president and controller at
a very very young age and was really excited. And
it's doing great things, I thought, and the company was
(19:59):
doing well. And came in one day and the president
of the company, another one of my mentors, Tim Vargo,
called me into his office and said, hey, Bill, we've
decided you're not going to be This is four months
after I got promoted to senior vice president. Tim Vargo
calls me in and says, Bill, we've decided you're not
(20:20):
going to be the next CFO. In fact, we've hired
him and he's starting on Monday. He's going to take
your job. You're going to be demoted back to a
vice president and we don't know what you're gonna do,
but we like you and I said, wait a minute.
I was tracking with everything until he said, but we
(20:41):
like you. And so I went a week we're without
a job. That the following thursday, Tim Vargo called me
back in his office and he said, we decided what
you're gonna do. We're gonna make you a divisional vice president.
So I went from being the controller of the organization
with about two hundred people in my organization, most of
(21:02):
which sat on the same floor I did in the
building downtown Memphis, to all of a sudden, I was
responsible for five hundred and twenty five stores in eleven
states and eight thousand people. And I said, and you
call that a demotion, And it was one of those.
It's probably the luckiest demotion that's ever happened. And I
(21:24):
had a wonderful opportunity to go and spend time with
the people that are the most important in our business,
the people that are on the front lines that are
dealing with our customers and providing wild customer service every day.
I was only in that role for about eleven months.
We had a new CEO that came in, and when
(21:44):
that happens, many times, leadership teams get shaken up a
little bit and Iris did as well. A few people left,
and our new CEO, Steve Idlin, promoted me back to
a senior vice president, but this time in charge of
our supply chain. Now here's this account from Ernst and
Young that tried to be an operator for eleven months,
(22:07):
that's now trying to be a supply chain expert. It
was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the time
in both store operations and supply chain. I was in
the supply chain role for about six months and our
CFO transition actually happened. Our CEO at the time, he
asked me to be responsible for information technology and the
(22:30):
supply chain, and just really learned in both my operations
and supply chain years empathy for what we asked people
to do every day and the commitment that they have
for the success of this organization and frankly the success
of their families. People work awfully hard, and I get
to see that firsthand. Our CEO called a board meeting
(22:56):
on a Friday afternoon and announced that he was leaving
and he was going to take on the chairman and
CEO role of Office Depot. It was the week of
spring breaks when he called the meeting. I was in
Colorado with my family and I had a skiing accident
on Wednesday and had a severe concussion. It was not
cleared to drive an automobile for a week. That was
(23:16):
on Wednesday, and I got a call on Sunday afternoon.
I knew something was up because I'd had some conversations
with our general counsel, but I didn't know that our
CEO was leaving or anything. And I got a phone
call at four o'clock on Sunday afternoon from our founder
and he said, Bill, I want to let you know
Steve resigned on Friday. The boards met all weekend and
(23:39):
we've made you the president and CEO. I'm coming back
on Tuesday. We have a board meeting on Tuesday at noon.
I'll see you in your office at eleven o'clock. And
I said, Pet, did anybody tell you that I had
a ski in accident? And he said, yeah, get to work.
So I went to work. So today AutoZone is about
(24:03):
a sixteen billion dollars sales organization. We have seven nearly
seven thousand stores in the United States, Mexico, and Brazil.
We have one hundred five thousand people. One hundred five
thousand people that We don't call employees, We call autosowners.
They have a passion, have a dedication to drive customer service.
You think about a significant part of our organization is
(24:26):
in the retail business. Well, most of the times when
you go see a retailer, you're excited about what you
can buy. You're buying some new glasses or a new
shirt or whatever. You're really excited. Right, That's not the
case when you come to AutoZone. You woke up, you're
trying to go to work, carded and start. You got
to go to auto Zone and find out that maybe
I've got to spend one hundred fifty dollars on a
(24:48):
new battery. You know what. One hundred and fifty dollars
wasn't in my budget. But I've got to do it
anyway because I got to get to work. Our people
are our secret sauce. Autosowners are I shall breed. They
have to be problem solvers. So another one of my
quotes that I often say is AutoZone isn't for everybody,
(25:09):
and everybody isn't for AutoZone. And that's okay because we
have to have somebody with a servant heart. When somebody
walks into that store and they're having a bad day,
their car won't start. We have to have somebody that
is empathetic for the customer situation and is willing to
(25:32):
help that customer solve that problem. We have lots of
different practices. One of them is called gotcha go out
to the customer's automobile. So if a customer walks in
and says, my car is doing X, Y or Z,
our people stop what they're doing. They go out to
the car and they look, listen, smell what's going on,
(25:54):
with cards to help try to diagnose the problem. Our
people are problem solvers and they do it every single day.
