[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 41 (Thursday, March 17, 2011)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1815-S1818]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                     TRIBUTE TO RICHARD JAY CORMAN

  Mr. McCONNELL. Madam President, I rise to recognize a good friend of 
mine, a very special Kentuckian who I and many others can look up to, 
Mr. Richard Jay Corman of Nicholasville, KY. Mr. Corman is a successful 
businessman, a self-made man who started what is today a multimillion-
dollar company. He is also living with cancer--and I do mean living, as 
for several years now he has continued to make the most of each day 
despite this disease, and he has become an inspiration for many.
  Richard grew up on a farm that did not get indoor plumbing until he 
was in the fourth grade. Now he is the head of the R.J. Corman Railroad 
Group, a construction and railroad operation company he founded when he 
was 18 years old. When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, the Corman 
Railroad Group was there, repairing the railways that had been damaged 
in dangerous conditions, and Richard was the one leading the operation. 
He is known for his intensity, his determination, and his indefatigable 
energy.
  Richard has so much energy he has barely slowed down even after being 
diagnosed with multiple myeloma nearly 10 years ago. Without treatment, 
he was told he may have only a year to live. He survives thanks to a 
fantastic medical team, and Richard himself is funding medical research 
that is not only keeping him alive but will benefit untold others. And 
Richard is still working and running marathons.
  I am proud to call Richard Jay Corman a friend and I think his life 
story holds lessons and inspiration for others. I read an article in 
Fortune magazine recently that was a fascinating look at Richard's life 
and work. I ask unanimous consent that the full article be printed in 
the Record.

[[Page S1816]]

  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

                      [From Fortune, Mar. 7, 2011]

                    The Ballad of Richard Jay Corman

               (By Carol Loomis, senior editor-at-large)

