Chapter 48

The week with Dale and Eddie in Birmingham was filled with many different kinds of feelings for me. First, it was busy. There was so much to do, and it seemed like every waking moment had multiple claims on it for my attention,

It was fun too. In spite of her earlier misgivings, Cindy, Dale, Eddie and I spent most of our evenings out, eating in one restaurant or another. We got some looks, and turned some heads, but, for the most part, we were all lost in ourselves anyway. We paid very little attention to what was happening outside our own little circle.

Cindy and Dale became friends right away. Although they teased each other with some sort of mating dance ritual, they failed to connect on a sexual level right away. They both knew they would, eventually. Instead, they talked. It seemed like they talked for the entire week the four of us were together. Their friendship amazed Eddie more than their having sex would have. I saw it as the beginnings of a courtship, and gave both of them enough space to continue to allow it to become more fully developed.

On the Macklinson front, I took the initiative. Gene and I met at the lawyer's office where we both needed to sign some papers to transfer the property over to the trust I'd had Frank create for my twelve children. While there, I invited Gene to ride out to the second, smaller land parcel with me, so that we could take a look at it together. We did that, in his Jeep, and afterwards, stopped off to have lunch together.

I could see, from having visited the land itself, that Gene had spoken the truth when he said it wasn't farm land. It was ridge land, with second growth trees and a lot of undergrowth that made it ideal for birds to nest. There were plenty of rabbits and squirrels as well. It was connected to the Underwood property by a ninety foot corridor of common border on the South end of the small parcel.

The title search I'd been given showed that Tom Macklinson had sold the property back in 1934, to a Georgia couple. It had been resold in 1961, then again in 1984. Gene had bought the property at a tax auction the year before, for twenty seven thousand dollars. I had waited to comment until after we had been seated for our lunch.

"If you want, Gene, I'll call the lawyer and tell him we decided to not include the two hundred and forty acres in the sale. I'll only do it under two conditions though." Gene looked at me suspiciously.

"What conditions? That piece of land isn't really very valuable, Kenny."

"I can see that. Like you told me before though, it's Macklinson land, and you'd like to keep it in the family." Gene nodded. Our drink order came, and both Gene and I stopped talking long enough to sweeten our iced teas and add some lemon squeezing's to it.

"I've thought about it, Kenny, and it would be worth forty thousand dollars to me to be able to keep that property in the family."

"I had in mind a different sort of trade, Gene. I want to propose an exchange of cooperation. I want you and your brothers to stop agitating about me hiring Patty and Cindy, and I want the three of you to quit doing anything to interfere with Kyle, Steve and the rest of the boys going back, and staying at, work. Those are my two conditions."

I could see that Gene hadn't anticipated me asking for anything along those lines. We spoke some more, about the whole family tradition history, and about how most of the Macklinson sons and cousins had decided to quit on their own. Gene told me that Patty had already called Phil, Larry and him, and had told them she wouldn't stand for any of them to be in her way over doing what she'd already decided to do, and that was work at Macklinson's.

"Patty made it pretty clear that she didn't want to have anything more to do with all of us, if we didn't let her have her own way with this. Cindy takes after Patty that way. She has her own beliefs, and she won't listen to good advice. She's a lot like Lee that way too. All of them are too strong willed for my taste."

"I've been talking to Cindy a lot, and she's got me convinced that what you said was right, that I don't understand how things work down in this part of the country. She's been trying to help me communicate better. She told me it wasn't so much what I was doing, but how I went about getting it done."

"She has the right of it, Kenny, but I've told you that myself, more times than I like to remember." Our sandwiches came then, some kind of pork in barbecue sauce that was very tasty, but messy to eat. The two of us dug into them, putting further conversation on hold. It took us each about ten minutes to demolish our sandwiches.

"Cindy told me I should sit down with you and ask your advice about how I should have handled things." This was really the critical part of our talk. If Gene decided to tell me I was wrong in changing things, then he and I would have little further to discuss. I was confident that the changes were necessary and good, and that they would make the overall operation both stronger, and more profitable. Gene had waited some little while before responding. I was sure her was deciding on which way he wanted to go with this.