Many times. Our people go out and solve a problem
for free, and we love that. So if you go
out in the car won't start, well, all of a sudden,
the auto's owner sees it's a corroded battery cable. They
(26:14):
clean it up, get rid of the corrosion, tightened down
the clamp, and guess what, the car starts and the
customer says, oh, well, what I owe you nothing? Well, okay,
well here's ten dollars of tip. No, ma'am, I can't
take that. We're here to serve you. That's what service
is about. That's what our team excels at. And a
(26:41):
great job on the production by Robbie Davis and a
special thanks to Bill Rhodes for sharing his story. Seven
thousand stories, one hundred and five thousand autos owners and
they do have a servant heart. If you've ever gone,
you know what gotcha means because they come out to
that car and they try to solve problems and it's
the heart of their business is their servant hearts. And
(27:02):
by the way, there are two hundred and seventy million
cars on the road. Most of them are used. The
average age twelve years old, so we all know what
it's like to wake up and that battery doesn't work.
Bill Rhodes's story AutoZone story here on our American Stories.
(27:37):
This is our American Stories. And when we first bumped
into doctor Charles Kemper of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, we were mazed.
Graduating from Duke University in nineteen forty, this one hundred
year old doctor has seen generations come and go in
his town and actually help deliver a whole lot of
(27:59):
the those generations at birth. Use our own Monty Montgomery
with his story, Doctor Charles Kemper grew up on the
East Coast in Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore is like a big
metropolis most any place, but Baltimore at the time, at
one time was a principal city in the United States,
(28:23):
right on its Hispeake Bay. He was a center for shipping.
And I had good parents. My dad had a terrible temper.
He would come home tired, exhausted at work in twenty
hours a day, carrying suitcases. He was a merchandiser. He
would travel to all these little townels had little stores
(28:47):
and pull out this big sample box that opened them
up and show them what they might like to buy. Well, anyway,
he'd come home, wouldn't get mad at trivial things like
why didn't you fix me to those fried potatoes like
(29:07):
I always like. I guess he was so tired and
exhausted it everything annoyed him. But I think he was
very good hearted. Nevertheless, and I came across a letter
he wrote once in which everybody hates me. Yeah, it
was this his perception. I remember one time I and
(29:31):
my cousin Sydney, we played hooky from Sunday school and
he was supposed to pick us up on a certain
corner downtown Baltimore. We went to the wrong corner, or
waited for him at the wrong corner, or he forgot
which corner it was. I don't know, but anyway, boy,
(29:55):
I was scared at what he wouldn't you going to say?
You do? I some of those characteristics, but I think
they have gradually evolved as they got older and understanding,
and I certainly don't feel it. Wait and eager to
live a life better than his father did, Charles decided
(30:16):
that he wanted to become a doctor, a dream his
mother was more than happy to support who When I graduated,
she gave me a doctor's bag. I still have it.
So he used it all all these years as a
sort of a truism that Jewish mothers were ambitious that
(30:38):
their sons would have become doctors and not politicians. After
serving as a medic in the Army Air Corps in
World War Two, Kemper decided to move to Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin,
setting the city aside for the country. Due to a
number of reasons. My wife parents lived in a town
not far from here, and he was pregnant. This was
(31:01):
after I had a decide where I was going to practice,
and I thought it'd be good to practice here in
this small town because she would be close to her parents.
Went at her first child, and one of the doctors
at the hospital where I was resident, said, why don't
(31:23):
you come to Chipwo Falls. There's only ten doctors here.
So I came here. I was the eleventh doctor. My
parents were happy that I was a doctor, but they
wanted me to stay in Baltimore, and they thought that
this country out here was the wild West where cowboys
and Indians. When they arrived to see me visit me
(31:48):
for the first time, as they were walking into the house,
a car pulled up with four hunters in it. They
pulled up in front of the house and yelled at me,
did you see where the wolf ront? My mother almost faded.
(32:08):
I really came from a different world, but I wanted
to be in a place where I where I knew
everybody and got acquainted with him, and they knew me.
I remember the very first patient I had in town.
All the doctors in those days in this town had
(32:30):
their office upstairs, which is uh came was stupid, didn't
you think about it? Because people with heart trouble to
climb little stairs. Well. Anyway, the first day I in
my practice, I had my office upstairs in downtown and
(32:50):
had to walk down the hall, and I was the
last office there. And my first day in practice, I
parked a car out front and I waited there and
I didn't see a patient until just about four thirty
and old man walked in and he didn't have anything
seriously wrong with him, but he asked me if I
(33:12):
would come see his father. See his father only smokes,
he mean, it must be really old. I was curious,
so I said sure, I'll be happy to come see him. Well,
when he left and I walked down to my car
and low, I had a ticket for illegal parking, and
(33:34):
the fine was exactly the same as what the patient
paid me, which was two books. I used to like
to make house calls because that took me out in
the country. And I always said, my binoculars on the
seat beside me, and I would stop and look at
(33:55):
stare at some birds. You heard right. Doctor Kemper has
always had a fascination with birds, dating back to his
time in World War Two. When crossing the Pacific by boat,
he watched albatross and other birds off the ship out
of boredom primarily. Charles now tells the story of one
of his memorable bird watching experiences. There was one time
(34:19):
at the base of this hill, or at the top
of the hill, is a Catholic church and the nuns
live in the convent. Well, anyway, I was driving up
the hill and I got to the top. I saw
a white, pure white starling that I had captured and
(34:39):
put a band on it about a week before. Bird
Banding is an occupation by the US Fishing Wildlife Service.