       Richard Jay Corman is hardly a household name. But this 
     entrepreneur, a son of Kentucky, has made himself a force in 
     the railroad industry, where in up-from-nothing fashion he 
     has created a thriving, highly respected company. Called R.J. 
     Corman Railroad Group, it's a construction and operating 
     enterprise that takes in around $300 million a year. Rick 
     Corman, 55, is its sole owner. Earnings? He will say only 
     that it's ``incredibly profitable.'' But we'll make an 
     informed estimate: This business, after taxes, has in more 
     than one recent year earned $50 million in profits.
       A Kentucky friend of mine, impressed by Corman and aware 
     also that he was facing some complex estate-planning 
     problems, suggested he'd make a good story. You couldn't say 
     the idea was a natural for us: Corman's financial feats, 
     while first-class, don't exactly put him in the Fortune 500 
     league. Still, Corman seemed worth a trip, so last fall I 
     went to see him in his home state. And well before we 
     finished talking, I realized that he just might be--apologies 
     here to the Reader's Digest, which popularized this title--
     the Most Unforgettable Character I've Ever Met in my more 
     than a half-century at Fortune. That may seem surprising 
     given that I've come to know more than a few standout CEOs 
     over the years. But the emphasis here is on the word 
     ``character.'' In the way he operates--and faces the world--
     Rick Corman is truly larger than life.
       And that's not just in business. Corman has also led a kind 
     of soap opera existence, whose chapters he began describing 
     to me in his twangy Southern drawl, and with a startling lack 
     of inhibition, within minutes of our starting to talk. We 
     were at his headquarters in the Lexington, Ky., suburb of 
     Nicholasville, in a small conference room adjoining a 
     cafeteria. He made sure I sat where I could look through a 
     glass wall down to a hangar in which there were parked two 
     private jets and a helicopter, all of them bright red (more 
     on that later). At that moment, I was too obtuse to grasp how 
     unusual those aircraft were. I mean, really, how many red 
     planes have you seen?
       Asking a journalist's throwaway kind of question, I said 
     that driving to Nicholasville I had noticed a sign that said 
     REELECT KEVIN CORMAN FOR SHERIFF, and was he related? ``No,'' 
     said Rick, ``but if I get into trouble, he will be.'' And 
     those were the first of many laughs that I got from the very 
     funny and quick Rick Corman, who laughs along at high 
     decibels and loves it.
       Hours later, Corman ended our talk with a plan for getting 
     me back on the road. Standing in his red baseball cap and 
     red-and-white corporate jacket outside his red-trimmed glass 
     offices, he told me to drive behind him as he led me to a 
     locked back gate and a shortcut to Lexington. The ride 
     unrolled a pristine scene of success. Ignoring a profusion of 
     red 25-mph signs he himself had ordered installed, Corman 
     raced at twice that speed for more than three miles through 
     2,000 acres of manicured rolling fields, past red sheds and 
     red work-barns and red bridges and small, shapely roadside 
     maples cooperatively turned, of course, red. In the left sky, 
     a pilot in still another red Corman helicopter was practicing 
     powerless emergency landings on a road. There were two 
     snapshots in white: the three farmhouse rooms that Corman 
     grew up in (and that got indoor plumbing when he was in the 
     fourth grade) and the large frame house, featuring half-
     octagon windows at the end of recently built wings, that he 
     lives in now.
       And as the back gate opened and I started to wave thanks, 
     Corman unfolded his gangly 6-foot-3 frame from his Lincoln 
     Navigator SUV, came to my right window, and said, ``I just 
     had to add one more thing: I would not be alive today if it 
     weren't for Kathy Martin.''
       So, yes, there is a dark side to this tale. Kathleen 
     Martin, a gastroenterologist, is Corman's Lexington doctor. 
     He has an incurable form of cancer: multiple myeloma, which 
     attacks the plasma cells in bone marrow and destroys bones. 
     The disease killed Wal-Mart (WMT) founder Sam Walton, 
     quickly, in 1992. But Corman was diagnosed nearly 10 years 
     ago, when he was only 45. With the aid of two bone marrow 
     transplants, the determined ministrations of both Dr. Martin 
     and Harvard's Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the strong 
     will that allowed him to build a major business from scratch, 
     Corman has survived.
       You can read about it on his company's website, where Dr. 
     Martin conveys the latest medical news about Corman. Last 
     July, following a period of remission for him, she posted a 
     new report saying that unfortunately a small amount of 
     recurrent cancer had been detected in his bone and that he 
     would therefore undergo new doses of radiation and 
     intensified chemotherapy.
       Then, in October, the doctor triumphantly posted ``good 
     news.'' A PET scan had found Corman's myeloma to have again 
     gone into remission. ``We remain hopeful,'' Dr. Martin added, 
     ``that new therapies will become available to treat any 
     future relapses.''
       Since R.J. Corman, the company, has no shareholders to 
     ponder this information, Martin's reports inform and reassure 
     the company's employees and customers--and even a board of 
     directors--who know Rick Corman to be the soul of the 
     company. True, he ostensibly retired about 14 years ago when 
     he suffered his third divorce and took over shared custody of 