"You know Kyle and I are close, Kenny, and we always have talked a lot about the business. He likes to tell me what he's thinking, and I tell him my opinion about his ideas. He's been telling me about this new thing you've got him working on, and how he's already started getting things lined up for it. You've got him excited, I can tell you that much. I've never seen him so worked up about something he was doing."

"I was happy to learn that Kyle and Steve hadn't quit when I got back."

"Larry and Phil, they've been seeing the other side of it, mostly the boys who have been getting pretty close to being up against it, now that their incomes being turned off. For all of us, not just them boys, our work has been more than just the money. Mostly, its been the way we've all kept together. I'm telling you this as part of my way of saying that I've already been giving this a lot of thought. I've seen both sides of this, and I'd like to make it better if you'll let me."

This was different than what I'd expected. He wasn't talking about business so much as he was talking about family. He was speaking as a father, brother and uncle. I wasn't certain about where he was heading with it, but I liked the frame of reference he was using.

"I think we both want to make it better, Gene. For my part, I'm perfectly willing to admit I've made some mistakes, and maybe part of the reason was I didn't understand some of the warnings that you tried to give me. I tend to usually concentrate only on results, and that usually means needing to beat down any resistance or objection to what I'm trying to do. I'm starting to believe, because of what happened here, that this might not be the best way to approach these things."

"Some of us are starting to think that what you said about keeping family and business issues separate was good advice for us to take too. Larry is mostly the one who keeps telling us that now. We can't keep visiting family problems at work or work problems in the family. This is new to all of us, because the business and the family have always been closely intertwined until now."

Once again Gene was heading off on a different angle than the ones I'd been prepared for. The problem with it was that we weren't heading in the same direction. I didn't want to be the first one to pick out one of the flaws he was admitting to, so we could examine the issue more closely and arrive at some understanding. Apparently, Gene felt the same about the shortcomings I was admitting.

"If things were back to before we had all the trouble, I can think of some things I would have handled differently. For one thing, I'd have tried to find out what it was that you and Larry were fighting about?" Gene laughed.

"We always fought. Larry always got his way, in the beginning, it was because he was the oldest. Later, it was because it mattered more to him to get his way. We all just got used to letting him do what he wanted to. It was just plain easier all around."

"Laura told me that she was going to marry Larry, before you took her away from him?" Gene colored up right away. It looked like he was going to get angry.

"I just couldn't help myself. I tried not to feel that way about her, for the longest time. When it got close to them being married, I just had to let her know what a mistake she'd be making by marrying him. It was the hardest decision I ever made, and it got all the more complicated, and painful, when the two of us discovered the feelings we each had for the other. See, when I went and told her not to marry Larry, I had no idea that she had strong feelings for me as well. No idea at all."

"It must have been hard for Larry?"

"Hard? You don't have no idea. That man wanted to kill. If we had stayed anywhere that he could put his hands on us, he would have too. We went and hid in Georgia first, then down in Florida, until she caught with Kyle. We were gone for six months, and the only thing that kept Larry from going ahead with his plans for murder was my daddy blaming him for me being gone from the company. Told him to stay away until he found a way to bring me back to work. That was when Larry found out that Daddy was putting me above him in the company. Part of the reason for it was that Daddy was so mad at Larry for letting his personal problems get in the way of our running of the company. It was some tense after I came back. I can tell you there were lots of times when I wasn't certain that Larry wasn't going to go ahead and kill me anyway."

"I can understand how it would make him pretty angry. You're his brother."

"That's true, but you don't understand how it was with us when my father was alive. We didn't act like family. He always set us to competing about everything. We fought all the time. Phil and I would team up to protect each other, but something would happen, we'd get to fighting each other ourselves, and then Larry would end up beating up on both of us, separately. It wasn't a good thing. We didn't grow up like a family should."

"That seems to be changed now. You all act like you're joined at the hip or something. Smack one Macklinson, and they all bleed." Gene laughed again. A sardonic laugh.

"Larry's doing, mostly. It was a year after Lee and I had run off together. Kyle was born by then, and Daddy was already showing signs that he was sick bad. Daddy kept me close to him, telling me what I'd need to know to run things after he was gone. He had almost continual pain by then, from the cancer eating at him, but he wanted things to keep going good after he died.