In those days, it didn't have high technology. That was
one way of studying, putting a serial numbered band on
(35:01):
aluminum band around the ankle of the bird, and that way,
if the bird was ever recovered, they would know where
the bird went. But anyway, I pulled my car to
a stop and jumped out of the car with my
(35:23):
binoculars and I stared at that starling. I wanted to
see if it had a been on this leg and
just sen curtain and the convent came down. Suddenly, an
um nurse or some lady sister in the convent saw
me with my binoculars and and I thought, oh, there
(35:49):
goes my reputation. So I had to leave that down,
and Charles even took some of his patients birdy chin.
I remember I had one lady who was old enough
to be my mother, was interested in birds, and one
(36:11):
day I took her. She and her husband and myself
were out to swamp just outside of town, and there
was an interesting bird there that we were looking at.
The bird was a bittern, which has a habit of
standing very still and with his bill pointed upward, and
(36:35):
he fades into the environment, but he doesn't move. That's
his means of defense. And we were on the roadside
and looking at that bird, which was about forty yards away,
and I wanted to see what would happen if I
picked up a small rock and throw it near the birds,
(36:56):
see if I could flush it fly away. Well, I
wasn't too accurate when through the rock it hit the bird,
and Missus Lundon was her name, anyway, she said right away,
I'm changing doctors. She thought i'd feel a rock at
(37:19):
the bird. I didn't feel a rock at the bird.
I was trying to miss the bird, just scare him
so he would see if he would fly off. And
even today, at one hundred years old, Charles still has
a fascination with birds. But as for his longevity, he
thanks their creator and his I was just lucky. I
(37:43):
had nothing to do with my longevity. I just say
good Lord had some reason for keeping me here, and
I firmly believe that. And you've been listening to doctor
Charles Kemper of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. What a unique voice.
Doctor Charles Kemper's story here on our American Story
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
By the way, we'd love to hear your story. Send
them to our American Stories dot com. There's some of
our favorites. Bill Rhodes, a Memphis, Tennessee native, has been
the president and CEO of AutoZone since two thousand and five.
(00:32):
Today Bill joins us to tell his life's story and
the journey that led him to AutoZone. So, my father
in the early years was with Orcan Pest Control, and
my mother and father moved nine times in ten years,
(00:54):
and one of the stops was Greenville, which is where
I was born. After I was six weeks old, we
moved to Meridian, mississip and after about another year we
moved to Dallas, Texas. In nineteen sixty nine. April of
nineteen sixty nine, our family moved from Dallas, Texas to Memphis, Tennessee.
The reason we moved to Memphis, Tennessee was my mother
(01:17):
and father didn't want to keep moving every year. He
was a branch manager with working and so they kept
moving year after year after year. There was a new
startup company in Memphis Tennessee called termin X. At the time,
Terminex had just a handful of branches, and they hired
(01:37):
my father to be the first ever multi store manager.
So he came to Memphis in April nineteen sixty nine
as the regional manager for Terminx, the only one that
they had, and I lost him a couple of years ago,
so I can't hardly talk about him without getting a
little choked up. But the vast majority of the lessons
(01:59):
I learned about leadership came from my mother and my father.
People want to talk about leadership and how sophisticated it is,
and which books do you read. I think leadership starts
with care and truly caring about people and living your
values out every day. My father used to go to
work every Saturday, and many of those saturdays, he'd allow
(02:23):
me to come along with him, and I'd sit in
his office and I'd listen to the conversations that he'd have,
and i'd watch him roll off these reports off these
antiquated printers, and he'd sit there and study those reports,
and then he'd pulled me around on the side of
his desk and he'd says, so, here's where we're doing well.
And here's what we're not doing well, and here's what
I need to do to help incentivize or encourage this person. Yeah,
(02:45):
my dad, My dad is my hero. My father loved sports.
I and junior high and so played basketball and football,
and I wasn't good enough to progress to the high
school level, so pivoted and turned my attention to golf.
