DEL.ICIO.USLOCKHEED MARTIN
Raptor boss has roots in Georgia soil
Lee E. Rhyant credits his mother, wife of a sharecropper, for his success
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sunday, May 03, 2009
The man who oversees the manufacture of one of the most sophisticated aircraft ever devised doesn’t hesitate when asked who’s responsible for his success. It was, he says with a slight smile, the work-worn wife of a South Georgia sharecropper.
Lee E. Rhyant, the 58-year-old executive vice president and general manager for Lockheed Martin’s Marietta facility, rides herd over the 6,800-employee operation that produces — among other things — the F-22 Raptor, a $140 million, super-stealthy jet in the cross hairs of federal budget cuts.
Jason Getz/jgetz@ajc.com
Lee E. Rhyant stays away from talking about politics, especially when the future of the F-22 comes up.
The F-22 program employs 25,000 people in more than 40 states, including about 2,400 at the Marietta facility. Defense Secretary Robert Gates last month declared the 20-year-old jet doomed, even though some Congress members vow to save it.
Rhyant arrived in the middle of the F-22 program, which has meant increased investment at the Marietta facility, but also generated its share of criticism. Critics contend the jet fighter is too expensive and was intended for the Cold War. The fighter has not been used in Iraq or Afghanistan, relatively low-tech combat theaters that some military strategists say will be typical of 21st-century conflicts.
Rhyant, who has an easy laugh and is quick with a tale of his life, is as evasive as his company’s endangered aircraft when asked about the F-22’s future.
“One thing I’ve learned in 38 years in business is not to speculate on [federal] budgets,” he said.
That a reporter is sitting in his spacious office at a premier defense contractor asking the question is an unlikely culmination of an unlikely career path. And no one is quicker to admit that than Rhyant.
“A friend once told me that a person had a better chance of winning the lottery than ending up in my position from where I came from,” Rhyant laughed. He worked for Rolls-Royce Aerospace and General Motors before his current gig, which includes strategic development, corporate special assignments and government relations.
Rhyant landed at the Marietta facility, which had a 2008 payroll of $528 million, about a decade ago. Today, he spends nearly as much time giving speeches at business conferences, youth leadership forums and schools and colleges as he does at the plant.
He was named Cobb County’s 2008 Citizen of the Year and this month will receive an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, the 3,400-student Bethune-Cookman College in Daytona Beach, Fla.
“It’s easy for a person in that position to get carried away with their title, but he’s just not that way,” said Rhyant’s pastor, the Rev. Harris T. Travis of Zion Baptist Church in Marietta. “He always seems to make time for others.”
Travis said Rhyant, who has fought two bouts of prostate cancer, agreed to head an ambitious fund-raising campaign for the church even though he was already serving on a dozen boards, including the Atlanta Area Boy Scouts Council, the Georgia Club, the Atlanta Urban League and United Way of Cobb County.
U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson counts himself a Rhyant fan. “He’s a very humble man,” Isakson said. “He could walk into a room and fit into whatever strata he walked into, whether it’s a room full of CEOs or a soup kitchen.”
Though Rhyant counts the politically powerful among his friends — Isakson invited him to Barack Obama’s inauguration — he doesn’t openly dabble in politics.
“I try to stay clear of it,” he said. Federal Election Commission records indicate Rhyant does back candidates. He has given $7,500 since 2001 to candidates ranging from former Democratic U.S. Sen. Max Cleland to former President George W. Bush to Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss.
Rhyant’s life began in Sasser, a community near Albany on a farm where his parents were sharecroppers.
“Life was very hard in southern Georgia,” Rhyant said. “But my mom [Evelyn] had this unshakable belief. She kept telling me I had two advantages over the rest of the world. She said that if you are born in this country and you are born to good parents, you can do anything.”
Rhyant remembers his father, Harding, as a hard worker and tough disciplinarian. But it was his mother who was the driving force in his life, he said.
When he was 3, his mom sold her wedding ring and used the paltry savings she had cobbled together to move the family to Fort Pierce, Fla., for what they hoped would be a better life. It turned out to be little more than a migrant camp.
“What we expected to be our Mecca was no Mecca,” Rhyant said. “It was just more hard work.”
But his parents and their eight children — Rhyant was the fourth — persevered. They went from field work to janitorial jobs. His father began a lawn service. His mother cleaned houses and eventually enrolled in nursing school.
Rhyant’s mother read to her children at night — the Bible, books she found, encyclopedias. And she lectured them on the importance of an education. Attending Mt. Moriah Primitive Baptist Church in Fort Pierce, Rhyant said, was “non-negotiable.”
“Here’s the deal with mom — if the church doors were open, you went, or you didn’t go anywhere else but school all week,” he said. He still goes back to speak at Mt. Moriah, where his family donated money for a stained-glass window that bears his parents’ names.
All eight children finished college, said Rhyant, who got an MBA from Indiana University and has taken post-graduate courses at Harvard and MIT. Rhyant’s twin sons, Roderick and Broderick, are both medical doctors.
“Education was my mother’s total solution to us getting out,” Rhyant said.
His parents are gone now — his mom from pancreatic cancer when she was in her 60s, his dad years later from a stroke. Rhyant keeps a framed picture of his mom and the last letter she wrote him on his living room wall.
Rhyant said his dedication to work and charity came from two early role models in Florida, Charles Hines and Earl Little. They were teachers, but they also volunteered — Hines as a Boy Scout leader of Rhyant’s segregated troop and Little as a choral director. He remembers being stunned when he realized that the men did not get paid for many of the activities that had such a positive impact on his life.
“I understood at a very young age from these men that you have to give back to the community,” he said. “It’s almost become an obsession with me because of that.”
His wife, also named Evelyn, has been stepping up the pressure for him to slow down, Rhyant said.
He dodges a question about retirement, but admits things don’t go on forever. “I plan to leave one year too early as opposed to one year too late,” he said. “There comes a time and season for everybody. I’m getting close to 60. My time and season is something I have to take under consideration.”
Services »
