That was just before the end of World War II. We were real busy all
during the War and worked awfully hard. The first nice vacation
Page 17 I had in my life was just immediately after the
War. I went to Europe for about three months. I had a well-trained crew
of executives, and business went on just as well as it did when I was
here. But later on I found out that we had to really and truly merge.
This is the first thought I had about merging. In fact, I had been
approached by one company that I liked an awful lot. It had reached the
point that I had to do some merging, or I had to go in debt an awful lot
for my company. So we got talking about it, and my oldest son had
graduated from college and he had been with the company about five or
six years. I had him in New York—that was more problems than any other
place—for about a year. But he finally decided that that wasn't the
career for him for the rest of his life. He never could have owned the
company. So I had an Annheuser-Busch distributorship in Raleigh, North
Carolina. I've had it thirty years, so that was way back then, and my
manager was eighty-one years of age. And my son, Larry, wanted to know
if he couldn't go down and manage that. So we, of course, let him do it.
I'm a great believer, if you're not happy in your work, well, you're not
going to do well at it anyway. But he worked his heart out. He was real
interested in it. But he wanted a business that he could own someday. So
I got to studying about it, and really and truly, I was the first
company that sold. Back then you couldn't hardly buy a trucking company.
Everybody wanted to get in the trucking business, and the trucking
business was doing well. So I decided that since my other son had
already told me that he wasn't interested in the trucking business, why
should I stay with it if they weren't going to be interested in it later
on? So I decided to sell it, and of course didn't have any problem, sold
it real quick. But I had made up my mind that I had to get out of it or
borrow an awful lot of money and expand myself, or do a lot of merging,
so I just . . .