An Executive Profile
Quite a Stretch
Keith Crisco proves farm boys
can become
successful city slickers and stay true to their roots
By Kevin Brafford
Keith Crisco jokes that “we keep your underwear up
and the sheets on your bed,” and it’s no stretch to say the same
probably goes for your friends and relatives.
The “we” is Asheboro Elastics Corp., and when Crisco, the
president, chairman and co-founder, says the word, it’s no stretch
either. His wife of 37 years, the former Jane Sidbury, is the
company’s financial manager. Sons John and Jeff are regional sales
managers.
“It makes me feel good,” says the 58-year-old Crisco, “that they
all want to be a part of the business. And it was their own calls.”
But Asheboro Elastics is not your typical family business. There are
about 150 employees who work at three plants in Randolph County and at
eight distribution centers, several of them offshore. Last year, its
sales of knitted elastic for textile, furniture and other industries
exceeded $20 million. This year, sales are up nearly 15 percent,
amazing given the economy.
“We’re shipping 10 to
11 million yards a week,” Crisco says. “People generally are
surprised at just how much offshore business we do. We’ve been in
the Dominican Republic for six years, Mexico for four. We go where the
business is. Last year, we made enough elastic to go around the
equator 27 times.”
It only takes a few minutes of conversation to gain a sense of
Crisco’s intelligence and his vision. He doesn’t attempt to dazzle
you with vocabulary words — though you sense he could — rather, he
speaks in simple terms that are genuine to his rural North Carolina
roots.
“He’s always been very deliberate about everything,” says Dr.
J.Z. Little, a second cousin and childhood best friend, “but he
always gets things done — and done right. He’s one of the most
honest, forthright people you’ll ever meet.
“Keith’s proof that sometimes good guys do finish first.”
Roots on the Farm
He’s accustomed to being on top. Raised on a small dairy farm in
Aquadale, a tiny Stanly County community eight miles south of
Albemarle, he’s the oldest of Truett and Lula Crisco’s three sons.
“Real dairy farmers would laugh,” says Crisco, “but we did sell
milk. My father worked at a lumberyard during the day and farmed the
land at night. We had six dairy cows and small grains — typical of a
lot of family farms back then.”
Automation was a term in only a few dictionaries in the late 1940s and
early ’50s, so it wasn’t uncommon for the family — his mom
helped as well — to work from dawn to dusk. Chores, they were called
then.
“You were married to the farm,” says Crisco, “because you had to
do everything. One of the things it did was establish a strong work
ethic that’s always stayed with me.”
He credits an aunt with helping accelerate his early education, the
benefits of which he shared with his cousin J.Z. when the two became
best friends in fifth grade. “We lived about three miles from each
other,” says Little, a retired surgeon who lives in Springfield,
Ohio. “We had nothing but dirt roads between us. Once we got old
enough, our daddies let us ride tractors back and forth between our
houses.
“We hated to see summer vacation come — especially Keith, since he
really liked to read and learn — because summer meant you had to go
to work.”
They did occasionally find time for fun. One of Crisco’s fondest
childhood memories is of he and J.Z. fishing in a pond near the Crisco
home. “We’d be passing time fishing, water moccasins everywhere,
memorizing our state capitals,” he says. “It’s funny the things
you remember.”
Little remembers it too. “I had gotten some encyclopedias from the
grocery store — when you read so many books you’d get an
encyclopedia — and we memorized the states, the state capitals and
all of the countries. And we fished, though we never caught a damn
thing.”
The two cousins learned enough to skip the sixth grade and went on to
graduate at age 17 from Aquadale High School. The Class of 1960, 24
strong, reunites every five years at a local fish camp. Classmates
voted Keith Crisco “the most likely to succeed.”
The reasons why were plentiful. His spotless grades, his leadership,
his serving as editor of the school’s first annual, and his state
championships in 4-H competitions all spoke of a man going somewhere.
Still, there was an occasional disappointment. “I remember one
summer being at a FFA (Future Farmers of America) camp and thinking
I’d do really well,” Crisco says. “There was this guy from the
East who wiped us all off the map. He was so polished — he had every
“i” dotted and every “t” crossed. His name was Jim Hunt.”
Getting an Education
Crisco was nominated for a Morehead Scholarship to the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Just like the competition against the
one-day four-term governor of the state, Crisco didn’t win this time
— and now he’s glad.
“Looking back, it was probably a good thing because I would have
been lost at a big school,” he says. “The path I took couldn’t
have been better.”
The path wasn’t a long one, just to nearby Pfeiffer College (now
Pfeiffer University). He accepted a Research Foundation scholarship to
the Misenheimer school and has been loyal to it since. On July 1, in
fact, he assumed duties as chair of its board of trustees for the next
two years.
“I got an education and a wonderful wife, so it was a very
productive four years,” he says. “It’s a great, great school —
all three of three kids (a daughter, Julia, is a financial analyst in
Summerville, N.J.) graduated from there as well.”
A year his senior, Jane caught her future husband’s eye in a math
class his freshman year. “She sat about two rows over from me,” he
says. “She was smart as a whip, and I remember using math as a
vehicle to talk to her.”