     his three youngest children, then 6, 8, and 10. His 
     description of life as an idled, single father is that every 
     day he took the kids to the playground and sat there and 
     cried. And that was before he knew he had cancer.
       Reports of his ``retirement'' are, in any case, highly 
     exaggerated. When his storm-team unit won a large and hugely 
     difficult Hurricane Katrina railway-repair job in 2005, he 
     was on site, leading the work, which produced revenues of 
     more than $100 million. ``He knows everything that's going 
     on,'' says W.W. ``Half'' Halfhill, a close friend. And Corman 
     circulates within the company's offices, and even its 
     cafeteria, like a boss--``Tell the cook not to fix so much 
     catfish at a time, because it gets cold,'' he ordered as our 
     interview turned into lunch. Says a veteran Corman employee, 
     Dickie Dillon: ``He's the motivator.''
       Now, deeply aware of the doomsday clock, Rick Corman has 
     the untimely job of planning his company's future. Private 
     equity firms circle, some no doubt figuring they might sell 
     off pieces of the company. But out of loyalty to his 900 
     employees, Corman refuses to sell.
       Instead, he considers alternatives, a subject that 
     inevitably leads to the soap opera part of his life. His two 
     oldest children, a daughter and son who bear his name but 
     were born to a woman he never married, do not seem slated to 
     run the business. The three others--the ones he once took to 
     the playground--are still young, only in their twenties. On 
     the other hand, he has a highly competent staff, headed by a 
     talented president with whom Corman communicates with ease: 
     She's 49-year-old Tammie Taylor, dark-haired and attractive--
     and Corman has lived with her for nine years.
       Corman has a Kentucky expression for almost every 
     situation, including his death. That would be no big deal for 
     the company, he says: ``One monkey don't stop no show.'' But 
     in reality, for the Corman empire, that's as flawed in logic 
     as in grammar.
       Corman came from a farm family, which included a 
     grandfather who did odd jobs hauling goods and took Rick in 
     as a 25% partner when he was only 11. A few years later, high 
     school utterly bored him. He got married in September of his 
     senior year and, when she didn't turn out to be pregnant 
     after all, they got divorced. Totally impatient with 
     schooling, Corman missed 105 days out of a scheduled 175 
     during the 1973 school year but managed to graduate.
       Having devoted his days playing hooky to learning the 
     excavation trade from an uncle, Rick rented a backhoe and a 
     dump truck and set out to do whatever jobs he could pick up. 
     The dump truck was red, and that became his color. ``You 
     can't be good if you don't look good,'' he says.
       He edged into railroad work, rebuilding crossings and 
     driving grueling distances to wherever the job was, sometimes 
     sleeping in his truck and regularly braving terrible weather. 
     ``Railroads don't care--well, they really can't care--what 
     the weather's like when something needs fixing,'' he says. 
     Workers who couldn't take the punishment left. Corman kept 
     making himself the model for doing things right. A ``go-
     getter'' by the description of many, including even himself, 
     he steadily picked up construction jobs and gained a 
     reputation for fast, expert service. It also helped that most 
     people simply liked him, sensing his innate intelligence, 
     quickly learning that he was totally honest, enjoying his 
     openness and humor and boisterous, cackling laugh.
       In business, Corman was opportunistic. A Columbus company 
     to which the rail industry outsourced some of its derailment 
     business quit the city, and Corman was asked by railroad 
     friends to step into the void. He did, accepting the need to 
     acquire heavy, expensive equipment--machines that will lift a 
     derailed car, for example, so that the rails beneath it can 
     be repaired or replaced. That naturally led to ``crisis'' 
     work. ``He's kind of like an oilfield firefighter,'' says 
     Matt Rose, CEO of Burlington Northern Santa Fe, of his friend 
     Corman. ``He's the Red Adair of the railroad industry.'' But 
     Corman also has a hand in more prosaic businesses, such as 
     selling rails and ties to railroads. In effect, he takes on 
     inventory costs they'd just as soon not bear.
       By 1984, when Corman was paying 24% interest to finance new 
     trucks, he sought help from Luther Deaton, a lending officer 
     at Lexington's Central Bank & Trust. Deaton, now president of 
     the bank, recalls that ``a very self-confident and happy-go-
     lucky'' Corman, then just short of 30, arrived for their 
     first meeting wearing boots, khaki pants, and a big belt 
     buckle flashing his initials, and with no financial 
     statements in hand. ``I just couldn't get comfortable with 
     him,'' Deaton remembers.
       Deaton stayed skeptical until Corman got him to visit a 
     couple of work sites--``to see what we do.'' On his first 
     visit, to a sprawling Baltimore & Ohio wreck, Deaton saw 
     shiny red trucks and bulldozers and watched Rick work atop a 
     railroad car, rigging cables to start pulling derailed cars 
     out of a tunnel. Next, on a deathly hot August day, Deaton 
     drove to see a stretch of railroad being rebuilt. Deaton 
     found Rick pulling up spikes so that track could be re-laid, 
     while sweat poured out of the top of his work boots. 
     Explaining to Deaton that he couldn't right then talk to him, 
     Corman said that if he got

