Executive Profile for August 2004 Tool Time Pickett Council was living life to the fullest in New York City, but gave it up when the family business needed her -- and is glad she did By Kevin Brafford

Pickett Council is as comfortable in steel-toed boots as high heels, as at ease conversing with a lifelong friend from Lake Waccamaw or the president of the United States.

If you think that’s an exaggeration, pick up the phone and dial the White House and ask for George W. Bush. Odds are against you getting through, but if you do, our 43rd president will no doubt speak fondly of Council Tool Co.’s First Lady — and probably express regret at not being able to attend her wedding.

Council indeed had an audience with President Bush, thanks largely to NCCBI President Phil Kirk, who recommended her to be one of five industrialists to meet with the president at Central Piedmont Community College in Charlotte on April 5. Kirk felt that Council, as chair of NCCBI’s Small Business Advisory Board, was the most qualified person to talk about small business issues.

“They called it a roundtable,” says Council, who at 39 was the youngest invited. “The purpose was for the president to hear what we had to say about the concerns of the small businessman. He wanted to hear, both pro and con, how our companies had been impacted by his tax relief plan.”

The session lasted about 25 minutes, after which Council joined the others in having their nametags signed. She also had the president sign a photograph of an American soldier in Iraq using a Council Tool Co. sledgehammer to break up confiscated enemy weapons.

Then, in what friends and family members say should have been expected, she asked the president if he might be free to witness her pending nuptials to Lendon Ellis. “He said, ‘Pickett, when is it?’,” she says with a smile.

“It was a very special day,” she adds. “At some point, I remember thinking to myself that this was pretty good for a little ol’ girl from Lake Waccamaw.”

While Council may have been in awe of her surroundings, sister Nancy Council Rix wasn’t surprised. “Nothing Pickett accomplishes surprises me,” she says. “She’s about done it all in her life — and with flair. She’s very much a renaissance woman.”

Virginia Pickett Council was the last in a long line of baby girls born to Jack and Majorie Moore Council. She was the last of five, to be exact, eight years younger than her brother John, the lone boy among the half-dozen.

There have always been a bunch of Councils running around Lake Waccamaw, a small lakefront community 45 minutes west of Wilmington. She was named for her great-grandfather, John Pickett Council, who founded Council Tool & Die in 1886. Today, Council Tool continues to produce a variety of hand-held tools; it warehouses its products on the West Coast and sells them worldwide.

Council was only 4 when her parents divorced, a decision that understandably impacted the family tremendously. “I think each of us felt it was hardest on us,” she says. “I know it was hard on John because he was the youngest next to me and the only boy. And it was terribly hard on me because I was home with my mother and watched her when she was so sad.”

Within a few years, Jack Council remarried, and Pickett and her siblings embraced Dorothy “Dotty” Council. Her mother, who has never remarried, also accepted her and a big family grew even bigger. “I have a stepbrother and three stepsisters,” she says. “A few years ago, we began having a Fourth of July picnic. It’s just immediate family, which means we have about 30 people at the lake.”

Council lived with her mom and spent every other weekend with her father and Dotty. “Daddy was a great out-of-the-house father and Dotty, bless her heart, couldn’t have been sweeter. I can remember spending the night with them and being scared that the ‘boogie man’ was going to get me. So I’d sleep by their bed and she’d hold my hand all night long. I’ve been really blessed to have two women in my life who are so fabulous.”

Their house fronted the lake, and Council spent as much time in and around the water as possible. “I was a water baby, there’s no doubt,” she says. “You know how if you stay in the bathtub too long your fingers look like a prune? That was me by the end of the day. Swimming, sailing, hanging out on the pier — that was me.”

She also was very much a tomboy, and not always a smart one at that. “When I was in the fifth grade, I was playing pickup baseball with some of the neighborhood kids — with no gloves, mind you. Smart chick that I was, I decided to pitch underhanded to a boy who was playing Little League ball at the time. He swung and made contact and the ball came right at my jaw. It knocked me out, and I had threadprints on my cheek for like 10 days.”

Council tells that story because the imprint was long lasting. By the time she reached high school, the effect of the blow to her jaw required corrective surgery. For a teenager, spending six weeks with her jaw wired shut was tantamount to a summer in prison. “It was awful, by far the worst summer I’d ever had growing up,” she says.

She excelled at Hallsboro High School, where she’d go on to graduate as salutatorian after starring on the volleyball, softball and basketball teams. She was “literally in every office in student council,” won state competitions as a member of Future Business Leaders of America, and was selected for Governor’s School.

