Executive Profile
Second Wind
He was a hard-charging bank president before
retiring,
but now Bodie Bodenheimer really has hit his stride
By Kevin Brafford
The
hands are big and strong, the eyes soft and comforting. His
walk is measured, and that’s not because Bodie Bodenheimer’s 72
years old. Rather, you get the feeling that every step he’s taken
during his more than five decades in the working world has been
calculated.
On this morning he wants to tell you the inside story on wood floors,
his primary interest these days as chairman and CEO of Zickgraf
Enterprises Inc. in Franklin, a still sometimes-sleepy little town
deep in the southwestern reaches of the state. You learn that the
greatest enemy of wood floors is moisture, and you learn that the
floor is fundamental in any room design.
You learn these things long before you get to the really good stuff
— that he’s a former school teacher and coach, a retired bank
president and a retired brigadier general in the North Carolina Army
National Guard who bought and turned around a fledging company — in
his 60s, no less. And you also learn pretty quickly that when he says
“we” he really means “I.”
You suspect that he has many stories to tell, and he doesn’t
disappoint. Nor does he fail to entertain. A couple of hours later,
you walk away both satisfied and a little sad, knowing that he’s
done more to brighten up this one day for you than you can possibly
ever do for him.
Bodenheimer was old school long before being old school was cool. He
was born in Lumberton but raised in Granite Falls, one of two sons to
Ada and Furman P. Bodenheimer Sr. Furman, the original “Bodie”
(pronounced “bo-dee”) in the family was general manager for
Shuford Mills and Ada perhaps had the more difficult job — she
stayed home and took care of Bodie and Chris.
“Growing up in Granite Falls was one of the great blessings of my
life,” Bodenheimer says. “We never really wanted for anything, and
it was a great place to be as a kid.”
He played every sport imaginable and made his mark in the classroom as
well. “I was fortunate enough to have a teacher who ended up having
a great deal to do with my attitude about life,” he says. “Edith
Cagle is her name, and we’ve been close friends ever since I started
junior high school.”
That Bodenheimer regards her now as having been a friend even while
she was his teacher speaks volumes as to her impact. “She demanded
so much,” he says, “not only academically but in the way that you
lived your life. She wanted you to live it with honor.
“We had 47 people in our high school graduating class, and a lot of
them went on to become doctors, lawyers and the like — real
successful people. Come to think of it, we didn’t have a loser in
the bunch.”
High school was followed by a two-year stint in the Navy, the first
date in what would become a lasting relationship with the military.
Growing up he was “Little Bodie,” but he wasn’t stuck on the
name and figured once he got in the Navy he might go by either Furman
or F.P. “But I found out that when you went into the military,
they’d call you by your last name. Mine was too long, though, so
they started calling me Bodie and it’s stuck ever since.”
All the while Bodenheimer kept his eye on Appalachian State
University, his favorite teacher’s alma mater. So when his hitch was
over, he headed for Boone, where he played football while earning a
degree in science and physical education.
Cagle’s influence was one reason that he yearned to be a teacher and
a coach. He landed a job at Charlotte Technical High School, the last
existing technical school in the state, in 1952, and still considers
those couple of years the most satisfying in his life. “Fifty years
later, to have people who have turned out so wonderful come up and
tell you that you influenced their life, well, there’s nothing
better than that.”
While professionally rewarding, the financial end of teaching was a
strain. “My dad told me early on that it was a very honorable
profession, but that I’d never be able to make a living at it,” he
says. “And he was right. When I began I was making $188 a month, and
there was a schedule in place that told you exactly what you’d be
making 25 years from then. It was discouraging, so I felt like I had
to go in another direction.”
He took a job selling mortgage insurance at Prudential. After several
months of training in Richmond, Va., he went to work at its
Jacksonville office for a short time before returning to Charlotte.
It was there he initially laid eyes on Margaret Kuhn, an airline
stewardess for Eastern Airlines. They chatted for the first time at a
party near their apartment complex. “He actually had come with
someone else,” says Margy, “an older girl who was very attractive.
But we ended up talking the whole night. One of the things I remember
is that I couldn’t pronounce his name.”
“I guess I spent too much of my time with Margy that night,”
Bodenheimer recalls, “because my date decided to go home by
herself.”
