Jack Lowe, Sr.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jack Lowe, Sr. (born July 22, 1913)
Dallas native Jack Lowe, Sr. founded Texas Distributors Inc. in the back of an auto parts store owned by his aunt. The company's servant-leadership culture dedicated to helping employees succeed was established by Jack Lowe and remains part of the company's vision and values. While building his company, Lowe became involved with the lives of others. Lowe served as chairman of the multi-racial Dallas Alliance Education Task Force, which worked to develop a widely accepted school desegregation plan. The plan was adopted almost word-for-word by the federal court. For his work on the Dallas Alliance Education Task Force, Lowe was awarded Dallas' highest community service accolades—the Linz Award—in 1976. Lowe also helped strengthen the Greater Dallas Council of Churches, and he served on the Citizens Council. He was active on the boards of the Community Relations Commission, Salvation Army, American Red Cross, Urban League, YMCA and Girl Scout Council. He also was a member of and chaired the Cotton Bowl Athletic Association, the Salesmanship Club of Dallas and the Dallas Kiwanis Club. Jack Lowe, Sr. died in 1980 at the age of 67, survived by his wife Harriet, sons Ed, Bob, and Jack and daughter, Ann Williams.
Contents |
[edit] Early life
Jack Lowe Sr.’s father, John Burford Lowe, was a traveling insurance salesman who often left behind his wife, Florence, and their infant son. In 1913 or 1914, J.B. Lowe left his wife and baby in New Orleans. Needing money, Mrs. Florence Lowe spoke to the owner of the grocery store and he agreed to give her enough money for milk and food in exchange for her working at his store. But later she got too sick to earn money. The grocer got in touch with Mrs. Lowe’s mother who moved Mrs. Lowe and baby to Farmerville, Louisiana.
The Lowes were back together in Dallas by 1923, and Florence went to work as a stenographer for Dallas Power & Light. Three weeks later her husband died from pneumonia. By 1924, Mrs. Lowe worked as secretary to C.W. Davis, then general manager of DP&L but soon to become president, and her fortunes improved gradually.
Jack was the kind of child adults liked and admired: obedient, respectful, and responsible with fair consistency. Florence was a very independent woman and taught Jack pride and self-reliance. The things she did for her son, besides offering more or less constant moral support, instruction and encouragement, centered around feeding and clothing him, and putting him through college during the heart of the Depression. Part of her influence was also taught by example: Florence constantly studied anything that would improve her in her job and improve her mind.
[edit] High School and College Years
Jack Lowe was the salutatorian of his class at Oak Cliff High. He was active in the Scholarship Club, Hi-Y, and was a member of the Oak Staff. He served as vice president of the National Honor Society and won the Efficiency Pin. In high school he belonged to the City Crack Company and the State Crack Company of 1927 that marched at the State Fair; crack companies were drill teams, a part of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) very popular in the years between the world wars.
Two months after Jack began his senior year at Oak Cliff, the stock market crashed. Job opportunities for high school seniors were limited, but Jack got a scholarship to Rice. Jack’s involvement in clubs and school publications ceased abruptly at Rice, mostly because he held part-time jobs to help defray expenses.
[edit] Post-Graduation
Jack Lowe left Rice with a degree in electrical engineering and an assignment to the General Electric Company’s training facility at Schenectady, New York. GE had formed an Air Conditioning Department at Bloomfield, New Jersey in 1932, and Jack transferred there after completing training at Schenectady. The management put him to work selling and overseeing the installation of large commercial units in the region just south of the Great Lakes. In 1938 at the age of twenty-five, Jack was chosen to superintend the installation of an air conditioning system at Wolf and Dessars, the largest department store in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
While in Fort Wayne, Jack married Harriet Fuelber, the daughter of a prominent local attorney, just three weeks after their first date. Jack, Jr. was born in 1939, and GE moved Jack and Harriet frequently. Jack and Harriet transferred to Dallas, and he took on the job of finding more GE customers in North Texas. A year later their second child, Ann, was born, and Jack became district manager over air conditioning. Then the country went to war.