When it came time to choose a college, Council faced a dilemma. She was a finalist for the prestigious Morehead Scholarship at UNC Chapel Hill, but she’d grown up bleeding red and not baby blue. “My grandfather went to N.C. State, my daddy went to State, Nancy went to State and John went to State,” she says. “I was a Wolfpacker through and through.”

During an interview for the Morehead, she was asked where she’d applied and she gave a forthright answer: to UNC and N.C. State. Then she was asked her preference. “I thought that was a terrible and unfair question,” she says. “Well, I could have lied and my face would have turned red, so I told them the truth, that all things being equal I’d probably go to State.”

Council got her wish, and had the decision made for her, when the Morehead went to someone else. She “settled” for the Georgia-Pacific scholarship at N.C. State and four years later graduated with a degree in business management.

While in Raleigh, she had worked part-time as a teller at United Carolina Bank (now BB&T), and the bank was impressed enough to ask her to attend its management training program. “I eventually worked at several branches, starting in Whiteville where I commuted and could live with Daddy and Dotty,” she says. “I worked in Erwin for awhile, then I was offered a promotion at a bigger branch in Clinton. But I knew by then that this wasn’t what I wanted, that I wanted to spread my wings and live a little bit while I could.”

So she set sail for Norfolk, Va., where childhood friend Ellie McLean lived. The two shared an apartment and Council took a job waiting tables at a bar. “The grand plan was to go there for six months, but I fell in love with a dude named Walter and ended up staying two years,” she says. “I got a job at Crestar Bank, then became assistant manager of a restaurant at the Omni Hotel. Once I fell out of love, I was ready to get on with my life.”

When she was 16, Council had taken a trip to New York with one of her sisters and had been mesmerized by the bright lights, skyscrapers and electricity the city produced. “I had told my family I was going to live in Manhattan one day, so I don’t know that they were that surprised when I moved,” she says.

Her oldest sister, Susan, was living in Boston. During a visit to New England, Council interviewed with a company, Reed Travel, which was headquartered in a New York suburb. She was hired as an editorial assistant, and after living for a year not too far from her office, where she quickly advanced through the ranks, she found an apartment in midtown Manhattan that she had to have.

“It was on 14th Street between avenues C and D,” she recalls. “The apartment was a fifth-floor walkup. It had three rooms, hardwood floors, high ceilings and crown moldings. But it wasn’t in the best neighborhood and it wasn’t in the best of shape — I got it for $750 a month when apartments in Manhattan often went for $2,000 a month.

“When I called Daddy to tell him that I was moving into the city, I knew I had to play it up — like it was this great place and that I knew exactly what I was doing. I’ll never forget what he said, that the decision I’d made ‘was like packing your bags and moving straight to hell.’ ”

Friends who helped with the move were instantly rewarded. “There was no elevator, so I put coolers of beer at the top and the bottom of the steps,” she says. “Every time you completed a trip up or down those stairs, you were entitled to a beer.”

Council soaked in everything the city had to offer. Her car had been stolen six months earlier and she never replaced it — and swears she never missed it. “I walked everywhere,” she says, “or took the subway. My office was just five miles away across the Hudson River, as the crow flies, but it was two subways and a bus and I never made it in less than 45 minutes. But I didn’t mind. I was there to experience New York.”

She became editor of Start Service, a division of Reed Travel, and she moonlighted one night a week as a waitress at the Wanda Full Moon Saloon on 38th Street. “I’d make $100 on average,” she says. “That was my fun money, and I could spend that pretty quickly.”

Council was still very much enthralled with the big city when Nancy, the sister closest to her in age, was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 43. “Pickett was there for me in every way, shape and form,” says Nancy, who’s been in remission for 6 1/2 years. “She helped me talk things out, and I was able to visit her and get away from everything. I went one time when I didn’t have any hair and no one up there even batted an eye. It was very therapeutic.”

A few months later, John Council called and asked his kid sister if she’d consider helping run the family business. “I had been offered a great job as an editor at Simon & Schuster (a publishing company), so I wasn’t sure that Lake Waccamaw was where I wanted to be,” she says. “But Nancy’s diagnosis had shaken me up and reminded me of what’s really important. So I came home.”

She was named a district sales manager in July 1995 and took up residence in Wilmington. “I didn’t think I could live in Lake Waccamaw right then,” she says. “It would have been too much of a culture shock, plus I didn’t want to be under my parents’ noses.”