[[Page S1817]]

     the job finished by midnight, he would get a bonus and in 
     turn be able to pay bonuses to his workers--those remaining, 
     because several had quit during the day owing to the harsh 
     conditions.
       Deaton went home, comfortable, and says he told the 
     president of the bank, ``Look, we've got to help this guy. He 
     knows how to get it done. He's free to go be a great 
     success,'' and the boss said, ``Do it.'' The next day, a 
     Saturday, Deaton found Corman sitting in the engine he used 
     for an office, with blisters on his feet visibly oozing. 
     Deaton cut his interest costs on the trucks to 14% and 
     offered him a $500,000 credit line. ``We've never looked back 
     since then,'' says Deaton. ``He's a banker's dream.'' 
     Translation, according to Deaton: Corman is a brilliant 
     businessman who borrows frequently, but is conservative and 
     always good for his debt.
       Corman's improved financial position helped set him up for 
     his biggest opportunity, which materialized when the passage 
     of the deregulating Staggers Rail Act of 1980 caused the 
     industry to gradually reshape itself. Many railroads sold off 
     their ``short lines,'' usually meaning rail lines of 100 
     miles or less. These were like baubles to the trunk lines, 
     but they were nice baubles, being monopolies (as is the case 
     with almost all railroads), except for competition from 
     trucks.
       Corman got in this game when a Seaboard System executive 
     who took to Rick said, ``I'm going to sell you a railroad.'' 
     And that's how it happened that Corman, in 1987, paid 
     $300,000 for a 20-mile line in Kentucky, the first of eight 
     short lines, covering about 620 miles, he picked up. 
     Naturally, the engines on these lines are red. On the profit 
     side, though, the short lines began to deliver very black 
     profits, becoming Rick's biggest moneymakers.
       Then came the cancer. It revealed itself in the spring of 
     2001 in Amsterdam, where Corman, generous to others all his 
     life, had taken a group of friends and relatives to see the 
     blooming of the tulips. He was running in a park one day, 
     when another runner passed him doing 5\1/2\-minute miles. 
     Corman immediately tried to match the pace. Within minutes he 
     was brought to his knees by excruciating pain in his back.
       Managing to get home to Kentucky, he got two doctors on the 
     case. One, his family internist, Terrance Furlow, ordered a 
     blood test and a bone biopsy that strongly indicated multiple 
     myeloma. The other doctor was Kathleen Martin, a tall, 
     striking blond whom Corman had dated until they had recently 
     broken up in a friendly way. Corman knew the woman he calls 
     ``Kathy-leen'' to be a dedicated patient advocate. ``There's 
     no dam big enough if she's the beaver,'' he says, speaking 
     Kentucky. He wanted her at his side as he dealt with his 
     illness, and that's where she has been for nearly 10 years.
       Dr. Furlow sent the two of them to the Mayo Clinic for a 
     bone marrow biopsy and a confirming diagnosis. There, Dr. 
     Stephen Ansell, a hematologist, told Rick soberly, ``It is 
     myeloma. It's not curable, but it's treatable.''
       Rick said: ``Well, there are worse cancers than this, 
     right?'' Neither Ansell nor Martin spoke. ``It seemed like a 
     year passed,'' Corman recalls, ``until finally both came up 
     with pancreatic cancer.'' He said at least it was good to 
     know there was a worse one. But by that time he was breaking 
     up with laughter at their halting answer--and so were the 
     doctors. ``It's a gift of Rick's,'' says Martin. ``He gets 
     people to laughing no matter what.''
       Dr. Ansell said that without treatment Rick might have a 
     year to live. Rick instantly became a fan of treatment. Dr. 
     Ansell allowed that a bone marrow transplant, which he 
     suggested be done at Mayo, would reset the clock and possibly 
     give Rick three years. The doctor added that Rick should 
     focus on spending his money and enjoying life. ``The 
     message,'' says Rick, ``was that my life was going to be 
     short.''
       After that meeting, Corman and Martin, in effect, shopped 
     for time, hoping to find a specialist who might visualize a 
     better outcome. At the University of Arkansas for Medical 
     Sciences, a center of myeloma research, doctors said the 
     right treatment could give Corman seven years. And then he 
     and Martin went to Boston's Dana-Farber, whose myeloma chief, 
     Dr. Kenneth Anderson, looked down at Corman's file and said: 
     ``I see you're 45, Rick. I'm surprised that you'd be 
     satisfied dying at age 52. If you come here, we will do 
     everything possible to see that you grow old gracefully and 
     die of something other than multiple myeloma.''
       And thus was struck a memorable bargain, for both sides. 
     Against terrible odds, Corman has survived; Dana-Farber has 
     received millions for the R.J. Corman Multiple Myeloma 
     Research Fund, most of the money contributed by Rick, some by 
     friends of his. He told Dr. Anderson at the outset: ``Every 
     year you keep me alive, Santa Claus will visit you.'' Corman 
     proceeded to deliver Dana-Farber at least $250,000 each 
     December, usually in packs of $100 bills (though he has 
     stopped the cash deliveries because of security concerns) 
     that he ostentatiously plunks down before his doctor, Paul 
     Richardson, and other staff members. And Rick would say, 
     ``Don't forget that this won't be coming if I die.''
       Dr. Richardson, 48 and internationally known for his work 
     on multiple myeloma, has done his part by cycling new and 
     improved drugs (some developed at Dana-Farber) into the oral 
     and intravenous ``cocktail'' that Corman takes. Dr. 
     Richardson says he and Dr. Anderson have ``kind of taken this 