[edit] The War Years
General Electric promptly declared Jack vital to the war effort and arranged a deferment which he just as promptly refused to accept. He didn’t think he deserved it, and within months of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Jack enlisted in the Army. When the Navy rejected him because of poor eyesight, he memorized the eye chart and passed the Army physical. He refused an officer’s commission and entered the Army as an enlisted man. But he was assigned to Signal Corps projects stateside for the duration of the war, and eventually discharged in San Antonio shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
General Electric was never extremely pleased that Jack had quit them when the war began, and the position they offered him when he returned wasn’t the position he thought he deserved. He was tired of traveling, of being away from his family so much, and at GE he had begun to feel like an increasingly insignificant part of an increasingly large company. Jack was thirty-two years old when he came out of the Army, and within a few months he had founded a company he called Texas Distributors, Inc.
[edit] Texas Distributors, Inc.
As the founder of Texas Distributors, Inc., Jack served as the technical father, but he carried that title to a personal level too. Texas Distributors was not only a wholesaler and an air conditioning contractor that provided a service to its customers and, hopefully, made a profit—it provided a steady employment and financial security for those who chose to work there. The profit-sharing plans were designed to limit cash outflow, and that helped employees by helping the company, but they also offered employees the opportunity to establish financial resources beyond their biweekly paychecks.
One morning late in 1954, Jack called his vice presidents into his office for a meeting and asked them to close the door. Closed-door discussions were a rarity. Jack announced in a quiet voice that he had contracted tuberculosis; he withdrew from the operation of the company, effective immediately, in order to undergo treatment. Surviving from tuberculosis depended on early detection, regular medication, at least nine months of nearly absolute inactivity, and in extreme cases, surgery.
Eighteen months passed before Jack walked downstairs a well man ready to go back to work. He had surgery to remove the affected lung tissue and another six months of recuperation. Jack began to look at Texas Distributors less as an instrument for the production of wealth than as a device that could create well-being for the growing number of people who were a part of it.
In the early 1970s, the company was not exceptionally productive, and while sales were up, income was not. Morale was low in some areas, and Jack came up with the idea of meeting with small groups of employees at his home. Before each meeting, participants received the usual packet of information about the company, but they also got a copy of “Robert K. Greenleaf”’s booklet, “The Servant as Leader.” The result of the employee meetings was The People Objective which stated how employees thought TD people should operate.
From the beginning, Jack believed that in order to keep control of his company, he must always own a majority of its stock, but from nearly the beginning, he began offering shares of voting stock to his officers. Later, when the first major cash crisis moved him to approach his employees with the problem, and to offer them a chance to invest in the company, the stock they received had no voting rights connected to it. In the early 1960s, Jack began to offer more and more voting stock to his officers and to depend on their participation in major decisions. In 1964, as Jack, Jr. entered the company, Jack gave up his controlling ownership position. Still, Jack remained the dominant force in the company. And in 1978, the decision was made to extend voting rights to all company stock on a one-share, one-vote basis. TD’s stock plan is designed so that it benefits most those who have been at the company longest and hold the most responsibility.
[edit] The Church
Jack joined the Highland Park United Methodist Church because of his admiration for its pastor, the Rev. William H. Dickinson. Located in one of Dallas’s wealthiest areas, the church numbers among its members some of the most influential people in the city. Jack and Dickinson worked on ideas that would improve the church, and encouraged the congregation to confront social and economic problems in the community.
In the late 1960s Dickinson recommended Jack to lead the Council of Churches, and the leadership accepted him. The Council of Churches became a legitimate agency of the churches through which they could work “for justice and what is best for the City of Dallas” rather than a way of mobilizing area churches to support the policies of the Dallas Citizens Council. Jack remained president for three years. He successfully increased the budget, and two programs were begun: one a city-wide counseling service staffed by ministers, and the other a permanent ministry at the county jail. A third program and by far the most controversial was Block Partnership, a plan to help solve problems in minority neighborhoods and to improve race relations by linking them with comparatively affluent white church groups. More than fifty partnerships were established between black and white neighborhoods, and a lot of problems were solved.
