Ely Callaway Jr.

Ely Reeves Callaway Jr. was an American Entrepreneur, Textiles Executive, Winemaker and Vintner and Golf Club Manufacturer, as the founder of Callaway Golf.

He had three successful careers – first in textiles, next in wine and finally in golf. Ely Callaway was born in 1919 in Georgia and raised in LaGrange, Georgia. Even as he moved up the corporate ladder in New York, and later in California, he held on to his southern roots and retained a distinctive, singsong twang to his voice and a genteel southern charm.

Early life

At age 10 he earned $150 selling copies of Literary Digest, and used his profits to buy a J.H. Hale peach tree that yielded a crop of $750 in their first year. “My father thought they were probably the easiest to raise successfully, and also very palatable versus any other peaches," he later told his alma mater, Emory University.

Ely Callaway played golf as a youth, and was a distant cousin of golf legend Bobby Jones. He won four successive championships at LaGrange’s Highland Country Club. He was a natural leader in school, and was business manager of his high school newspaper and yearbook. His family wanted him to be an engineer, but he was determined to obtain a liberal arts degree. He was senior class president, worked at the business manager for the university publication called The Campus and was a member of the Omicron Delta Kappa leadership fraternity. He graduated with a degree in history in 1940.

Army career

He joined the Army as a reserve officer in 1940 and earned a reserve officer’s commission through a correspondence course. Despite his intent to stay away from the family business of textiles, he was assigned to the Philadelphia Centralized Procurement Agency; the Army decided fabrics suited him after learning of his family’s history in textiles and Callaway Mills. He fulfilled his one-year obligation in October 1941, and decided to re-enlist. Just a few months later, Pearl Harbor was bombed, and his role and responsibilities expanded exponentially. "All of a sudden we were buying hundreds of millions of items of apparel and all of the fabrics," he says. "[By 1945,] we had about twenty-five thousand people working there administering contracts all over the United States. I was spending at the rate of something like $700 million a year under just my jurisdiction, with my name on every contract. So you learn business real quick," he told Emory Magazine.

He rose to the rank of major and married; at just 24 years old, he became the youngest major in the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot. His three children, Reeves, Lisa and Nicholas, were born in the 1940s and 50s and when Ely Callaway was discharged from the Army, he had plenty of job offers and contacts in the textiles industry. He went to work for Deering-Milliken Co. in Atlanta. Charming and charismatic, he was chosen to launch a new company division in New York and became a rising corporate star. One of his greatest professional successes in the textiles business came from his development of polyester blends. "I was one of the leaders of the move toward the fundamental new fabrics, Dacron blended first with wool and then with cotton," he told Emory Magazine. "It started at Milliken and increased tremendously at Burlington. My first real success was a blend of wool and Dacron, which went into men's suitings and became very famous. It led the way for all the other fabrics to be adopted as blends instead of 100 percent."

Textiles

Ely Callaway helped quality clothiers realize the benefit of blended fabrics that looked good, cost less and lasted longer, and he gave them catchy, memorable names like Viracle. He used unique and sometimes shocking marketing techniques, like dousing a line of models in suits with water to show the fabrics’ innovative properties, while also garnering attention from media. He was also among the first to hire a woman for an executive position. Letitia Baldrige, etiquette author, columnist, and former social secretary and chief of staff for Jacqueline Kennedy, was Burlington’s first director of consumer affairs. http://articles.latimes.com/1994-07-17/news/ls-16774_1_ely-callaway

In the late 1950s Textron hired Ely Callaway away from Deering-Milliken; Textron was then sold to Burlington Industries. He became vice president at Burlington in 1960, then president and director by 1968. But when he was passed over for the top spot as chairman of the company, he retired in 1973, and headed West to launch his next career.

Wine and Golf

Ely Callaway had purchased 140 acres of land in Temecula, California some four years earlier, and decided to turn it into a vineyard. Some people said the area was unsuitable for growing grapes; it had never been done. Ely Callaway thought differently. He hired soils and climate experts who determined that the Temecula area had a microclimate that indeed was suitable for grape growing. He planted his grapes in 1973 and established Callaway Winery and Vineyards in 1974. The first wines were sold in 1975, and Callaway Reisling was served at a luncheon for Queen Elizabeth II in New York; the Queen asked for two glasses and a meeting with the vintner, and soon Temecula was on the map as a legitimate wine-producing region. http://www.callawaywinery.com/callaway-company.html

In 1981 Callaway Winery and Vineyard was purchased by Hiram Walker and Sons for $14 million, leaving Ely Callaway with a $9 million profit. Retired for a second time, he was playing a lot of golf when he discovered Hickory Stick clubs in a Palm Springs-area golf shop. The old fashioned-looking, wooden clubs looked similar to those he had played with as a youth. However, these clubs were unique; they had a hollowed wooden shaft that was filled with a steel rod for strength and consistency. Hickory Stick, then owned by Richard Parente, Dick De La Cruz and Tony Manzoni, was looking for investors, and Ely Callaway was looking for a third career. In 1982 he purchased half ownership of Hickory Stick USA for $400,000, it soon became Callaway Hickory Stick USA and by 1984 Ely Callaway purchased the company in full, and it became Callaway Golf – his third and most successful business venture. The company made him an icon for entrepreneurs and great big name in the game of golf, thanks to the company’s Big Bertha Driver. "Most people would settle for any one of Callaway's careers," Entrepreneur magazine wrote of Ely Callaway in a 1994 profile.

Ely Callaway was awarded an Emory Medal in 1990 and an honorary doctor of humane letters degree in 1996. He often said the secret to his success came from a simple formula. The way to win in business, he said, is to create a product that is "demonstrably superior and pleasingly different from the competition in some significant ways." According to a 1994 profile in Golf Digest, "In his sixty-plus years in business, Callaway's reputation for honesty, ethics, and generosity is unblemished."

Ely Callaway often repeated the phrase “Good ethics is good business.” He was actively involved in minority issues and rights, and was chairman of the National UNCF Corporate Campaign. He believed in giving back, and donated generously to Emory University, as well as the local community near Carlsbad, California and the Callaway Golf Foundation. "What is good in life is good in business: Treat everybody right and tell the truth. No matter what you do, do your best and don't give up. Just try, try, try. Then try again."

Later life

In April 2001 at age 82 Ely Callaway was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Until that time, he had arrived early at his Carlsbad office nearly every day—unless he was traveling for business – driving himself to and from work, actively and aggressively engaged in the business of selling what he called “Demonstrably Superior and Pleasingly Different” golf clubs. He often stopping off during lunch or on the way home for frozen yogurt – his favorite treat. Just a few months after his cancer diagnosis, in July 2001, Ely Callaway died. The headstone on the Callaway family plot in LaGrange, Georgia, states: "He considered himself very fortunate in all aspects of his life".

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