Kempner’s Unofficial Business
I’ve been a reporter or editor since gas was about a dollar a gallon and “Hands Across America” was a thing. I’ve spent lots of time covering government, the environment and, for most of my career, business. But I don’t daydream about fiscal policy and corporate earnings. What I love about business is the strategy and the people and the journeys that those people take. I like irony and surprise and nuance. I’ve interviewed soldiers, oystermen, football stars, chicken plant workers, Fortune 500 CEOs, suburban activists and entrepreneurs dreaming big dreams. How cool is that? I’ve teared up in interviews, laughed inappropriately, been yelled at and snookered. I do like an adventure. Let’s see where this one goes.
Before Chick-fil-A was a fast-food juggernaut, it was one little mom-and-pop restaurant struggling for existence like a bazillion other ventures.
We knew the “pop”: Truett Cathy.
The oddly named, smiling, balding man later wrote books about family, his vision of doing right and his closed-on-Sunday chicken chain, which began as the Dwarf Grill in Hapeville. He aspired to build more than just a business. When I interview local entrepreneurs, they sometimes praise lessons they gleaned from his books or mentoring.
But they don’t mention the “mom” in the mom-and-pop operation. I suspect few knew her name. I know I didn’t remember it.
Jeannette Cathy died Wednesday, less than a year after her husband passed away. She was 92. A private memorial service was Saturday at the First Baptist Church in Jonesboro.
I’m frustrated I never tried to interview her when she was alive. Nearly a decade ago, Truett Cathy won a “Smart Marriages Impact Award” for “his leadership, vision and determination to strengthen marriage in America.” (Don’t be thrown by the plural “s”. As far as I know, he was only married once, and it lasted 65 years.) He considered his wife a partner in the business with veto power over decisions.
I know just using the word marriage in the same sentence as Chick-fil-A is edgy stuff. Dan Cathy, one of the couple’s sons and now chairman of the company, set off a firestorm with his 2012 comments opposing gay marriage. I don’t know what Jeannette Cathy’s own thoughts were on the subject.
But that’s not really what I’d have wanted to talk to her about. I’d have wanted to find out what it was like to be part of the partnership that struggled for years before building a dream that really did grow to become more than just a business.
Diners who pack the chain’s 1,900 restaurants can thank Jeannette Cathy for bigger slices of pie. She thought Chick-fil-A’s pies should be sliced into seven slices rather than the easier-to-cut eight, which she considered too puny. Chick-fil-Aers say that fit a theme set by Jeannette Cathy. She quietly pushed for a menu built on quality ingredients and quality customer service, at least as quality as a fast-food operation can manage.
She also backed her husband’s play to keep the company private and family owned, said Lynn Chastain, Chick-fil-A’s general counsel.
Truett Cathy launched the business in the 1940s with a brother, who died in a plane crash early on. Truett was soon dating Jeannette. They listened to the jukebox in his young restaurant on Sundays, when he kept the store closed to give himself a day off, respect the Sabbath and have time with Jeannette. They married and she became a sort of waitress as well as a partner in important business decisions, matters of faith and, eventually, the company’s philanthropic efforts.
The quiet one
She was the quiet one. That’s the way the Pie Lady remembers her.
Zelma Calhoun was still in high school when she started working part-time for the Cathys at their restaurant in the early 1950s. Mrs. Cathy was often at the cash register back then.
It was the beginning of Calhoun’s 45 and a half years of service with them. That’s what it said on her retirement cake.
Now 80, she’s a slight woman with a surprisingly sturdy handshake. I guess that’s what you get from a lifetime wielding a rolling pin.
Calhoun told me she wanted to become a nurse, but she took a job as a dishwasher because she needed a job. The Cathys told her they wanted her to become their pie maker.
“They taught me everything I know about cooking,” Calhoun told me as we sat in her screened-in garage in College Park, trying to hear over the roar of passing Hartsfield jets.
The Mustang the Cathys gave her at her retirement party 15 years ago still sits in the driveway. She lives four miles from the Chick-fil-A’s corporate headquarters, where it has 1,000 employees, a sliver of the 70,000 workers system wide. Back in the day, there were just a few.
“They had a lot of patience with me,” she says. Her early attempts at pie making weren’t pretty. Lemon pies, peach, apple, chocolate, coconut all made from recipes from Truett Cathy’s mom.
“I said, ‘I’m messing up your stuff.’ They said, ‘That’s OK.”
“She always would pat me on the shoulders and say, ‘You are going to be OK.’ She was always nice and sweet and smiling.”
When Calhoun’s mom and then father died, she had to take over care of her four young brothers, even as she and her husband raised their own son. She was 24. The Cathys, who had their own financial struggles with the business, paid for her to have a babysitter while at work.
Calhoun remembers Truett Cathy driving his Mercury to stores to pick up free cases of overripe strawberries and peaches for the pies. She would pick through the fruit, trying to find pieces still fresh enough to salvage. One day she made 91 pies from such scavenging.
Trusted adviser
Truett Cathy often turned to his wife for advice, Calhoun remembers. “He would always talk to her before he would do anything.”
Calhoun squeezed her palms together like praying hands to represent the couple. “They were just like that.”
Eventually, Jeannette Cathy spent less time at the growing restaurant chain so she could raise the couple’s children. But Calhoun remembers the chain’s matriarch still coming to the restaurant, her young boys in tow to run around the kitchen. Dan is now Chick-fil-A’s chairman and chief executive. Bubba is executive vice president.
A few weeks ago Calhoun she sat beside Jeannette Cathy at the company’s founders day celebration. The husbands for both had passed away in the last year.
They talked about surgeries and health. And again it was like it was when Calhoun was in her 20s and Jeannette Cathy was softly encouraging her. “’Zelma, you are going to be alright.’”
It’s the kind of crucial inspiration that the chain’s matriarch apparently spread throughout Chick-fil-A. Said Calhoun: “People don’t realize it because she stayed in the background.”
I’m sorry I never met you, Mrs. Cathy.
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