[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 143 (Wednesday, October 5, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: October 5, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                       TRIBUTE TO CAL TURNER, SR.

 Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I rise today to comment a fellow 
Kentuckian, Cal Turner, Sr., for his outstanding achievement in 
discount merchandising. Mr. Turner has recently been inducted into the 
Discounting Hall of Fame, placing him among such famous retailers as 
Wal-Mart's Sam Walton.
  Fifty-five years ago, during the Great Depression, Cal Turner, Sr. 
and his father, J.L., a salesman with a third grade education, began a 
business endeavor purchasing failed merchants' inventories and selling 
them for a minimal profit. For many years, the Turners lived hand-to-
mouth, barely making ends meet. The buying at the bankruptcy auctions 
eventually led to the opening of the original Dollar Store in 
Springfield, KY in 1955. There, the Turners instituted the root of 
their success by making ``dollar-day sales'' an everyday procedure. 
Today, the Turner dynasty controls 1,940 stores in 24 States and is 
growing at the rate of about 300 stores a year.
  In 1977, Cal Sr. relinquished the presidency of the Dollar General 
Corp. to his son, Cal. Jr., who moved the executive offices to 
Nashville, TN in 1989. The administrative offices and distribution 
center still remain in Scottsville, KY employing 500 to 600 people. At 
79, Cal Sr. continues the duties of chairman emeritus while at the same 
time, managing a farm of 1,200 head of cattle.
  Although the Scottsville location continues to reap profits of nearly 
$3 million a year, Cal Sr. has maintained his ``country ways and 
values.'' He regularly gives to many charities and the church. After 
losing his wife to cancer 6 years ago, he donated some of his land for 
development of a new hospital. He also gave $1 million to the Lindsey 
Wilson College in Columbia, KY 3 years ago, which was used to build a 
new dining hall.
  Cal Turner, Sr. began his business in rural Kentucky which flourished 
into a successful, multistate corporation. From humble beginnings to 
fame and fortune, Mr. Turner has remained loyal to Kentucky and his 
county.
  Mr. President, I ask that the article from the Courier-Journal appear 
at this point in the Record.
  The article follows:

         [From the Louisville Courier & Journal, Oct. 2, 1994]

                           The Dollar General

                            (By C. Ray Hall)

       Scottsville, KY.--Cal Turner, the man who invented Dollar 
     General stores, wheeled his Range Rover around the town 
     square. As the scent of new-car English leather filled the 
     compartment, Turner looked for a parking space near the 
     busiest Dollar store in the country.
       To his immense satisfaction, he couldn't find one.
       ``I like to see us a little tight,'' said Turner, whose 
     mouth always seems to be crinkled into a smile. It's kind of 
     a cumulative smile. It's kind of a cumulative smile, 
     unerasable, fixed by 79 years of rare good fortune. (And, 
     more recently, by fame. Six weeks ago he was inducted into 
     the Discounting Hall of Fame, a distinction that's hard to 
     discount when you consider it includes Wal-Mart's Sam Walton, 
     possibly the most famous merchant of modern times.)
       Turner wheeled the truck down the street that runs beside 
     the store. There's a couple of years back, someone took a 
     photo of him. Turner, a man who tips his hat to ladies and 
     says, ``Hi you?'' projected a vision of village squiredom in 
     the photo, except that nearing age 80, he was kneeling and 
     plucking grass from the sidewalk.
       Turner's son Steve says: ``I've always maintained that his 
     store was his presenting of his soul to the public. Nothing 
     was to stand between him and that presentation, not even a 
     blade of grass.''
       After a trip around the block, Turner nestled the Range 
     Rover in front of the store. Yielding to the urge to show off 
     a little, he pushed the button that raises and lowers the 
     frame, depending on the terrain. While touring his hilly 
     farm, he rides high. But this being pavement, a lowering was 
     in order. The British luxury truck curtsied toward the Dollar 
     store.
       ``For $50,000, you can get a lot on these things, whether 
     you need them or not,'' he said, sounding more chagrined than 
     proud. Inside the store, surrounded by $10 jeans, $5 shirts 
     and 25-cent mousetraps, he yielded to pride, though. The 
     subject was not a $50,000 truck but a 50-cent greeting card.
       ``A lot of our customers are like me,'' he said. ``They 
     can't write very well and they can't spell. I got so tired of 
     going to a store and paying a dollar or more for, greeting 
     cards,''
       So, two-for-a-dollar greeting cards.
       ``You wouldn't believe,'' he said, ``how many millions of 
     these things we sell.''
       Certainly enough to keep the family in British luxury 
     trucks. Turner's is a hand-me-up from his son Cal Jr., the 
     company president and chairman who drives a Range Rover 
     through the rugged outback of Nashville, Tenn.
       The elder Turner's truck isn't exactly a trophy.
       ``He's never been a materialistic man, by any stretch of 
     the imagination,'' said Steve. ``Which makes it extremely 
     difficult, of course, to try to buy him any sort of gift. 
     It's not just a matter of he doesn't need it, he doesn't want 
     it.''
       The Range Rover wasn't a gift, either. ``Oh, he didn't give 
     it to me,'' Turner said of his son, laughing gently. ``He let 
     me buy it from him.'' Thereby hangs a double moral that has 
     usually served the Turners well: Keep it in the family, and 
     get your money's worth. (Cal Sr. is so notoriously thrifty 
     that he once told his family that he couldn't sleep well in 
     an expensive hotel, for worrying that he wouldn't get his 
     money's worth. ``It's hard,'' he said, ``to sleep that 
     hard.'')
       That's been the way the Turners have run things since Cal 
     and his father, J.L., opened the forerunner of Dollar General 
     55 years ago this month: fretting about value and values. 
     They fretted even more in 1968, when Dollar General went 
     public, and Wall Street met Scottsville's Main Street. But 
     the Turners have often resisted Wall Street's advice, partly 
     because there's a Turner's name atop the company hierarchy.
       ``A hired gun might not be secure enough to manage for the 
     long run,'' said Cal Jr.