“He likes to tell the story that I dropped my slide rule and he
picked it up, but it’s just not the truth,” Jane says.
They were friends for about two years before they began dating. He
graduated on May 27, 1964 (one year after Jane), with a degree in math
and physics. Thirty days and two odd jobs later, they got married.
Four days later, they moved to Baltimore, where he began his career.
Business had found its way into his blood, but the hunger to learn
still hadn’t waned. He applied for admission to the Harvard Business
School and made the trip to Boston hoping to meet the dean and better
his odds.
“I’m a person who’s rarely late, but I got turned around and
showed up for a 9:30 appointment at quarter-to-10,” Crisco says.
“When I get to see Dean Fowler, he tells me that everything looks
good, but that their admission folks hadn’t heard of Pfeiffer
College. I don’t know why, but I shot back, ‘Frankly, Dean Fowler,
Pfeiffer folks haven’t heard of Harvard.’
“Four days later, I got a wire saying that I’d been accepted. To
this day, I think going up there on a whim and having that exchange
helped get me in.”
Crisco was out in 1968, a masters in business administration degree in
hand. He took a job with Burlington Industries, and during the next 10
years served in a variety of positions in New York, Chicago and
Greensboro.
While with Burlington in 1970, he was selected from more than 1,500
applicants to be a White House Fellow. He served as an assistant to
the secretary of commerce during the Nixon administration, a bit of
irony that to this day brings a wry smile from Crisco, a staunch
Democrat.
“Being a member of the White House Fellows program was a wonderful
honor,” he says. “It’s such a prestigious program and to have
been a part of that is something for which I’m very proud.”
He left Burlington in 1978 to become president of Stedman Elastics in
Asheboro, a division of the textiles company owned by former NCCBI
chairman David Stedman. When Stedman made overtures about selling his
company in the mid-1980s (it was eventually bought by Sara Lee),
Crisco looked to fulfill a lifelong dream.
“I had wanted to own my own company for a long time,” he says.
“Given the uncertainty at that time, not knowing for sure if I’d
have a job, we started this company.”
Asheboro Elastics began in 1986 with four working investors and a
guaranteed loan from the Small Business Administration. Besides
Crisco, one other original investor remains, vice president of sales
Warren Knapp. The company’s growth has been steady, and in 1992 it
was recognized by Inc. Magazine to be one of the fastest growing
privately owned businesses in the nation.
“One reason that we’re able to compete so well is that we’ve
never bought a piece of old equipment,” Crisco says. “When we
started, we had machines that ran 900 RPMs. The ones we have now run
2,300 or 2,400 RPMs.
“There are markets where we are really big players. We do all of
OshKosh, and we’re a major supplier to WestPoint Stevens, Dan River
and Cannon. And we do a lot of private labels.”
Life Away from Work
Crisco’s dedication to Pfeiffer has fed a relationship with school
president Charles Ambrose, who has seen Crisco work both a 5-iron and
a room.
“If he asks you to play golf, you may want to check your appointment
book twice,” says Ambrose. “But I can promise you’ll still have
a good time.”
The two have had their share of such times during a relationship
that’s barely three years old. “He doesn’t mind just getting in
the car and going somewhere,” says Ambrose. “One time, David Olive
(Pfeiffer’s vice president for advancement) and I went with him to
Staunton, Va., just to visit a classmate of his. We got there,
visited, turned around and came home, though we did stop at a lycro
plant in Waynesboro on the way back.”
Crisco doesn’t look 58, and his eyes don’t twinkle when retirement
is mentioned. The lights are usually on in his office by 7:15 a.m. and
don’t go off until between 6:30 and 7 p.m. “Ten years ago, I
worked a little different but no less,” he says. Six-and-a-half
hours of sleep a night suffice, and early mornings feature time on the
treadmill at the home they built in 1980 — “it gives me a chance
to watch (ESPN’s) SportsCenter.”
He and Jane travel more than ever, something both of them enjoy. He
enjoys working in the yard, still pores over baseball boxscores in the
morning newspaper — he’s a baseball trivia nut — and loves to
sail when the Criscoes take weekend excursions to the river town of
Oriental in Pamlico County, where they own a second home. Ambrose says
Crisco’s eyes light up when he talks about his grandchildren. Julia
and her husband, Gifford Del Grande (also a Pfeiffer graduate), have a
1-year-old and oldest son John and his wife have a 7-year-old with a
second due this month. “They are the apple of his eye,” says
Ambrose.
Jane Crisco says she knew 37 years ago that she was marrying a kind
and giving person. Beyond that, she was lucky. “Being in the
generation that we are, there are a lot of men who want their women at
their side doing what they tell them to do,” she says. “He’s
never done that.”
He has influenced many
lives around him. “He’s got an uncanny ability to connect the
dots,” says Ambrose. “It doesn’t matter if it’s his family,
the business, the university, Asheboro and Randolph County, he brings
them all together — all back around to a common good.”
J.Z. Little says that Crisco has carried those traits for more than 50
years. “We talk two or three times a year and see each other every
two or three years,” he says, “and Keith’s the one who keeps
that going. I still consider him to this day to be my best friend.”
Return to magazine index
|
|