(03:06):
So I end up going to the University of Tennessee
at Martin, and it's about two and a half hours
two hours and fifteen minutes northeast of Memphis, Tennessee. It's
about eight miles from the Kentucky border. In Martin, Tennessee,
at the time of a very small town, and certainly
for a kid coming from Memphis, Tennessee, it was a
town of five thousand people that at the time had
(03:27):
about fifty five hundred students. I got to Martin because
I played golf. I wanted to play collegiate golf, and
I had the opportunity to be recruited by quite a
few schools in the mid South, and ultimately the golf
coach at University of Tennessee Martin, Grover Page, offered me
a compelling scholarship to come and play golf at UT Martin.
(03:53):
So I went to UT Martin. My fraternity my first
year was a golf team, and I loved the golf team.
We had a very good golf team, and we played
Division two golf and we're always on the verge of
being able to go to the NCAA Championships or not.
My first three years we got to go. Unfortunately, I
wasn't good enough to make those trips the first three years.
(04:16):
But golf was a big part of my existence in school.
I studied accounting while I was at the University of
Tennessee at Martin, and I can remember talking to my
mom and dad. People these days wouldn't remember these phone calls,
but back then, we didn't carry a phone with us.
(04:37):
We didn't have a phone in our dorm room. We
had to go downstairs and wait in line for one
of the two or three phone booths that were in
the blobbe level at the dormitory. And I would call
home two or three times a week, and my mother
and father, this is something people wouldn't realize today either.
They would both jump on a landline at home and
(04:58):
we would have a three way conversation without having to
merge a call, And I can remember one particular phone
call my freshman year and my father, as I mentioned,
was big into management, and I knew I wanted to
go into business because I wanted to be my father.
(05:20):
And I can remember this phone call. He said, son,
if you decided on a major, and I said, yes, sir, Dad,
I have And he said, okay, what is it? And
I said, I'm going to be an accounting major. He said,
what You're going to be an accounting major? You know
those people, they kind of sit in the corner. They
(05:41):
wear a green ice shade and a green arm band
and all they do is count the numbers. He said,
so why do you want to be an accountant? And
I said, Dad, is my understanding that accounting is the
most difficult business degree that they have here at UT Martin,
and so that's why I chose it. He said, that's
good enough for me. That's good enough for me. It
(06:06):
would have been good enough for my dad too. And
a very similar philosophy about life and his father finally
moved to Memphis for one reason, to not move anymore.
He doesn't want to move his kids around from place
to place to place. The majority of the lessons about leadership.
I learn from my mom and dad, and it all starts,
Bill Rhodes says, from truly caring about people and watching
(06:29):
his father and mother do that and have that be
the anchor of their life. My dad was my hero,
Bill said. And then of course that line about accounting,
I understand it's the hardest major at the University of
Tennessee at Martin And of course that was it for
his dad and his mom. When we come back, more
(06:49):
of this storytelling Bill Rhodes story. By the way, we're
looking for your stories too, I mentioned at the beginning
of every show, But father and mother stories. We love
them for Father's Day, we love them from Mother's Day,
we love them all year long. Then your mother and
father's stories to our American Stories dot Com. When we
return more of Bill Rhodes's story here on our American Story.
(07:30):
Lee Habibi here the host of our American Stories. Every
day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across
this great country, stories from our big cities and small towns.
But we truly can't do the show without you. Our
stories are free to listen to, but they're not free
to make. If you love what you hear, go to
our American Stories dot com and click the donate button.
(07:53):
Give a little, give a lot. Go to our American
Stories dot com and give and we're back with our
American Stories and Bill Rhodes's story. Bill has been the
(08:14):
president and CEO of AutoZone since two thousand and five.
We just heard how much his father meant to him.
In fact, Bill chose to study accounting at the University
of Tennessee at Martin because it was the most challenging
business degree they offered, and he figured it would train
him to be at least half the professional that his
father was. Back to Bill, as I was pursuing my
(08:39):
accounting degree, I learned two things. One, I didn't particularly
like accounting. More importantly, it didn't like me. And so
in my senior year I was progressing it. I was
a pretty good student, and I'd made pretty good grades,
but I really had to work at it. And I
was taking this one class. It was called auditing, and
(09:02):
doctor Relda Baron, the head of the accounting department at
the University of Tennessee, was the professor, and she's very talented,
and we kept going through this class and I was
really working hard. I was close to graduating. Really excited
about graduating. I decided I was not going to be
an accountant and I was therefore going to go straight
(09:22):
to the University of Memphis to pursue an MBA. But
this auditing class, really I was struggling in and I
was going to see doctor Baron on a regular basis,
and I'd say, doctor Baron, you know I'm trying this.
I just don't get the concepts. And I worked it,
and she coached me and tutored me, and ultimately came
down to the end and I said, after the final exam,
(09:45):
I said, doctor Baron, I'm sorry, I did not do
well in this class. And I know that I'm on
the verge of an F or a D. And I
plead with you to give me. And I know it
would be a gift to give me my first ever
D in any class at UT Martin, because if you don't,
(10:06):
you're gonna have to deal with me again next fall.
