The Road to Enterprise: One Man's Journey in the Land of Opportunity

By Ron Rozelle and Arch Aplin Jr

Mark Twain couldnt have penned a finer boyhood than mine. I was Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer rolled into one, and Harrisonburg was any moon-washed river town that Huck and Jim would have floated past on their raft.
While much of the nation forged headlong into the relatively new century, shooting skyscrapers higher and higher and flying aircraft unfathomable distances, Harrisonburg and its neighboring towns clung comfortably to the past, making do with mostly one story buildings, as many horse-drawn wagons as motorcars, and boats that had slowly plied the river for decades.
Anyone making their way up to the town from the river had to pass the top of the bluff, between a pair of businesses owned by Arch Aplin, Esquire. Who was, in addition to being my father, a walking embodiment of an entrepreneur. One business being a cotton gin and the other a general mercantile store.
Before I was old enough to venture out on my own or to go to school, my mother would take me with her to the store every early morning and Id stay there all day, watching the shoppers come and go. When it was time for a nap, Id stretch out on a cot in the back room and close my eyes and take in all the smells of the place and listen as women chattered away around the stove.
The jingling bell over the front door and the clanging of the cash register are perhaps the earliest sounds I remember. Theyve played like a sweet tune down the years.
Ive finally come to realize that they really might have been more than just pleasing sounds. They may have been a sirens call to the inviting waters of commerce.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781468508468

Ron Rozelle

Arch Aplin, Jr. has been a sailor onboard two ships that saw considerable action in both the Atlantic and Pacific theatres of World War II, a high school teacher and basketball coach, and a contractor who has built shopping centers, entire subdivisions full of new homes, and a dozen post offices. But before he distinguished himself in that trio of pursuits he was an enterprising young boy in a small Louisiana town on the bluffs of a fast flowing river, making money any way he could, from selling figs in syrup cans to providing cigarettes and candy from his father’s general store to inmates in the county jail - for a price, of course. Throughout his long life he has been guided by principals of hard work and honest dealing that he learned from his parents, good people with not much in the way of a formal education. They ran several businesses that turned good profits at the very height of the Great Depression. Arch Aplin’s story is full to brimming with the American Dream, practical ways to go about achieving it, and, because he sees it as greatly tarnished and even restricted in recent times, ways to bring us back to the greatness that we once knew in this country. The Road to Enterprise is the story of a life well and meaningfully lived. And it is the story of Americans facing great conflicts – in both war and peace.

Book preview

Contents

Prologue

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Part Two

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Part Three

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Epilogue

A Final Word

Acknowledgements

Arch Aplin, Jr

Ron Rozelle

Dedicated to the memory of

Cater F. Aplin, Jr.,

who served on the USS Bowfin,

one of the most decorated submarines in World War II and to

Glynn McGuffee,

my dear friend a star player on the

Harrisonburg

Boy Scout Basketball Team

and a lifelong friend

Prologue

I’ve come to realize in the course of a long, good life that I am a common denominator.

I’m a thread, so to speak, that connects two storekeepers from two very different eras. Though I’ve never run a store or had any interest in doing so, I was profoundly influenced by the first, and hopefully had something to do with the success and the shaping of the philosophy of the second.

Generations seem to work like that, with personalities and goals and ethics tumbling down the years, like rivers to the sea.

And much of my story, and those two storekeepers’, has to do with rivers.

*     *     *

In November of 2009 Charlie Gibson closed one of his nightly ABC World News broadcasts with a piece titled Gotta Go.

Gibson, the popular network anchor at ABC, relaxed a bit that night in the New York studio after reporting on wars, famine, politics, and crime. Then he smiled.

Finally tonight, he said, we have a story about a chain of stores and gas stations down in Texas that was developed with a unique business plan. He emphasized the word unique. "The owners of the chain came to realize that Americans keep going, and going. And going. And they built their business around that fact."

Then he introduced correspondent Ryan Owens, who was standing in a vast parking lot which was sprawled out beside Interstate 45 in Madisonville, Texas. Behind him drivers waited for their turns at thirty gas pumps and enough customers moved in and out of the entrance to a handsome building for it to look more like a crowd at Grand Central Station than at a convenience store.

Texas has seventy-nine thousand miles of highways, Owens said, the scene fading to a stretch of busy interstate and then to a big billboard with the characterture of a toothy beaver in a baseball cap.

And when the sign says ‘you can hold it’ . . . people really do.

Then there was a woman looking into the camera explaining that she had just driven all the way up from Houston with a thermos full of coffee. She lifted one hand above the other so that the viewer might conjure up an image of the thermos.

I waited, and I held it till I got to Buc-ee’s.

She did, in fact, look greatly relieved.

She was followed by a young mother and her teenaged daughter.

We saw the sign and it said forty-four miles, the mother said. "And we held it. "

The daughter nodded that this was so.

Then, to the accompaniment of soft, celestial strumming on an unseen harp, the camera moved through a hallway of framed prints on glistening tile walls and through the door of a restroom cubicle, focusing finally on a sparkling clean toilet on a shiny floor.

"This is why they waited, Owens said. There’s the artwork as you walk in, the dozens of private stalls, and the attendants who never stop cleaning."

One of the attendants was shown scrubbing away on several square yards of countertops around sinks. Then yet another customer explained how in most roadside stores she goes into the restroom, takes a look at the filthy place, and comes right back out again.

Not here, she said.

Owens commented on how cleanliness is obvious in the upscale gas stations.

Why? he asked. Well, leave it to…

A new face on the screen finished the sentence.

 . . . Beaver. Beaver Aplin.