     disease by the scruff of the neck and given it a damn good 
     shake.''
       Richardson's affection for his patient has in the interim 
     grown so deep that he never runs out of praise for him. He 
     watched Rick give $12,000 to a cancer patient he didn't know 
     for a transplant that might otherwise have not been 
     performed. Every week Rick funds a group luncheon for Dana-
     Farber's doctors, picking up the check because the 
     institute's rules won't let it pay. ``Rick is a profoundly 
     good man,'' says Richardson, finding him a remarkable mixture 
     of ``humbleness and--I don't say this lightly--greatness.''
       Richardson does not talk, meanwhile, of a cure because 
     there isn't one. Richardson says, ``I hope--well, actually I 
     pray--that he can have another five to 10 years.'' Rick, not 
     much into religion, says simply of his prospects, ``If you 
     make it to tomorrow, you've done good.''
       All of Corman's doctors agree that he has come this far by 
     keeping himself remarkably fit. In 2002, five months after 
     his first bone marrow transplant, Corman ran the Boston 
     Marathon to aid a cancer fundraiser. He still runs five 
     kilometers almost every day, but his illness has caused his 
     pace to slow, from maybe 19 minutes for the distance to 27. 
     The drugs he takes also have intermittently caused him 
     intense, neuropathic leg pain, which he sometimes can ease 
     only by elevating his legs above his heart. He often does 
     that in deep La-Z-Boy recliners at home, in a space once 
     called the living room and now christened the ``cancer 
     room.''
       The discovery of his illness brought about large changes in 
     both Rick's business and personal life. Dr. Richardson asked 
     to see Rick frequently in Boston, which raised the threat of 
     commercial flights exposing him to germs. No problem: Rick (a 
     pilot himself) constructed a city-airport-size 5,600-foot 
     runway on his property. For transportation, he bought two 
     planes for $12 million, a Challenger and a Learjet, naturally 
     decking them out in his color. That move was automatic, even 
     though a dark paint like red increases operating costs--
     absorbing heat, for example, and making the plane more 
     difficult to cool. That's a reason, folks, you do not see 
     many red planes.
       Though turning his grounds into an airfield kept Rick busy, 
     he wasn't spared periods of great sadness and despair about 
     his illness. On one 2001 Friday night several months after it 
     flared, with his young kids away at their mother's, he phoned 
     Tammie Taylor, then the chief of one of his company's 
     divisions. Finding her at the office, he asked her to come 
     the short distance to his house. ``Why?'' she asked. ``Is 
     anything wrong?'' ``Please just come,'' he answered. When she 
     got there, he says, he was ``sitting there bawling.'' To her 
     anxious question, he said simply, ``I'm scared.'' Things 
     moved on after that in quite a remarkable way: Taylor stayed 
     that night, and she's been there ever since.
       As a manager, Taylor wins Rick's ultimate accolade: ``She's 
     a go-getter'' (a description that, were it in a thesaurus, 
     would be in the vicinity of ``industrious''). But she is the 
     first to say that the secret of R.J. Corman's success is, 
     simply, Rick. She spends her days, in fact, trying to hire 
     people who will bring his kind of ``passion and pride'' to 
     their work.
       And what is to happen when Rick--this inspirer and 
     motivator--is not there to keep that culture going? The legal 
     answer is that a trust will take over ownership of the 
     company. It will exist for a near-unimaginable 200 years and 
     is likely to have Dana-Farber as its ultimate beneficiary. A 
     handful of trustees will run it--people that Rick knows well 
     and indeed trusts--and they will be paid handsomely, probably 
     dividing one-fifth of the company's pretax profits. That 
     would be big money. But Rick expects the trustees (who could 
     include some of his children) to devote all their might to 
     preserving and building the company. And if they do that, the 
     price will seem cheap to him. All the while, Rick says, 
     Tammie Taylor and her staff will run the company and can be 
     expected to do it very well.
       He does not rule out the possibility that eventually one or 
     more of his children will move into management, though at the 
     moment the three oldest have careers that are not headed in 
     that direction. Amy, 33, is a marketing analyst at a 
     Lexington uniform company, Galls; Richard Jay, 30, is an 
     associate dean at Lenoir Community College in North Carolina; 
     Jay Richard, 24, drives a tractor-trailer for R.J. Corman. 
     The other two children are Ashley, 22 (called by her first 
     name, Shawna, by everybody but Rick), and April, 21. Both, 
     Rick thinks, might have the ``capacity'' for running a 
     business. Each, though, has entertained the thought of 
     becoming a doctor. Ashley is currently a clinical research 
     coordinator at Dana-Farber and a student of her father's 
     disease. April is a junior at Transylvania University in 
     Lexington.
       Dale Hawk, formerly a CSX (CSX) executive and today an R.J. 
     Corman director, says Rick's kids will undoubtedly have to 
     earn their way into management if that's where they'd like to 
     be. Right now, he says, the company is well established and 
     will endure if Rick dies. But he also acknowledges that it 
     will miss Rick's flair and the personal relationships that he 
     has in the railroad industry. ``The company will go on,'' he 
     says, ``but it will never be the same without Rick.''
       After my long Nicholasville interview with Rick, I saw him 
     three times more. In November, I traveled with him and Dr. 
     Martin to

