Good People

5questions

Folksy sayings impart useful wisdom ... a simple truth he learned from his parents

Story and photo by David Moore

No one ever accused Davis Lee of doing things in a small way.

His AlaTrade chicken processing plants in Boaz and Albertville are among the largest employers in Marshall County.

When Davis decided to “retire,” he sought a way to thank his workers and decided to convert AlaTrade into an employee-owned business. That action in June made Guntersville-headquartered AlaTrade one of the largest ESOPs – employee stock ownership plans – in Alabama.

During a particularly heavy time for littering in Marshall County, Davis, who lives north of Arab at Cherokee Ridge, pumped some $50,000 into cleanup and educational efforts.

After buying discarded iron from a renovation of the Statute of Liberty, in 2008 he created Liberty’s Legacy and gave replica figurines containing shards of that iron to elementary students as part of a curriculum on liberty.

A dozen years ago, when he heard about a drive to fly Tennessee Valley veterans to the nation’s capital to see the World War II memorial, he wrote not one but two $100,000 checks to the cause.

Much of Davis’s character development traces to his parents, who raised him in Arapahoe, a wide spot in the coastal plain roads of North Carolina.

“They had everything to do with what I am.” And, he adds, “I also picked up a few good points from people I worked with, associated with over the years.”

After a management career in the poultry industry, Davis developed a lucrative streak of entrepreneurship from which he fueled his philanthropic spirit. And he keeps it all colorful with a knack for anecdotal storytelling.

“People ask me all the time about how I made such a success out of AlaTrade,” Davis says, explaining why he rewarded his AlaTrade employees in such a big fashion. “I tell them I’m like the turtle on top of a fence post … I had a lot of help getting there.”

Help notwithstanding, Davis ascended that fence post from humble, North Carolina roots.

His dad, Lytle Lee, was a civilian aircraft mechanic at Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station who ran a ferry on the Neuse River as a side job. Davis lived his first years in a two-room house.

He was born so sickly the doctor gave him only two weeks to live. But his mother, Eva, who finished the seventh grade, refused to accept that.

“I think she willed me to live,” says Davis, who was called Davie growing up. “She would not let me die.”

Later, the family upgraded to a fourroom house.

“We were not much worse off than the general population,” Davis says. “We just took what we had and made the best of it. I can’t remember ever being cold. I remember being hot. I slept outside under an oak tree a lot of summer nights.”

But poverty didn’t drive him to succeed.

“The only thing I ever tried to do was be better at whatever I did,” says Davis. Eva helped cultivate that attitude.

“If you’re a bread truck driver,” she told young Davie, “be a very, very good bread truck driver.”

From age 8, Davis worked in the fields to earn money to buy school clothes.

“I’d buy two or three pairs of overalls and new pair of shoes for Sunday. I’d rotate last year’s Sunday shoes for that year’s work shoes.

“You were committed to work,” he adds. “It’s what you did.”

At age 13, Davis didn’t know what “foreshadowing” meant, but he knew he had to turn in an agricultural project at school. Deciding to raise and sell chickens, he ordered 100 chicks. Purina shipped him 150.

He kept records on feed costs, but as the chicks grew, so did his appetite. By the time they were ready for sale, only 52 were left. He’d eaten the rest. His teacher was impressed with his bookkeeping, if not his profit margin.

Once, some teen-aged buddies of his – Davis wasn’t with them – broke into a camp house on the river. They didn’t steal anything, but they got caught.

“The sheriff scared the hell of them by taking them to jail before turning them loose. I told Daddy the scare seemed pretty harsh. He looked at me with his steely eyes and said, ‘You want to stay out of the trouble with the law?’”

“I said, ‘Yes, sir.’”

“Then behave yourself,” Lytle replied.

The law within the Lee family was basically the same.

“There was always an underlying tone not to embarrass the family,” Davis explains. “Even your brother or sister would call you down.”

In high school, Davis played all sports, but baseball was his love.

“I was not a gifted athlete, but I took what I had and worked to make it better,” he says.