And I don't think it's gonna go any better. And
I promise you, I promise you I will never be
an oddity. So I go on to the University of
Memphis and I'm going to grad school. I'm living with
my parents and I come home one day my senior
(10:29):
year in a ut Martin. I had a good golf season,
so I made academic All American despite my d and
I made an honorable mention All American. I got a
chance to Our team didn't make it to the NCAA's
that year, but I was invited as an individual to
play in the Division two national championships down in Columbus, Georgia.
(10:49):
And was you know, the kind of the pinnacle of
my career in golf. But there was a right up
in the commercial appeal about me. And after that right
up in the commercial appeal, the little article. I came
home one day from school, and back then you used
to write notes on the refrigerators, and there was a
(11:09):
note from my mom said, Mike Hopper called from Ernston Winnie.
You'd like for you to call him. So I picked
up the phone and I called him. Said, High, this
is Bill Roads, said High, Bill, this is Mike Hopper.
I'm in charge of the audit practice at Ernston Winnie.
Ernston Winnie was at the time one of eight large
public accounting firms. And this was in this portion was
(11:33):
in Memphis, Tennessee. In my hometown, and Mike said, I'd
liked it. I read about you in the commercial Appeal.
I'd like to talk to you. And so back then
public accounting, you wore dark suits, you wore white shirts,
you wore a tie. There was nobody in public accounting
that had facial hair. So I've go into this interview
(11:56):
with Mike Hopper, the head of the audit practice of
Ernston Winnie in Memphis, NC. And I put on my
best I put on my duckhead khaki's, my navy blazer.
I borrowed a tie from my dad. My dad's three
inches taller than I AMC has extra long ties. It
hung down too long. Put on my penny loafers, and
(12:17):
I had a full beard. And I went to Ernston
Winnie to interview with Mike Hopper. I looked way out
of place. I sat in his corner office and Mike
started interviewing me. Where'd you go? How'd you do in school?
That said, we're about three minutes in. He said, stop,
let me tell you why you're here. Ernston Winnie in Memphis, Tennessee,
(12:38):
has three different departments organizations. Got a consulting division in
the bond consulting business, we got a tax division. We
got an audit division. Mike said, I believe I've been
at the time, he'd been there twenty some odd years.
He was in the audit practice and charge the audit practice.
And he said, every summer we have a golf competition
(13:01):
between tax, audit and consulting. He said, Bill, every year
I've been here, not only has audit never won. We've
finished last. Every time I want to hire you, we'll
hire you as an intern. It's May of nineteen eighty eight.
(13:21):
The Golf Challenges is in July. You can work one
hour a week, you can work sixty hours a week.
I don't care. You can work through July, and after
the Golf Challenge you can quit, or you can work
through December when you graduate. But we won't hire you
full time because you just you know, you don't have
(13:42):
the grades from your college to be a full time
person here. And he said, what do you think? I said,
so I can write that I can work for Ernston
Winnie on my resume. Why in the world would I
not do that? And so I did. And it was
right when personal computers were becoming slumwhat mobile we called
(14:06):
them luggables. Ernst and Winnie National come out with us
new scheduling software. So they put me in charge of
figuring out how to use this new scheduling software and
I was pretty effective at it. It went well. July
came along and we won by a long shot the
Golf Challenge and it was the last year they ever
(14:27):
had the Golf Challenge, never had it again. So fast
forward to December of nineteen eighty eight. I'm graduating from
University of Memphis with an NBA. I've gone through a
year of testing with termin X, my father's company, and
I'm going to be a manager in training for my
(14:48):
father's company. And they had told me all along. My
father was a regional manager from Saint Louis to Knoxville
to Jackson, Mississippi, and they said, you know, you can
do your manager and training program for a year a
year and a half in Memphis, but beyond that, you're
gonna have to move outside of your father's territory to
become a branch manager. So we've decided you're going to
(15:09):
have to move to Philadelphia. And it was not Philadelphia, Mississippi.
It was Philadelphia, Pennsylvania within two or three weeks, so
it was a shock for a Southern boy from Memphis, Tennessee,
that you never really been that far away except when
I went to ut martin two hours and fifteen minutes away.
(15:30):
And remember Ernston Young had told me that I would
not be able to go to work there full time.
The same day that I was told I had to
move to Philadelphia, I got a letter in the mail
from Ernston Winning saying that they wanted me to come
on the audit practice as an auditor. They were paying
me about four thousand dollars more than I was going
to make living in Philadelphia working for termin X, and
(15:53):
so much against what I promised doctor Barron, and much
against what my dad really didn't want. I became an
accountant and I joined Ernston Winnie at the time full
time in January nineteen eighty nine. There's no question my
time in Ernst and Young was incredibly beneficial for me
(16:15):
in my career. I talked to kids all the time.
In fact, I talked to one of my nephews yesterday
who's considering going to work for Ernst and Young, And
I think it's an incredible place to go get an education.
