But land stewardship remains a critical expression of the family’s history.
Rollins, oversees a holding company that includes large oil and gas businesses, the boat enterprise that builds Chaparral and Robalo craft, and a pest-control empire with nearly twenty subsidiaries. Today the Rollins family of Atlanta, led by Randall, who is eighty-seven, and his seventy-five-year-old brother, Gary W. This image-the little boy holding on to his father, the two of them making their way across the North Georgia fields, each of them with a heart pounding for the wild harvest of their land-is a useful way of understanding the passions of this fabled Southern family. “The kind with that little hammer loop on the side,” Rollins remembers, “and he would have me hold on to that loop when we walked up to the dog on point, so he would know exactly where I was when the covey got up.” To that little boy in the Georgia hills in the late 1930s, however, his dad was simply a farmer in overalls. Wayne Rollins Foundation and other family foundations that would give hundreds of millions of dollars to colleges and universities across the South and beyond-including a recent gift of $65 million to Atlanta’s Emory University for the third Rollins School of Public Health building, slated to break ground next year. In the years to come, the Rollins family would crack the top 50 on the Forbes list of wealthiest American families and oversee a philanthropic outreach via the O.
Rollins bought a radio station in Radford, Virginia, that kicked off a regional broadcasting dynasty, and before they borrowed $60 million in 1964 to buy Orkin pest control in the first leveraged buyout recorded in the United States. Wayne Rollins, traded full-time farming for work at the Standard-Coosa-Thatcher textile mill in nearby Rossville, Georgia, and before his father and uncle John W. “And he just loved everything about hunting.” “My dad loved the land and all the things it could provide,” Rollins recalls, his voice trailing back to a time eight decades distant. They grew cotton, corn, and sweet potatoes, and raised chickens, hogs, and cows.
The family had eighty acres of land and a house built from timber they’d cut themselves. Randall Rollins was a child, perhaps four or five years old, he would follow his father on their North Georgia farm, hunting quail in the rolling mountains of Catoosa County just shy of the Tennessee state line.
0 kommentar(er)