The two dated — if you could call it that — for three years before
getting married in September 1960. “We didn’t go on many of your
typical dates back then,” she says. “I was used to having people
take me out to nightclubs and restaurants. We mostly walked around and
went to movies.”
“We did a lot of simple, resourceful things,” says Bodenheimer.
“I always enjoyed taking walks and pretty soon she did, too. Put it
this way: We spent a lot more money on ice cream than on steaks.”
During the courtship Bodenheimer took a position at First Citizens
Bank & Trust, working in Raleigh for three years before moving to
Greensboro in 1961 after he was named a regional senior vice
president. He and Margy stayed there for 17 years, raising three
children — daughters Dawn and Tracy and son F.P. III — and
establishing themselves in the community.
“Our kind of banking at that time was one-on-one,” Bodenheimer
says. “We taught that if you had a good customer, you needed to know
their business, and you learned a lot of that on Saturday mornings.
“It was a different work environment, one where you had to work many
extra hours. I’m a firm believer that not many people can do much
with their lives working just eight hours a day. You might make a
living, but it’s difficult to get ahead. Margy gave me that freedom
when not a lot of women would.”
Bodenheimer also maintained his military connections, serving on
weekends and choice weeks throughout the year in the National Guard.
At age 46, he was selected to the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle,
Pa., where he earned a graduate degree and learned even more valuable
lessons as one of his class’s oldest students. “We were required
to read 2,500 pages every five weeks,” he says. “I didn’t think
that was too much, but it turned out to be about three hours of
reading a night — I was having to read some things over and over.
Then they required us to condense that 2,500 pages down to two
type-written pages of summary, double-spaced. And that was hard. I
guess to summarize, I first learned that I couldn’t read, then I
learned that I couldn’t write.
“So I made it a point to get better at both, and I think I have. I
also promised myself that I’d never get to the point where I
couldn’t read fast and retain what I’d read.”
His involvement in the National Guard remained constant and
Bodenheimer’s expertise and skills led to his being appointed a
brigadier general. His family had long gotten used to a helicopter
landing near the house on Saturday mornings at the crack of dawn to
whisk him away to Fort Bragg for the weekend. Now there was added time
and distance to his travels, including regular trips overseas. “As a
kid it was pretty neat to see the helicopter land on Sunday and know
your dad was the one on board,” says F.P., now 35. “He’d come
out in his uniform and his helicopter helmet and all the kids in the
neighborhood would run down there.”
The commitment to our country came at a price, however. “There were
times when he had to be gone that we all wished he wasn’t,” says
Margy. “Those are difficult, because you can never get that time
back. But he went to every ballgame and school function that he could,
and looking back, I’m amazed at all of the things he didn’t
miss.”
The family moved to Cary in 1979 when Bodenheimer was named the
bank’s senior vice president. A couple of bank promotions later, he
was named president in 1986, a position he held until retiring three
years later.
After retiring from
First Citizens, he and Margy moved back to Greensboro and to the same
neighborhood near Sedgefield Country Club where they had lived before.
But he was about as comfortable in retirement as a fish is out of
water. “I tried to learn how to play good golf,” he says, “and
Margy and I traveled to some of the places that we had talked for a
long time about going to see. And we visited some people that we
hadn’t seen in years.
“All this only took about six months, and that was about the time
that I realized I had more fun working than I did having fun fun. So I
started looking for something to do. I didn’t just want to have a
hobby — I wanted something to pull on me, to make me do the things
necessary to be successful.”
A West Coast friend introduced him to Grant Zickgraf, who owned
Zickgraf Enterprises Inc., a group of companies in and around Franklin
that specialized in unfinished hardwood flooring. Zickgraf was looking
for someone to sell his company and Bodenheimer thought, why not?
“So I came up here and put together a book on the company and tried
to sell it. That was 1989, the year that bankers stopped lending money
to people to buy companies. I took it to 16 different companies or
individuals anyway and didn’t get a single offer.”
Zickgraf then tried to sell Bodenheimer on buying the company, and he
was persistent. “He’d call me regularly, telling me what a great
company this was and how I needed to own it.” One thing led to
another and Bodenheimer eventually made an offer — albeit one
considerably less than Zickgraf’s asking price. “I knew something
was wrong,” he says, “because I didn’t even get away from the
fax machine before he accepted it.”