How many other kids twenty three, twenty four twenty five
young adults have the opportunity to go in and see seven, eight, nine,
(16:39):
ten businesses over the course of a year, and see
which businesses and business models work, which ones don't work
and why. See which leaders are very successful and what
kind of traits do they have that lead to that success.
See which kind of leaders fail and where they lose
(17:00):
their support from their teams. Probably in my case, as
much as anything. See which cultures work and which cultures
don't work. So I call it one of the greatest
NBA programs in the world. And you've been listening to
Bill Rhodes tell one heck of an unlikely story. Accounty
(17:20):
didn't like me, and I didn't like accounting, and it
turned out, well, not so much to be true. He
gets that gig because of his golfing expertise. I love
what that hiring partner said. You can work an hour
a week, you can work sixty hours a week. I
don't care, but we won't hire you full time. And
of course that turned out to not quite be true.
(17:43):
When we come back more of this remarkable story, the
unlikely story of Bill Rhodes's journey to chairman, CEO and
president of AutoZone. Here on our American stories, and we're
(18:08):
back with our American stories in the final portion of
Bill Rhodes's story. When we last left off, Bill had
secured a job at Ernston Young formerly Ernston Winnie, despite
being told that after his internship there would be no
job for him. He returned to Bill, I was offered
(18:29):
a job to come to AutoZone from Ernston Young. I
was doing really well at ian Wy, enjoying what I
was doing. But here was this chance to go to
work for AutoZone. What a fortuitous decision for me. I'm
not sure it's worked out very well for AutoZone, but
it's worked out extremely well for me. So I joined
AutoZone on December fifth, nineteen ninety four, and I was
(18:52):
the manager of inventory Accounting. Quickly I moved into some
other parts of the organization, and the most fortunate thing
for me was the leadership team at AutoZone moved me
into a lot of different parts of the company over time.
So I started in inventory accounting, they asked me to
(19:14):
start an internal audit program, the first ever for autozonn
Then I was moved into our store operations team as
the store operations support person helping support our divisional vice presidents.
I was then moved back to finance. I guess I
got promoted to vice president while I was in store
operations support. I got moved back to finance in my
(19:37):
early thirties because they wanted our CFO was considering retiring
and I was moved back because they wanted me to
be the potential successor to the CFO. Four months into that,
I was promoted to senior vice president and controller at
a very very young age and was really excited. And
it's doing great things, I thought, and the company was
(19:59):
doing well. And came in one day and the president
of the company, another one of my mentors, Tim Vargo,
called me into his office and said, hey, Bill, we've
decided you're not going to be This is four months
after I got promoted to senior vice president. Tim Vargo
calls me in and says, Bill, we've decided you're not
(20:20):
going to be the next CFO. In fact, we've hired
him and he's starting on Monday. He's going to take
your job. You're going to be demoted back to a
vice president and we don't know what you're gonna do,
but we like you and I said, wait a minute.
I was tracking with everything until he said, but we
(20:41):
like you. And so I went a week we're without
a job. That the following thursday, Tim Vargo called me
back in his office and he said, we decided what
you're gonna do. We're gonna make you a divisional vice president.
So I went from being the controller of the organization
with about two hundred people in my organization, most of
(21:02):
which sat on the same floor I did in the
building downtown Memphis, to all of a sudden, I was
responsible for five hundred and twenty five stores in eleven
states and eight thousand people. And I said, and you
call that a demotion, And it was one of those.
It's probably the luckiest demotion that's ever happened. And I
(21:24):
had a wonderful opportunity to go and spend time with
the people that are the most important in our business,
the people that are on the front lines that are
dealing with our customers and providing wild customer service every day.
I was only in that role for about eleven months.
We had a new CEO that came in, and when
(21:44):
that happens, many times, leadership teams get shaken up a
little bit and Iris did as well. A few people left,
and our new CEO, Steve Idlin, promoted me back to
a senior vice president, but this time in charge of
our supply chain. Now here's this account from Ernst and
Young that tried to be an operator for eleven months,
(22:07):
that's now trying to be a supply chain expert. It
was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed the time
in both store operations and supply chain. I was in
the supply chain role for about six months and our
CFO transition actually happened. Our CEO at the time, he
asked me to be responsible for information technology and the
(22:30):
supply chain, and just really learned in both my operations
and supply chain years empathy for what we asked people
to do every day and the commitment that they have
for the success of this organization and frankly the success
of their families. People work awfully hard, and I get
to see that firsthand. Our CEO called a board meeting
(22:56):
on a Friday afternoon and announced that he was leaving
and he was going to take on the chairman and
CEO role of Office Depot. It was the week of
spring breaks when he called the meeting. I was in
Colorado with my family and I had a skiing accident
on Wednesday and had a severe concussion. It was not
cleared to drive an automobile for a week. That was
(23:16):
on Wednesday, and I got a call on Sunday afternoon.