"Larry had taken up with Grace by then, and she was already making him forget some of his anger at Lee and me. Phil was dating Grace's sister, Faye, and that looked like it might be serious too. Them both dating sisters like that, it made them feel closer, and they were in love, which made them both think differently about things. Larry started talking to Phil about how we all needed to change in how we treated each other. By then, all of us knew Daddy didn't have too much time left."

"All through this time, when Larry was so mad at you, did you both work together at the plant?"

"When I came back we did. Like I told you, Daddy stayed close to me. He kept Larry from bothering me too much about what happened with me and Lee. When Lee started showing with Kyle, I think Larry realized then that none of his being angry was going to change things. He eased up some then, and some more after he and Phil started dating Grace and Faye together.

"After Daddy died, I knew we either had to get things settled, or else we needed to split up the company. We had another bakery over by Atlanta then, this was before the fire that destroyed it. I told Phil what I was thinking, and he started telling Larry that I was planning on moving to Atlanta, to be closer to Lee's family, and that I wanted to split up things so that I got the smaller bakery over in Georgia, and he and Phil kept the one that was here."

"So, you almost split up the company?"

"No, we did do it. I moved to Atlanta. I stayed there for over a year, running my business and everything was fine. Larry and Phil both got married, and they were doing good down here. We kept to ourselves, them down here, and me over there. That was when Lee got pregnant, with Jerry, and Phil's wife was pregnant with Billy Ray. When Grace got pregnant with Steve, Larry started in talking about how it was a shame that none of us could get along like brothers should. It was him that talked me into coming back home again. He said he would let bygones be bygones, if I came back and we could all work together. I talked to Lee about it, and she agreed that we should."

"It was Larry then that acted as the peacemaker? He's the one who wanted to keep the family together?"

"Changed and together. We all had to change, Kenny. We needed to stop fighting and competing to make it work. It didn't always work, but it mostly did. We took advantage of each other's strengths, and, for the most part, it made all of us stronger. We started growing soon after I came back. The company had been strong under our father, but it got stronger when we started working together.

"What hurt us later, was we stopped growing. We were all satisfied with what we had. It was more than enough to feed three families. After the boys started working full time, we realized that we needed to grow again. By then it was too late, because we had competition, and all our income was being used on paying out salaries so we could all live good."

I knew what he meant. Growth cost money. From what I'd already learned, Macklinson's had distributed their annual profits, to satisfy Patty and their mother at first. After, they continued doing it because it was their tradition. They ended up with more than enough to live well, but nothing left to pay for expansion. Without expansion and growth, yearly profits became pinched with the salaries they were now paying each of their male children.

With having to fight off Consolidated's competition over a three year period, they had further weakened themselves to the point where the operating account was barely able to sustain their current production needs.

"Getting back to what I said earlier, if I had known some of the family history between you and Larry, I might have looked for a different solution after Larry threatened to quit. He must have expected both you and Phil to support him when he said that, but neither of you did. Why?"

"Mostly because all of us have been arguing about what we need to do about them boys of ours. Larry wanted to keep things like they had been. Phil and I both thought they needed to change. What we'd been doing wasn't working, and a lot of the kids weren't happy with how they were being used."

"I got some of that from Kyle. In fact, he seems to think you all were doing it deliberately, putting them in jobs they either weren't suited for, or didn't like."

"Kyle has always had his own way of seeing things. All of us agreed that we needed to keep him from out pacing all the others. If he got to do that, some of the others would want their own way too, to show what they could do. If that happened, they'd all be back to competing, just like we had back when Daddy was still running things."

"Trying to do your best is a good thing. Kyle should try to be as good as he can be. So should all the others. That isn't competing. That's excelling. Look at Phil. Everyone tells me he was really excellent at keeping all the machinery running. Larry was just as good in scheduling and production. You had your own areas of excellence. Achievement doesn't necessarily have to mean competition. Even a certain amount of competition can be a good thing."

"It wasn't for us, Kenny. We fought all the time. It kept us from being close like family should be."

