It might help to understand what follows if you knew Fred, the owner of a chain of barbecue stores in Northwest Arkansas. In fact, you might know the Old Smokehouse, which ships worldwide from its flagship store and smokehouse plant on a highway laden with tourists and their dough.
Fred’s a bit unusual. For one thing, he doesn’t know how to be dishonest; he’d do a bad job of it if he tried. Second, he cannot do only one thing at a time. When a woman has many things going on at the same time, it’s called multitasking and is worth at least a segment on Oprah. To those who
work for and with him, Fred’s case is more like—to call it what it is—the symptoms of adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: Fred comes into a room going out.
That can occasionally make it difficult for an employee to understand what it is that Fred wants done. By the time that the first of many questions raised has begun to sink in, Fred has already moved on to a new subject.
The third thing about Fred is that he doesn’t know how to lose his temper. Like when the following took place, oh, 30 or so years ago. Fred had just hired a new guy—I’ll call him Joe—to be in charge of the smoking operation at the new plant. That long ago, the job could have been Joe’s first, and still filled with enthusiasm, he might have been motivated to impress Fred with his ability to see what needed to be done and do it, without waiting to be told.
And no better opportunity to impress Fred would likely ever come along than the one presented by the boss’s beat-up old pickup. It was Fred’s favorite means of transportation, appropriate for a man who owned one suit (good for weddings and funerals alike) and 47 blue chambray shirts with an equal number of pairs of blue jeans. Fred had mentioned more than once that he wished he had sideboards on the bed of his pickup so that he could carry an even higher load of stuff.
So when Fred had to go to Little Rock, it was the opportunity Joe had been waiting for. He had seen some rough-sawn boards stacked in the ramshackle barn, and this being Friday—and Fred gone until Monday—Joe went to work: measuring, sketching, ripping (with a circular saw, mind you, because there wasn’t a tablesaw to be found in the place), and drilling (for carriage bolts, because these sideboards weren’t going to be just nailed together).
The project was finished with time to spare. Fred got back home late Sunday night, and first thing the next day, Joe proudly showed Fred what he’d made with nothing but initiative, hard work, and some old boards.
I was never told what, if anything, Fred had said, but I remember being told that there were tears in his eyes. “Gosh,” Joe may have thought to himself, “I sure didn’t expect him to be this moved by somebody thinking of a way to please him and then having the initiative to carry it through! I think this guy is going to be a really good man to work for!”
But Joe didn’t know the half of it: The man he was working for had tears in his eyes not because he was moved by Joe’s thoughtfulness, but because the wood that Joe had used was several 14-ft.-long, (full) 2-in.-thick by (full) 12-in.-wide cherry boards that Fred’s father had stored and “stickered” to air-dry in the barn before his death more than 20 years earlier. Fred had intended to use it someday to make a cradle for his first grandchild, who actually was by then in high school.
It’s a mark of the man that I’m still living today—even after asking Fred if he planned to finish off his new sideboards with a French polish or just a couple of coats of Watco.
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