I knew something was up because I'd had some conversations
with our general counsel, but I didn't know that our
CEO was leaving or anything. And I got a phone
call at four o'clock on Sunday afternoon from our founder
and he said, Bill, I want to let you know
Steve resigned on Friday. The boards met all weekend and
(23:39):
we've made you the president and CEO. I'm coming back
on Tuesday. We have a board meeting on Tuesday at noon.
I'll see you in your office at eleven o'clock. And
I said, Pet, did anybody tell you that I had
a ski in accident? And he said, yeah, get to work.
So I went to work. So today AutoZone is about
(24:03):
a sixteen billion dollars sales organization. We have seven nearly
seven thousand stores in the United States, Mexico, and Brazil.
We have one hundred five thousand people. One hundred five
thousand people that We don't call employees, We call autosowners.
They have a passion, have a dedication to drive customer service.
You think about a significant part of our organization is
(24:26):
in the retail business. Well, most of the times when
you go see a retailer, you're excited about what you
can buy. You're buying some new glasses or a new
shirt or whatever. You're really excited. Right, That's not the
case when you come to AutoZone. You woke up, you're
trying to go to work, carded and start. You got
to go to auto Zone and find out that maybe
I've got to spend one hundred fifty dollars on a
(24:48):
new battery. You know what. One hundred and fifty dollars
wasn't in my budget. But I've got to do it
anyway because I got to get to work. Our people
are our secret sauce. Autosowners are I shall breed. They
have to be problem solvers. So another one of my
quotes that I often say is AutoZone isn't for everybody,
(25:09):
and everybody isn't for AutoZone. And that's okay because we
have to have somebody with a servant heart. When somebody
walks into that store and they're having a bad day,
their car won't start. We have to have somebody that
is empathetic for the customer situation and is willing to
(25:32):
help that customer solve that problem. We have lots of
different practices. One of them is called gotcha go out
to the customer's automobile. So if a customer walks in
and says, my car is doing X, Y or Z,
our people stop what they're doing. They go out to
the car and they look, listen, smell what's going on,
(25:54):
with cards to help try to diagnose the problem. Our
people are problem solvers and they do it every single day.
Many times. Our people go out and solve a problem
for free, and we love that. So if you go
out in the car won't start, well, all of a sudden,
the auto's owner sees it's a corroded battery cable. They
(26:14):
clean it up, get rid of the corrosion, tightened down
the clamp, and guess what, the car starts and the
customer says, oh, well, what I owe you nothing? Well, okay,
well here's ten dollars of tip. No, ma'am, I can't
take that. We're here to serve you. That's what service
is about. That's what our team excels at. And a
(26:41):
great job on the production by Robbie Davis and a
special thanks to Bill Rhodes for sharing his story. Seven
thousand stories, one hundred and five thousand autos owners and
they do have a servant heart. If you've ever gone,
you know what gotcha means because they come out to
that car and they try to solve problems and it's
the heart of their business is their servant hearts. And
(27:02):
by the way, there are two hundred and seventy million
cars on the road. Most of them are used. The
average age twelve years old, so we all know what
it's like to wake up and that battery doesn't work.
Bill Rhodes's story AutoZone story here on our American Stories.
(27:37):
This is our American Stories. And when we first bumped
into doctor Charles Kemper of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, we were mazed.
Graduating from Duke University in nineteen forty, this one hundred
year old doctor has seen generations come and go in
his town and actually help deliver a whole lot of
(27:59):
the those generations at birth. Use our own Monty Montgomery
with his story, Doctor Charles Kemper grew up on the
East Coast in Baltimore, Maryland. Baltimore is like a big
metropolis most any place, but Baltimore at the time, at
one time was a principal city in the United States,
(28:23):
right on its Hispeake Bay. He was a center for shipping.
And I had good parents. My dad had a terrible temper.
He would come home tired, exhausted at work in twenty
hours a day, carrying suitcases. He was a merchandiser. He
would travel to all these little townels had little stores
(28:47):
and pull out this big sample box that opened them
up and show them what they might like to buy. Well, anyway,
he'd come home, wouldn't get mad at trivial things like
why didn't you fix me to those fried potatoes like
(29:07):
I always like. I guess he was so tired and
exhausted it everything annoyed him. But I think he was
very good hearted. Nevertheless, and I came across a letter
he wrote once in which everybody hates me. Yeah, it
was this his perception. I remember one time I and
(29:31):
my cousin Sydney, we played hooky from Sunday school and
he was supposed to pick us up on a certain
corner downtown Baltimore. We went to the wrong corner, or
waited for him at the wrong corner, or he forgot
which corner it was. I don't know, but anyway, boy,
(29:55):
I was scared at what he wouldn't you going to say?