He had confidence, too, which showed when he went out for baseball at Atlantic Christian College (now Barton College), in Wilson, NC. The coach had asked him to try out after playing him in ping pong and noticing his hand-to-eye coordination.

The first day, when the coach asked what position he played in high school, Davis said outfield. But after seeing a lot of big, tall, fast guys shagging flies, and seeing only two scrawny guys at third, Davis he’d like to play there.

“Ever played third base?” the coach asked.

“Nope,” Davis replied. “But I guarantee you I’m better than those two.”

SNAPSHOT: Davis Lee

EARLY LIFE: Born March 1, 1940, Arapahoe, N.C.; second child of the late Lytle and Eva Lee. Siblings, Tommy Lee, Union Grove; Judy Roads, Arab. EDUCATION: 1957, graduated Pamlico County High School; studied business three and a half years at Atlantic Christian College, Wilson, N.C. FAMILY: 1981, married the former Beth Johnson. Combined, they have six grown children: Davis Jr., Wendy, Melinda, Michael, Steve and Justin Roberts. CAREER: 1960 accountant, sales manager, Rose Hill Poultry Co.; 1969, plant controller, National Spinning Co.; 1971, general manager, Rose Hill Poultry; moved to Alabama in 1977 as complex manager, ConAgra Poultry, Decatur; 1982, complex manager, ConAgra, Ruston, La.; 1983, vice president, live production, Foster Farms of California, Turlock; 1985, VP sales/marketing, (Spring Valley Farms, soon purchased by) Tyson, regional production manager, Oxford, Ala.; 1992,

VP sales, Tyson, Springdale, Ark.; 1996, president, Keystone Foods Poultry Division, Huntsville; 1999, retired; 2000, started AlaTrade Foods, now a part of Davis Lee Companies, through which he started some dozen companies. AWARDS/AFFILIATIONS – Member, Arab First United Methodist Church; 1992, elected president, Alabama Poultry & Egg Association; Alabama Poultry Hall of Fame; first recipient of Marshall County Economic Development Council’s Industrialist of the Year Award.

Davis made the team and got a scholarship.

Even so, Lytle and Eva could not support his education. Plus, he was married with two children. So in college he worked various jobs, including refereeing high school basketball, a night shift in a pork processing plant and two summers aboard a fishing trawler.

Out of college in 1960, Davis worked as an accountant at a poultry processing plant in Rose Hill, NC. Within three years he’d become sales manager, and three years later company sales were up 100 percent.

A few years at a textile plant taught him a keen attention to detail. Returning with those lessons to Rose Hill in 1971 as general manager, he turned the company around from a $500,000 loss to $1 million in profits in two years.

In 1977, Davis came to ConAgra Poultry in Decatur, Ala., as complex manager. It was there he met the former Beth Johnson in 1979, and they married in ’81. After top positions in Louisiana, California and Arkansas, Davis worked about 11 years in management for Tyson. In 1996, he became president of Keystone Foods Poultry Division in Huntsville.

Davis gave retirement a whirl in 1999 – briefly. In 2000 he started AlaTrade, which became a part of Davis Lee Companies, which in turn grew to “umbrella” about a dozen businesses.

“I don’t think I ever had an original thought in my life,” he laughs. “But I was always good at copying. And it worked out for us.

“I’m interested in learning from people. That’s why when I started playing golf, I played with older folks – they have experience and sense and you don’t pick that up from the young guys.”

Besides selling off a few former holdings and exiting AlaTrade this June, Davis Lee is no longer directly involved in Liberty’s Legacy.

“I set up funds that will support it so it can be successful for the foreseeable future,” he says.

As CEO of Davis Lee Companies, Davis remains invested and involved in an armful of diversified, new and existing companies, including: • DSide, a fast, insurance research engine that Rockefeller Capital Group is trying to sell to a large internet company; • QuantumX, a cyber security system designed for business and national security interest, in which Davis is a major investor; • A partial investment in his youngest son’s business – with one plant in Huntsville and another being built in Crossville – that recycles aluminum by melting old engine blocks and such into bars and selling them to manufacturers of parts and engines for autos, boats and aircraft; • Heav’n Lee, a horse farm he and Beth own at the entrance road to Cherokee Ridge; • A Cessna XLS, his eight-passenger private jet on which he charters flights; • A fully integrated company producing CBG to fight inflammation, pain and nausea, and CBD to fight anxiety, all processed from legal cannabis grown in Union Grove.