Still, Bodenheimer almost walked away. At a board meeting in January
1991, the day the deal was to close, he learned “that the company
was in some difficulty.” A board member barely kept him from leaving
the room. “I finally told them that I’d come for 90 days, without
pay, to see if there was anything I could do. All they had to do was
pay for meals and a motel room. If I thought I could do anything with
the company, then the price I offered would stand. If not, I’d walk
away and we could all say we tried.”
In those 90 days, Bodenheimer, with help from a few trusted friends,
changed the direction of Zickgraf. A company that did $9 million in
sales, almost all in North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia,
today does nearly $50 million and
is an international company with four divisions — and a sales office
in Belgium. “This company has a commodity’s attitude for the first
50 years,” Bodenheimer says. “When we went worldwide in 1994, we
changed the way we did the domestic product. It used to be that there
were no hardwoods in Europe. Now we sell them cherry, maple and
others.
Until two years ago, Bodenheimer was spending three months a year in
Europe, showcasing his company’s work to prospective clients and
trade shows. Today, Zickgraf’s floors line is in the French Embassy
in Berlin, the British Airways building at Heathrow Airport in London,
and Buckingham Palace.
“Bodie’s a Type-A guy, a highly motivated self-starter,” says
John Thomas, a former chancellor at ASU and a longtime friend. “You
see evidence of that with what he’s been able to do with that
company. He’s powerfully persuasive, and while he’s soft-spoken,
if he thinks he’s right about something he’ll stay with it.”
Through all of his years in business, Bodenheimer’s stance on the
importance of education hasn’t wavered. When he moved to Franklin,
he was amazed at the level of poverty and its subsequent impact on
education. “I think education’s the way out — not the only way
but certainly the beginning,” he says. “To do that, you have to
change the attitudes of the mothers and fathers and grandmothers and
grandfathers.”
So in January 2000 he opened the Franklin Early Childhood Development
Center, a shiny 10,000-square-foot facility that’s home to 48
children from six months old to kindergarten age. Initially, the
school was for Zickgraf employees, but now it’s open to anyone in
the county. Bodenheimer says it costs $900 per month per child; save
for a state-subsidized allotment and some contributions from parents,
Zickgraf picks up the balance.
“We feed them the right foods and we teach them to sit down and eat
together,” he says. “Our hope is that by the time they get to
kindergarten, they will have the fundamentals to go on, and more
importantly, their parents will see the benefits of keeping that child
in school.”
The teacher-student ratio is 1-to-3, and Bodenheimer says the
education process is enhanced by the lone requirement for enrollment:
“The mother and father, whether they’re living together or not,
must give two hours of volunteer time a month to us,” he says.
Bodenheimer effectively stands watch over the school from a
mountaintop guesthouse he built years ago to host visiting clients and
associates. He lives downstairs during the week before getting into
his Lincoln Town Car each Friday at 4 p.m. for a 235-mile drive to
Greensboro. There he’ll find Margy (“There really wasn’t a need
for me to move,” she says, “because all he does in Franklin is
work.”) awaiting for a long weekend together.
One day, she says, he’ll come home for good. “I don’t know when
that day will be, because he truly loves what he’s doing.” Health
isn’t an issue — “he’s a 72-year-old man in a 32-year-old
body,” says Thomas. Bodenheimer’s daily routine has him up at 5
a.m. and through a mile-and-a-half walk (he walks the same distance
each evening) and a 38-minute Nautilus routine by 7 a.m. His meals are
generally void of anything that might make his chlosterol rise.
You get the feeling that he’d like his son, currently the vice
president of the American Floor Finishing Co., a Zickgraf plant in
neighboring Bryson City, Tenn., to succeed him. “Time will tell,”
Bodenheimer says. “If he’s good enough to run it, I want him to
have the opportunity if he wants it. I have an attitude — and have
told this to all of my kids — that’s it’s easier to own a
business than run it. Of course, such a decision would be made by the
board.”
But that’s then and this is now. “I want to continue to do the
things that I can do well,” he says. “The stopping point comes
whenever you get in the way of people who could do better. I think
I’ll know when that time is.”
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