[edit] School Desegregation
After the 1930s, Dallas was controlled in all aspects by the Dallas Citizens Council, a group of about two hundred men who had both achieved unusual success in their careers and demonstrated an unusual willingness to work on projects they believed would help build a great city. In 1954 with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to end racial segregation in public schools, the Citizens Council soon acknowledged that desegregation was inevitable, and they sought to make the best of it. The first step was the formation of the Biracial Committee. For the most part, the Citizens Council had already decided what to do, and the Biracial Committee helped get it done. They decided to prepare for school desegregation by desegregating the community bit by bit.
By 1960, changes were in place, but in one respect, nothing much had happened. Desegregation was still only tolerated, not embraced, by the general public. Jack saw the first racial changes from his position as president and chairman of the Cotton Bowl Athletic Association. By the early 1960s, he was on the board of the Salesmanship Club, and by 1965, he was president of the Salesmanship Club and a member of the Citizens Council. In 1968, he was entrusted with leadership of the Greater Dallas Council of Churches and then the Community Relations Commission, both of which pushed him into the center of local race relations.
In 1971 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that students could be bused in order to achieve racial desegregation, and after a compelling presentation by a group of young, minority men known as the “Dirty Dozen,” the Chamber of Commerce established a small Urban Affairs Office. The Urban Affairs Committee guided the Chamber’s urban program which set about trying to address problems identified by the Dirty Dozen; Jack was a member of this committee. It became clear to the committee that solving social problems would require involvement from more people and a more representative group of people, but they knew minorities would never participate in an organization controlled by the Chamber of Commerce.
The Chamber of Commerce agreed to fund the new Dallas Alliance, and both the leadership and minorities in the Alliance looked to Jack for assurance. In 1975, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans remanded U.S. District Judge William M. Taylor’s desegregation order and a new plan was called for. Taylor challenged the city to come up with solutions and to help make them work. He offered amicus curiae, or “friend of the court,” status to any group willing to get involved in the effort, and in the fall of 1975, he approached Jack with the idea of getting the city’s three largest ethnic groups to talk together in some semblance of equality and reach an agreement that would satisfy the great majority of the people. The Dallas Alliance Task Force was formed.
The Task Force membership fell into several informal groupings that generally reflected the racial or ideological make-up of the city, and the Task Force operated on the idea that developing the ability to agree was its most important goal. If a certain topic was going to be discussed at the next meeting, Jack made sure to talk to everyone individually on the topic beforehand so he knew the direction to take the meeting. The point at which the Task Force actually came close to falling apart came later on during a crucial period; Jack was not looking well, and hospital tests detected an irregular heartbeat. He had a pacemaker implanted, and his absence meant Task Force discussions broke down almost immediately. But a quick recovery was made, both for Jack and the Task Force. The Task Force reached an agreement and presented its plan for desegregating Dallas public schools to Judge Taylor; the plan was accepted essentially as written.
[edit] Final Years
Jack Lowe, Sr. continued his involvement with the Dallas Alliance and implementing school desegregation. Jack also helped to get the busing to run properly and to increase district revenue. The presidency of the Dallas Alliance passed to Walter Humann in 1976, but by 1978, Jack was again elected president of the Alliance and began to direct its attention to county jail improvements. He became involved in a leadership training program and worked at increasing minority membership on civic boards. Jack’s last tenure with the Alliance began when he was sixty-five, and as its end neared two years later, the group was considering amending its by-laws to allow him to serve yet another term. But Jack collapsed as he was on his way to a Dallas Citizens Council Luncheon shortly before the end of his term as president, and he died over a week later on Thanksgiving Day, 1980. His son, Jack Lowe, Jr. succeeded him as CEO of TDIndustries.
[edit] References
Cheshire, Ashley (1987). A Partnership of the Spirit: The Story of Jack Lowe and TDIndustries. Taylor Publishing. Jack Lowe Sr.. Retrieved on 9/8/06.