Owens said that explained the stores’ quirky logo.

Then he identified Aplin as the co-owner of this and thirty more Buc-ee’s stores, providing over a thousand jobs to Texas, getting over 250,000 likes on Facebook, and countless testimonials from fans on YouTube.

Aplin said that he’d even had calls from people who wanted to borrow the design of his restrooms so they could be replicated in their homes.

Toward the end of the piece, Owens mentioned the plethora of gas pumps, the gourmet food in the in-store deli, the specialty items like various pickled delights, bags of kettle corn and Beaver Nuggets (caramel-coated corn puffs), and the fact that no 18-wheelers are allowed in the voluminous parking lot.

But he closed his report by returning to the spotless restroom theme.

At the core, he said, this is a business built entirely on porcelain.

*     *     *

It was a good report. But Owens was wrong about that last part.

While clean restrooms are a large reason for Buc-ee’s success, the business is built, and has grown and continues to grow, on much more than that.

It’s built on a commitment to excellent customer service and reliable products. And it’s built on a strong work ethic and a carefully thought-out vision that Beaver Aplin and his partner Don Wasek have in common, and to which they are entirely dedicated.

Beaver is my son. And his initial fascination with stores had nothing at all to do with restrooms. It was born long ago, when he was a small boy, in an old town beside a river.

This book is about that town, that boy and the man he would become, his brother Reg, my other son who, as the owner of Benchmark Homes, is equally successful as a builder and developer. It’s also about a good many other things.

But mostly it is about becoming successful in business.

And in life.

One of the guiding principles of my own life has been that success can best be achieved by a two step process: seeking out opportunity and then shaping it into a positive advantage.

From my early boyhood in the very depths of the Great Depression I’ve been on the lookout for potentially rewarding situations. When I found them, I made myself a plan, carried it out, almost always made some money, and hopefully made a positive difference in the world.

It saddens and oftentimes angers me when I look at the current state of the nation from the vantage point of having lived eight and a half decades in it, especially when I see a society where too many people want everything done for them. Because I firmly believe the best hope for America, the finest and greatest nation on earth, is to return to the spirit of entrepreneurism and self reliance that made us strong in the first place.

I first observed this heady mixture of opportunism and hard work in my parents. During a time when millions stood in breadlines and the unemployment rate was astronomical, my father and mother—neither of them having much in the way of formal education nor expecting any assistance from the government, family, or fate—managed to open and successfully run several lucrative enterprises in a small Louisiana riverside town beginning in the 1920’s.

My first life lesson came from watching their hard work, and I put their philosophy into practice as soon as I was old enough to step out and wander around by myself. It served me well as I grew older, when I went to war, and when I became a teacher, a coach, and a businessman.

If the country that I love is to survive and continue to be a moral compass and world leader, then I believe we must relocate that spirit of self reliance and vigorous personal industry. The spirit that my son Beaver and his partner Don exemplify so well.

It doesn’t come from assistance programs or self pity; it comes from looking within ourselves for both the spark to kindle the flame and the willingness and determined effort to keep it burning.

I learned that long, long ago beside a fast flowing river.

Part One

THE ROAD TO ENTERPRISE

Chapter One

I grew up in a country of rivers.

Less than ten miles from the town where I was born and raised there is a geographical oddity, at least in the state of Louisiana, and perhaps in the entire nation.

There, in the town of Jonesville, three rivers merge to form a fourth.

The pretty Ouachita, having tumbled down for over six hundred miles from Arkansas mountains, collecting countless creeks and bayous with names like Bartholomew, de Loutre, and D’Arbonne along the way, is joined on the east by the lesser Tensas River and on the west by a curling body of water so small that no better name has ever been found for it than the Little River.

Where the three converge the wider waterway becomes the Black River for a few miles until it flows into the Red River and finally spills into the mighty Mississippi.

All of those waterways, large or small, bring with them not just diverse minerals and soils, but the faint whispers and unique scents of the places they’ve wandered through. Finally all of those things merge into just one thing, richer and stronger for the additions, on its way to the Gulf of Mexico.

My life has been like the journey taken by those rivers.

*     *     *

A short drive, or a long walk, north of where the rivers merge is Harrisonburg, the town in Catahoula Parish where I was born and raised on the banks of the very last of the Ouachita before its convergence.

When the river was plump with thawed snow, it rose up the bluff in front of our house high enough so that I could dive into it from our front yard. Looking back, I do believe we had the only swimming pool in town and, if not, we certainly had the largest one.

Harrisonburg was an old, old town even then, when Mr. Hoover was still the president and, much more importantly thereabouts, Huey P. Long was the governor. Some old-timers—amateur historians driven as much by regional loyalty as a quest for truth—maintain that Harrisonburg is the oldest town in the state, older even than Natchitoches and New Orleans, established in 1714 and 1718 respectively.

Wherever it actually falls in the true chronology, Harrisonburg has definitely been a settlement for an awfully long time. Pioneers making their way westward crossed the Mississippi at Natchez, it being where the famous trace bearing its name petered out. Then, when the travelers headed west and a bit north to the highest ground visible they came, after sixty miles, to a river deep enough for navigation and bordered by handsome bluffs.

There they felled enough trees to build a community of sorts which would serve as a stopover and provision post for a steady stream of wayfarers. Some of whom—after the long trek down the Natchez Trace and the stressful crossing of the wide, swift Mississippi—no doubt settled right there, figuring it was as far west as they needed to go.

The settlement saw considerable traffic on what came to be called the Texas Road, which led from Natchez to Natchitoches and then, via the El Camino Real, westward to Nacogdoches, in what would become Texas, and on