                            churning profits

       For the Turners, it has already been a long and improbable 
     run. Cal. Sr. and his father, a salesman with a third-grade 
     education and an MBA in real life, regularly worked 
     bankruptcy auctions during the Depression, buying up store 
     inventories, then selling them for a small profit. Cal's 
     delight at learning the trade was tempered by the fact that 
     it meant scavenging among the ruined dreams of older men.
       ``What a sobering, sad situation,'' he said. ``You'd see a 
     gray-headed, fine-looking man standing there. Then you didn't 
     have any Chapter 11's. When a fellow went broke, he really 
     went broke. And that fellow . . . he more than likely had 
     children in college. They'd lived well all these years. And 
     there they are selling his store. He's broke.
       ``That really will make you awfully careful with your money 
     if you ever get some, so it won't happen to you.
       ``That has stayed with me all my life.''
       It took a long time to feel secure; they were running from 
     the same demons as the broke, broken men of the Depression.
       He and his father each put up $5,000 to start a wholesale 
     company in 1939. They broke into retailing, Turner said, 
     ``because I had to have a place to sell my mistakes.'' As the 
     business grew, so did the worries. Cal and J.L. Turner 
     sweated through their own version of Saturday night fever.
       ``I used to call every Saturday night, maybe there'd be 15 
     stores, to see if I could cover the checks I had written,'' 
     Cal Sr. said. ``If I didn't quite make it, I'd get my father 
     and we go down to the Nashville banker. I'd go in and tell 
     him I have to have another $25,000. I needed it that day too. 
     I didn't go until I needed it.''
       After 16 years of staying a few steps ahead of the banker, 
     the Turners hit upon their enduring inspiration. Incited by 
     other merchants' dollar-day sales, the Turners decided to 
     make every day dollar day. They opened the first Dollar store 
     in 1955, in Springfield, Ky. They stocked the stores with 
     close-outs, irregulars and imports. Nothing sold for more 
     than a dollar, Ultimately, when inflation forced them to 
     break the dollar price barrier, they did it in an ingenious 
     way.
       ``We ended up with shoes for a dollar a shoe,'' Turner 
     said.
       The inevitable happened at a Memphis, Tenn., store. ``I had 
     a one-legged fellow come in.'' So, he sold him a shoe for a 
     dollar.
       ``I imagine we still have that other shoe in the Memphis 
     store,'' cracked Steve.
       This isn't to suggest that Turner held on to goods. The 
     idea was to churn the merchandise, even at a loss, to keep it 
     moving. Not that long ago, even the younger generation of 
     company leaders resisted computerizing the operation. The 
     theory was that computers just couldn't keep up, because the 
     Turners moved so fast. It's part of corporate lore that Cal 
     Sr. approved buying the first computer after being assured it 
     was an ``IBM accounting machine.''
       He's something of an accounting machine himself, getting 
     the good news from secretary Earline Frost that ``our stock 
     is up to 26 today,'' or poring over computer screens and 
     printouts for reports of a company so leanly staffed that it 
     averages fewer than five employees per store. (The company is 
     similarly staffed at the top. ``Every executive in our 
     company has about 125 percent of a job,'' said Cal Jr.)
       Computer screens can tell you only so much. Cal Sr. was at 
     the Glasgow, Ky., Wal-Mart recently, doing a little 
     comparison shopping. He paused in the jeans section to study 
     a sign.
       ``They said, `Dollar Store price, $8. Our price $7.96.' I 
     thought, `I'll give 'em more than 4 cents to mention our name 
     to their customer.'''
       Which begs a question. How does Dollar General keep from 
     getting cannibalized by giants like Wal-Mart, Kmart and 
     Target?
       ``They're the elephant,'' says Cal Jr. ``They've got enough 
     of their own agenda and mischief to put up with that they 
     don't need to pay attention to this little gnat.''
       It's a swarm of gnats: a billion-dollar company with 1,940 
     stores in 24 states. And the swarm is growing by about 300 
     stores a year. Even so, the hometown Dollar Store in 
     Scottsville still does the most business: almost $3 million a 
     year.
       The growth spurt came during the reign of Cal Jr., who took 
     over as president in 1977, with about 700 stores in the fold. 
     His father, a man not given to prideful utterances, said he 
     is more proud of what his son has done with the company than 
     of his own accomplishments.
       ``He does a better job of running the company than I ever 
     could,'' he said. ``I couldn't run it this size.''
       When the younger Turner was a teenager casting about for 
     careers, he thought little of the store trade. He resented it 
     because it ``invaded our home'' and consumed so much of this 
     father's time.
       ``I thought about medicine,'' he said, ``but my dad 
     conspired with the local doctor for me to get out of school 
     and witness an unsightly operation, and that changed my 
     mind.''