"Was that only from the competition, Gene? Since I've been down here, I've seen all of you fighting with each other still. It could be that all of you have personalities that thrive on conflict. You need to channel that into more positive areas. Give them all challenges that keep them too absorbed to leave them time for fighting. Wait until next week when you meet Joyce. Watch how she keeps things on the go. I don't have time to fight with her. As soon as I find something I want to pick a fight with her about, she has me running off in three separate directions, trying to put together information on some idea she's given me. She does the same thing with all of the others, not just me."

"Give me an example. It seems to me that Phil and Larry were kept pretty busy all the time. I know I was busy, but that didn't mean we wouldn't fight about things."

"I don't know if this is a good example or not. Now that the three of you aren't working for the company, how are you getting along? Are you still all fighting with each other?"

"We get along all right. We still can't agree on what we need to do, but our main conflict right now is you, not us."

"My main conflict right now is with trying to figure out the best way to get Macklinson's positioned for all the growth we're planning on having with this big expansion we're undertaking. I'm conflicted because I know it would be a lot easier if I had people I could work with who were knowledgeable about the baking business, and all the differing local customs. I can work with people who don't have local knowledge, but I'd prefer to do it the easy way, by using the resources I thought I'd have available to me. That means Macklinson people."

"It doesn't have to be such a problem." Gene was smiling. I think he felt I was coming to him admitting my defeat. This was usually the point where I'd let him know that wasn't the case at all. Doing that hadn't worked well for me, so I tried a different way.

"You would think it wouldn't be. Here we have a whole bunch of people who are able to do what I need done, plus we have a clear goal in mind. Add to this the fact that so many things have already been identified for them to do in order to achieve that goal. The conflict seems to be over accepting one single vision for achieving that goal. That seems to be the only problem, at least to me it does."

"I can't say I agree with that. I might if things were set up differently. Right now, I see the way things were set up as being the main problem. If we got that straightened away, I don't think having one vision accepted would be any problem at all."

I didn't know what Gene meant. At first I thought he meant the problem was with me being in charge instead of him. If he meant that, then he was in for a disappointment. There wasn't anyway we were going to turn over a five hundred million dollar expansion effort to someone outside our inner circle. It would either be my father, Joyce or me that directed the expansion, and probably all three of us for some of the parts of it.

"What set up changes do you think should be made?" I really tried not to put any sign of anger or negativeness in my voice when I asked him. I kept remembering how things had gone with Cindy, after I let her explain what she wanted from me. It hadn't turned out to be what I'd feared, not after we stripped away all of the extraneous camouflage she had surrounded it with.

"Well, first, I want to tell you that I really admired what you told Kyle, about how he only had to report to you, and how his people only reported to him, when it came to doing assignments. It makes a lot of sense, and its something we never practiced when we ran things here. I really like that set up, and I think Phil and Larry would as well. None of us have ever liked being told what to do by the others. Sometimes, just because we don't like the way someone said something to us. That day when Larry said he'd quit? He wasn't just talking to you, he was talking to all of us, and he was fighting a different fight altogether. If he'd been alone with you, he wouldn't have had to be so unreasonable."

"You think I wouldn't have had to fire Larry if he and I were talking together alone? I did talk to him alone, after you walked out, and he wouldn't answer me when I asked him a simple question."

"That was because he was already mad at me, and because it wasn't just a simple question. He couldn't tell you that he was at work because I told him I was going to quit if he didn't come back. He couldn't tell you that, because I had just had another fight with him about something else, and I'd decided to quit anyway, because I knew I couldn't do what you wanted me to do, and still deal with how Larry was, not both at the same time."

I took a sip of my new glass of iced tea. Trying to gain myself some time while I digested what Gene had just told me. In a weird way, I understood what he was telling me. I had encountered similar situations with Joyce and my other wives. I couldn't answer one question, because, if I did so, it would raise other problems for me that were more serious than the problems with not answering the first one.

I'd never lost a job because of it, but I had pissed off a few people from time to time. It was the price I paid for having such a complicated living situation. Gene was letting me know his family situation might be at least as complicated.

"I think we might want to consider having you, Phil and Larry each reporting separately directly to me. This could cut down on some of the conflict the three of you seem to be having." Gene nodded his head. His smile telling me that I was on the right track. "Maybe I should also have separate meetings with the three of you, where we could go over how you think each one of the boys should be used now? In the end, I'd be the one to make the final decision, but it would still be better if I got input from each of you."