Adjusting to new surroundings wasn’t nearly as difficult as adjusting to the new job. “Although I had worked at Council Tool as a teenager during the summer, I had no real knowledge of the hardware business,” she says. “I was like a fish out of water, but what helped me most was being Daddy’s daughter and John’s sister — that gave me at least some degree of credibility.”

As the years passed, Council learned more about both the company and herself. She married Rocco Wadsworth in November 1999 and the couple bought a home at Magnolia Greens, a golf community in Leland. By the time the calendar turned on 2001, stresses at work and home had eroded both relationships.

“We’re a small family business run by people who are extremely close, and I don’t think any of us knew how difficult it would be as Daddy got older,” she says. “He’s 81 now and he still comes to the office a couple of times a day, because that’s just what he does. He didn’t know how to retire.

“For a while, we struggled greatly to find our way. We went to counseling together — Daddy, John and me — and how many 70-something-year-olds do you know who would agree to that? To our credit, we were all forthcoming.

“Then as we were going through the heat of that, the economy tanked. Rocco watched this from the outside and it was hard on them and subsequently on us. We had been trying to get pregnant, and when we found out that we couldn’t, that was sort of the last straw for us. We had been through so many stresses that our marriage just crumbled.”

In her words, the first half of 2002 “was the worst time of my life. I really felt like I’d been through the ringer.” She moved into the house where she was raised — now vacant and owned by her sister Nancy — and attempted to put the pieces back together. “I’d sit out on the pier with a glass of wine or a gin and tonic and try to work through the pain,” she says. “Lucy and Lenny (her Golden Retriever and Black Lab, respectively) were my saving grace. Each time I’d step foot in that house, they’d be there to greet me, just as excited as they could be.”

At the office, where Council was now vice president, things were on the upswing, which was no surprise to Ivan Wilson, a retired International Paper executive and a longtime friend. “She has a great head on her and is wonderful at what she does,” he says. “She’s done a terrific job selling products to different in-users.” Today, while their competitors are no longer in business, Council Tool is thriving.

So is Pickett’s personal life. Late last November, just a few days before Thanksgiving, a man driving a shiny red pickup truck drove up while she was on her lawn tractor mowing the yard. Out stepped Lendon Ellis, who said he knew her sisters and was hoping to see them over the holiday. “I had dirty hair, no makeup,” she says, “so I can’t imagine that I made much of a first impression. I was going to have a party where’d he know a lot of the people there, so I asked him to come.”

They got to talking that night, and Ellis, 54, a sales manager for an electronics hardware and software company, got her attention when he asked if sometime she’d like to take a ride on his Harley-Davison. The party ended, but their relationship was just beginning.

Their wedding was followed by a night of dancing at Whiteville Country Club. “Everyone had a great time,” Nancy Council says. “Pickett wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

The newlyweds live on a large spread five miles down the road in Bolton, where Lendon, a competitive shooter, built a pistol and rifle range. “He gave me a Glock for Christmas,” she says. Lucy and Lenny also have new family surroundings and new family — Bailey, a Chocolate Lab, and Gilly, a Yellow Lab. “It’s just us, the dogs, the hawks and the squirrels,” she says. “It’s absolute heaven.”

Among her many memorable days, Council says swapping thoughts with President Bush ranks near the top. “I went through a thorough screening process that involved a series of phone calls and lots of questions,” she says. “And then I almost missed the darn thing.”

It was scheduled for a Thursday afternoon in late February. Pickett and Lendon left Lake Waccamaw for a drive that would normally take roughly three hours. But that was a day snow and ice hammered the western part of the state and five hours into the drive, they were only to Monroe and had little hope of making it much farther as conditions worsened.

“We finally got word that the meeting had been canceled; we turned around right then and drove straight back home.”

The meeting was rescheduled for April 5. This time, Council drove down the night before. She was one of six at the roundtable, plus Bush and Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao. “The president strode in very confidently and said, ‘I understand there are some great Americans in this room,’ ” Council remembers. “Bob Morgan (president of the Gaston County Chamber) was one of the six of us around a table and he got off a great line: ‘Well, there is now, Mr. President.’ ”

 With Council in the room, President Bush no doubt had it right the first time. “Pickett’s one of those rare people that makes you feel better for having been around them,” sister Nancy says. “She has a very easy way about her and a rapport that’s very genuine. She puts everyone at ease, and she does it all from the heart.”


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