                            small-town life

       The sight of blood in the operating room is nothing 
     compared with the sight of blood in the corporate boardroom. 
     The Turners avoided such a bloodbath when Cal Jr. and his 
     younger brother Steve both vied for the top spot. ``They 
     couldn't both run the company,'' their father said. ``Cal Jr. 
     was older and plenty good.'' He didn't take sides, though, 
     expecting his children could work it out. They did, in a 
     peaceful, but not painless resolution: Steve moved on to 
     banking and developing.
       Blood and bitterness might have flowed in 1989, when Cal 
     Jr. moved the executive office to Nashville against his 
     father's wishes.
       ``Sam Walton didn't have to leave Bentonville,'' the father 
     groused, playing a new variation on a familiar theme: the joy 
     and wonder of small-town life.
       ``I maintain that when you're raising a family, they'll be 
     better people and you'll be a better person in a small town 
     because everybody knows where you went last night and what 
     you did,'' he said. ``I don't think any of us have as many 
     secrets as we'd like to think we do at times; but I'm telling 
     you, in a small town, you don't have any.''
       If Cal Sr. were worried that moving to the city would 
     change his son, or the company, for the worse, those fears 
     seem to have been allayed.
       ``I think I'm more of a defender of the country ways and 
     values now that I'm in the city than I ever was when I was in 
     the country,'' said Cal Jr. ``I don't like to see anybody put 
     the little person down, and I think you see it more in the 
     city than you do in the country. And I'm inclined to crusade 
     for the little guy.''
       Cal Sr. also fretted that the city might make them soft. 
     ``I don't want to have a social club,'' he said. ``If he 
     hires somebody who turns out to be a socialite, he gets rid 
     of him.''
       In this way, Turner indicated, his son is stronger than he.
       ``I never could fire anybody,'' he said.
       That's the knock on Cal Sr. He's too nice.
       ``I was fascinated that he was able to be successful 
     because he's so kind, gentle and forgiving,'' Steve said. 
     ``He kept people working in the company that others would 
     have fired in a minute. Of course, what that did was build 
     some highly unusual loyalty. There were people that had been 
     given a second, third and fourth chance that now would kill 
     for him, because they knew out there is the rest of the world 
     you don't get treated that way.
       ``It always fascinated me that somebody didn't get all of 
     his money before he could make it.''
       When the executives headed 60 miles south, it still left 
     behind a robust contingent of 500-600 employees in 
     Scottsville, home of the administrative offices and 
     distribution center. There, above a sprawling complex on the 
     edge of town, the rim of a hill is solid with Dollar General 
     truck trailers; the horizon, truly is full of Dollar signs. 
     Though he will turn 80 next spring, Cal Sr. still reports to 
     this happy valley of prosperity six days a week, brown-
     bagging his lunch.
       As ``chairman emeritus,'' Cal Sr. has a large title and 
     little responsibility. But when you've been working 60 years, 
     it's hard to stop.
       ``I don't want to get in the way,'' he said, ``but I don't 
     want to get out of the way either. . . .''
       Maybe it has something to do with the sense of place, the 
     thing that causes Turner to say, ``I feel sorry for everybody 
     that doesn't live in Scottsville, Ky.''
       With the exception of about 4,300 people, that's everybody 
     on the planet: It's also all his children. The eldest, Laura 
     Jo, lives in Florida. Another daughter, Betty, lives in 
     Louisiana. The two sons spend most of their time in 
     Nashville. Does Turner feel sorry for his children?
       ``In that case, I feel sorry for me that they don't live 
     here,'' he said.
       The company he gave so much to is now giving back. ``I like 
     to think 20-25 years ago, it needed me,'' he said. ``Now I 
     need it.''
       One reason he needs it is the mile-wide hole in his life 
     the past six years, since his wife of nearly 52 years, Laura 
     Katherine, died of cancer.
       ``There can't be anybody else. We were lifetime lovers and 
     friends and all that goes with, perfection, I guess, in 
     marriage.''
       ``Gosh, they were a dedicated couple,'' Steve said. ``She 
     died in `88. I just knew this would be the case where one of 
     the spouses dies and the other one lasts three or four 
     months. Of course he loves life, and he has tremendous love 
     for the company and what he does.''
       If being chairman emeritus, talisman, touchstone and 
     institutional memory of a billion-dollar company can't fill 
     your life, there are other consolations. Turner owns a farm 
     with 1,200 head of cattle, inspiring observations such as 
     this: ``I can remember a time when we were ashamed to say we 
     were from the country. Now we're proud of it.''