[[Page S1818]]

     Dana-Farber. As we waited in a corridor, every doctor who 
     passed greeted the two warmly. One doctor, a Kentuckian 
     himself, joked with Rick about the next bone marrow 
     transplant he might need, saying it would undoubtedly be easy 
     to find a donor of cells ``because we know that all 
     Kentuckians are related.'' (``Oooh, be careful,'' said Rick. 
     ``Mrs. Loomis, here--she's from the press.'')
       I next saw Corman twice in New York City. On a Monday he 
     unexpectedly dropped by my office to introduce me to the 
     University of Kentucky's famous basketball coach, John 
     Calipari. The two men had flown to New York for the day to 
     shop at Brioni, the upscale tailoring establishment that 
     makes Rick's flamboyant, double-vent red sports jackets. I 
     thanked Calipari for a favor he'd done me. There had been a 
     time, early on, when Rick thought he might not cooperate with 
     this article. But friends had talked him into it, among them 
     Calipari, who argued, ``Somebody reading it might be 
     inspired.''
       In my other New York visit with Rick, he came to breakfast 
     at my office cafeteria in December so I could do a little 
     wind-up reporting. Heads turned to marvel at his jacket as we 
     stood waiting for our bacon and eggs. He was in Manhattan to 
     take 130 people to the Radio City Christmas show and then to 
     dinner at Del Frisco's, an expensive restaurant nearby.
       On that Friday morning he had the look of invincibility 
     that appears to have characterized him all his life, but that 
     sometimes, as you've read, is stripped away by sadness. Even 
     so, Rick Corman had made it to that December day and to the 
     others that passed before this story closed some weeks later. 
     He'd ``done good,'' by his way of reckoning. You can't help 
     but feel that he will keep on beating the odds. And, when his 
     luck runs out, the word will go up on the company website, 
     and the world will have lost some of its style.

                          ____________________