You do? I some of those characteristics, but I think
they have gradually evolved as they got older and understanding,
and I certainly don't feel it. Wait and eager to
live a life better than his father did, Charles decided
(30:16):
that he wanted to become a doctor, a dream his
mother was more than happy to support who When I graduated,
she gave me a doctor's bag. I still have it.
So he used it all all these years as a
sort of a truism that Jewish mothers were ambitious that
(30:38):
their sons would have become doctors and not politicians. After
serving as a medic in the Army Air Corps in
World War Two, Kemper decided to move to Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin,
setting the city aside for the country. Due to a
number of reasons. My wife parents lived in a town
not far from here, and he was pregnant. This was
(31:01):
after I had a decide where I was going to practice,
and I thought it'd be good to practice here in
this small town because she would be close to her parents.
Went at her first child, and one of the doctors
at the hospital where I was resident, said, why don't
(31:23):
you come to Chipwo Falls. There's only ten doctors here.
So I came here. I was the eleventh doctor. My
parents were happy that I was a doctor, but they
wanted me to stay in Baltimore, and they thought that
this country out here was the wild West where cowboys
and Indians. When they arrived to see me visit me
(31:48):
for the first time, as they were walking into the house,
a car pulled up with four hunters in it. They
pulled up in front of the house and yelled at me,
did you see where the wolf ront? My mother almost faded.
(32:08):
I really came from a different world, but I wanted
to be in a place where I where I knew
everybody and got acquainted with him, and they knew me.
I remember the very first patient I had in town.
All the doctors in those days in this town had
(32:30):
their office upstairs, which is uh came was stupid, didn't
you think about it? Because people with heart trouble to
climb little stairs. Well. Anyway, the first day I in
my practice, I had my office upstairs in downtown and
(32:50):
had to walk down the hall, and I was the
last office there. And my first day in practice, I
parked a car out front and I waited there and
I didn't see a patient until just about four thirty
and old man walked in and he didn't have anything
seriously wrong with him, but he asked me if I
(33:12):
would come see his father. See his father only smokes,
he mean, it must be really old. I was curious,
so I said sure, I'll be happy to come see him. Well,
when he left and I walked down to my car
and low, I had a ticket for illegal parking, and
(33:34):
the fine was exactly the same as what the patient
paid me, which was two books. I used to like
to make house calls because that took me out in
the country. And I always said, my binoculars on the
seat beside me, and I would stop and look at
(33:55):
stare at some birds. You heard right. Doctor Kemper has
always had a fascination with birds, dating back to his
time in World War Two. When crossing the Pacific by boat,
he watched albatross and other birds off the ship out
of boredom primarily. Charles now tells the story of one
of his memorable bird watching experiences. There was one time
(34:19):
at the base of this hill, or at the top
of the hill, is a Catholic church and the nuns
live in the convent. Well, anyway, I was driving up
the hill and I got to the top. I saw
a white, pure white starling that I had captured and
(34:39):
put a band on it about a week before. Bird
Banding is an occupation by the US Fishing Wildlife Service.
In those days, it didn't have high technology. That was
one way of studying, putting a serial numbered band on
(35:01):
aluminum band around the ankle of the bird, and that way,
if the bird was ever recovered, they would know where
the bird went. But anyway, I pulled my car to
a stop and jumped out of the car with my
(35:23):
binoculars and I stared at that starling. I wanted to
see if it had a been on this leg and
just sen curtain and the convent came down. Suddenly, an
um nurse or some lady sister in the convent saw
me with my binoculars and and I thought, oh, there
(35:49):
goes my reputation. So I had to leave that down,
and Charles even took some of his patients birdy chin.
I remember I had one lady who was old enough
to be my mother, was interested in birds, and one
(36:11):
day I took her. She and her husband and myself
were out to swamp just outside of town, and there
was an interesting bird there that we were looking at.
The bird was a bittern, which has a habit of
standing very still and with his bill pointed upward, and
(36:35):
he fades into the environment, but he doesn't move. That's
his means of defense. And we were on the roadside
and looking at that bird, which was about forty yards away,
and I wanted to see what would happen if I
picked up a small rock and throw it near the birds,
(36:56):
see if I could flush it fly away. Well, I
wasn't too accurate when through the rock it hit the bird,
and Missus Lundon was her name, anyway, she said right away,
I'm changing doctors. She thought i'd feel a rock at
(37:19):
the bird. I didn't feel a rock at the bird.
I was trying to miss the bird, just scare him
so he would see if he would fly off. And
even today, at one hundred years old, Charles still has
a fascination with birds. But as for his longevity, he
thanks their creator and his I was just lucky. I
(37:43):
had nothing to do with my longevity. I just say
good Lord had some reason for keeping me here, and
I firmly believe that. And you've been listening to doctor
Charles Kemper of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. What a unique voice.
Doctor Charles Kemper's story here on our American Story
Host
Lee Habeeb
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