                           the gift of living

       Owning, it seems, is less important than giving. He gave 
     some of his farm land for a new hospital. One supplicant 
     seeking money for a church got a donation despite the fact 
     she addressed her request to ``Cow turner.'' Three years ago 
     he gave $1 million to Lindsey Wilson College in nearby 
     Columbia, explaining, ``The president over there is a 
     Methodist minister, and these little colleges need to make up 
     money.''
       At first, Turner wanted the gift to be anonymous. But John 
     Begley, the president, asked him to go public, convincing 
     Turner it would inspire others to give similar gifts. It did. 
     ``Since then we've had four other million-dollar gifts,'' 
     Begley said. (Turner's million went toward a dining hall.)
       Turner has a tender spot for Methodist preachers. In his 
     youth, Cal Jr, thought seriously of becoming one. ``I think 
     that scared him,'' Cal Jr, says of his father. (Not just 
     because it might deny Dollar General a future chief 
     executive, but because the elder Turner probably couldn't 
     devise a way to dissuade him. He could send an aspiring 
     doctor to see gory surgery, but what could he do to a 
     prospective preacher? Take him to church, from gory to 
     glory?)
       Memories of another Methodist preacher, Gainy Bohanon, 
     inspire a long moment of reflection from the chairman 
     emeritus.
       ``I loved him dear,'' Turner said. ``I accused him of 
     ruining my golf game; we played golf together, and he 
     wouldn't cheat. He wouldn't move the ball toward the hole. 
     Gosh, that just really tore me up, because now I'm 
     embarrassed to move it.
       Turner once told the young preacher: ``If I ever say 
     anything that sounds smart or sounds all right. I want you to 
     make a note of it, because I expect you to preach my 
     funeral.''
       One of the melancholy revelations of long life is its 
     overdose of heavy ironies. On your 50th anniversary, your 
     wife can get into her wedding dress, only because a mortal 
     disease is taking her away, bit by bit: a litheness bought 
     with life itself. The minister you hope would say a few words 
     over your grave dies before you, despite his youth.
       Is anybody taking up Gainy Bohanon's charge, recording 
     Turner's smart sayings nowadays?
       ``No,'' the chairman emeritus said, ``and I've gotten where 
     I can't say them anymore.''
       It's enough to give a man . . . perspective. A way of 
     summing up that involves no mention of money from the man who 
     gave new meaning to the word dollar.
       ``There are so many ways to describe being rich. Good 
     health and friends, long life. . . . I know that God has been 
     good to me. I see other people with loads that I know I 
     couldn't bear. I've had a wonderful wife and four wonderful 
     children. . . .
       ``How lucky can you be?''

                          ____________________