“It will be,” says the man who doesn’t do things in a small way, “the largest CBG and CBD operation in Alabama.” 1. How would you describe the corporate culture you created at AlaTrade?

A: As long as we do good – not just for customers but for our corporate family – we’re going to be successful. So we try to do good, to be good corporate citizens.

But for our citizenship mission to be successful, you first have to turn a profit. That’s my 11th Commandant – Thou shalt turn a profit. You’ve got to have that or you can’t add these other things.

My daddy once had me shoveling wheelbarrow loads of chert for our driveway, and told me that I would probably be working all my life, so I should make work fun.

“Where’s the fun in this?” I asked. He handed me his watch and said to time himself shoveling the next load. “Then what?” “Then do it faster on the next load,” he said.

He was telling me to be the best I can be, and that meant doing better the next time I did something. Some days it might be 10 percent better, some days just a half-percent better. It’s not necessarily that the actual action you do is better, it’s that your attitude is always to do better.

That’s what we do at AlaTrade – do a better job today that we did yesterday. We have 1,800 employees, and I dare say probably three-fourths of them have that do-it-better attitude. I appreciate that.

That’s why I gave thank-you bonuses to management when I left AlaTrade. But it bothered me that I hadn’t done anything for the line workers, except the ESOP.

Then I had this epiphany – the Davis Lee Legacy Lottery. We will have a $50,000 lottery drawing at each plant every year. The only thing employees have to do to be eligible is to come to work every day when they are not sick. So every hourly production person will have a chance to win $50,000 every year.

I’m funding it for three years for sure and might do it beyond if it’s working. 2.Philanthropy appears to be important you. How did that come about?

A: It all goes back to my upbringing.

One evening I was complaining to my momma about something going on at school. She asked me what I’d done to try and change that. I said “Nothing.” “Let me give you some advice,” she said.

I used to ride the bus sometimes, but we lived close enough to school to walk, and when I did I took a shortcut through some woods.

“Davie,” she said. “You know that shortcut you take, that mudhole that’s always there in the middle of your path?”

“Yep. It was there this morning. I had to walk around it and tore my shirt.”

“Go out there behind the garage to your daddy’s rock pile every day, and put some rocks in your pockets,” she said. “Then throw them in that mudhole as you pass it. You keep doing that, and eventually you’ll fill it and make your travels easier.”

I said that made sense. Then she leaned over the kitchen bar and said, “And it will make the travels easier for all the people who come behind you.”

You don’t just fill up the mudhole for yourself. You fill it for everyone who comes behind you.

Mom died in 2004. She was 94 and had been living with Beth and me 13 years. We buried her in eastern North Carolina. I did the eulogy. I was so nervous Beth gave me half a Xanax.

There are no rocks to speak of in eastern North Carolina. Only sand and water, but after the funeral I looked down

and there was a little heart-shaped rock, like a symbol of what she told me to do with my life – to fill up mudholes so that your travels, and everyone who comes behind you, will be easier. I still have that rock.

About six or seven years ago, the principal at DAR High School asked me to speak at their graduation. I asked if I could present something to each senior, and he said yes. So I told them that story. When they came across the stage, he gave them a diploma, and I gave each one a heart-shaped rock – or the best I could find.

A few years later I was at the grocery store to get fried chicken for lunch. A young woman with a small child and bunch of groceries was about to check out ahead of me. I’m thinking, “I’m in the wrong line.”

She looked back and said, “Mr. Lee, come on and get ahead of me. You don’t know me, but you spoke at our DAR graduation.” And she reached in her purse and she had her rock. She said she carried it with her every day.

I laughed and said, “You’re probably the only one in a hundred.”

“No,” she said. “A lot of my classmates still have their rocks.”

Maybe we all need a reminder about filling up mudholes. 3. In 2008 and early 2009, you made two donations of $100,000 each to Honor Flight Tennessee Valley, paying the way for 250 World War II veterans to fly to Washington, DC, to see the WWII and other memorials. How did that come about?

A: That’s the best contribution I could have ever made. I still don’t go a month without running into someone who says, “You helped my dad go to Washington.” That happens all the time.

I had an accountant who was a great advisor, but he left out some tax opportunities for AlaTrade. When he retired he put me with a firm in Birmingham. They went back three years and found those opportunities and refiled.

I went home one night and had gotten a check from the IRS for $94,000. Beth said, “I know you can use that toward your business.” I could have, but I said no. Joe Fitzgerald, who was trying to raise money for three Honor Flights. What a great way to honor our veterans! So I called him, we had lunch and he said they were not doing very well with fundraising.

I had already written a check for $100,000 and said, “Now you’ll be able to take the first flight.” He made a big deal of it, and the first flight was great.

The next year or so, I came home again and there was another check for almost $100,000. When I opened it, Beth said, “I don’t think I have to guess where that’s going.”

Back when I was growing up, my mother might get a birthday card with maybe $3 in it, and she’d say, “That’s found money. You’re supposed to do good with it.”

“Found money ...” I had some found money from the IRS. Yes, I could have used it in the business, but that is not what I wanted to do.

Beth and I went on the second Honor Flight. It was very touching. I cried like a baby.

I later supported a Korean flight in honor of my brother, who was in the National Guard and activated during that time. And earlier this year, after selling a 12-house poultry farm in Centre, I created a trust and made Wounded Warriors the beneficiary.

When I was in college I tried to join the Marines. I did fine on the physical and such, but they said they couldn’t take me.

“Why? Am I blind?”

They said it was because I had two kids. So I didn’t’ serve in the military – and I regret that – but it’s not that I didn’t try.

4. The Honor Flights included veterans from Marshall County, but talk about some of the other local groups that have benefited from your philanthropy.

A: Last November, I asked Tracy Champion, in our office to check with the bank and see if I could get $120,000 in $100 bills. “What do you want it for?” she asked.

There is so much talk about defunding police that I wanted to give cash Christmas gifts to all the law enforcement personnel in Marshall County. Guntersville Chief Jim Peterson gave me the number for each town and the sheriff’s office, but the bank could not get the cash fast enough for me.

So my son, Michael, called a man in Lakeland, Florida, who deals with cash. I met the guy at the Albertville Airport and he handed me a wrapped up cardboard box about half the size of a box of sheet paper, full of bills.

We gave every uniformed officer in the county five $100 bills and each clerk or jailer three $100 bills. That was one of the most satisfying things I’ve done. Some of the letters we got back from those people would just tear you up.

About 10 years ago, I gave some money from our “give-back fund” to several groups to help spruce up Marshall County. The litter had gotten really bad.

Working through PALS, I donated $10,000 to the sheriff’s office to spend on gas to transport inmates on clean-up detail, help defray overtime for guards and to buy plastic bags. I offered $6,000 for the same sort of use by the police departments in Arab, Guntersville, Albertville and Boaz.

As part of the clean-up effort, I offered $1,000 to each of the sixteen or so primary and elementary schools in the county to buy materials for teachers to use for anti-litter lessons. My hope was the kids could learn lessons and pass them on to their parents.

There are other local things, too, like supporting Arab Musical Theatre, and, before Covid, Beth and I funded a scholarship program at our church that paid talented high school kids to lend their voices to the adult choir. 5. What’s something most people don’t know about Davis Lee?

A: I’m not good about holding in my feelings and emotions or my love of country, but I really don’t have any secret desires.

I do remember one day while my daddy was teaching me to drive.

“Son,” he said, “you’re doing good. I want you to learn to keep in the right lane. But you also need to know how to look on each side of the highway.”

I said, “What? Everything is flat and mostly pine trees … maybe a pig farm.”

“There are opportunities in life son,” he told me, “but there are not any if you don’t see them.”