THE SOLDIER WHO REPAIRED ENGINES – THE GREATEST GENERATION

I first saw Donald Bingham in 1947 at a car repair shop in a garage he rented from his older brother. I was 7 years old, and he looked like a mature man to me. He was 22. I could not have known that we would develop a friendship that lasted 64 years.

I know now that he WAS a mature man. Colonel Paul Tibbets, the pilot who dropped the first atomic bomb was asked, “At age 28, how did you have the maturity to command 1,500 people when you had no managerial training?” He said, “Where I had been, if you didn’t grow up at 22, you didn’t live to be 23.” Of course, Donald Bingham was mature! He too had been places and done things that aged a 19-year-old boy quickly.

Someone recently said, “In photos of World War II service men, they look serious, unlike boys of the same age today. [Tibbets] Donald was like that, along with 12 million others. Born in 1925, he grew up during the Depression on a farm in Piedmont North Carolina, the youngest of a sister and four brothers. A childhood at that place and time was already a maturing experience. And then at 16, when life for boys like him was beginning to get easier and the future a little brighter, Pearl Harbor changed everything. He finished high school and went into the Army in 1943.

After his discharge as a corporal in 1945, he settled in the village where I lived. He had no interest in college. He was ready to use his considerable business skills to begin a life for himself.

His two older brothers owned a lumberyard. One day Donald was there when a lumber dealer from a nearby town came to the yard along with his beautiful daughter, Sarah. She and Donald married in 1949 and soon built a modest home.

Now married, he needed steady work, and for a couple years, he drove for Roadway Express, a major trucking company. Each week, he made three or four trips to Atlanta with his rig - 320 miles, no Interstate. He was paid $.13 per mile, before deducting his operating expenses. His income was about $125 a week for 60 hours work. (Equivalent to $65,000 annual income in 2022, $22 an hour).

He drove until he paid off his mortgage. Then with his own $5,000 and a partner’s truck, they started a lumber business in 1952. They bought a small secondhand lumber planer. The diesel engine that powered the planer broke, and they needed $5,500 to buy a new one. They had no credit left, but a helpful banker advanced them $5,000 and they were able to stay in business.

I worked for him part time for four years, beginning at 14 as a laborer in the lumberyard. At his memorial service, I repeated something I had said many times, “He taught me a valuable, early lesson – find some other way to make a living.” Stacking green 2x8s every day in the heat or cold was not a good career path.

Like many other successful fellow veterans, he had entrepreneurial skills. He could immediately grasp the value of so many things and how he could negotiate a bargain – trucks, equipment, land, and especially timber. One of his suppliers, a sawmiller, said that Donald was the best he ever saw at walking through woods, looking at the trees, and estimating the timber the trees would produce when cut.

Donald Bingham and his partner always had an eye for new business ventures. In the early 1960s, the partner enjoyed trap shooting. They learned that Winchester, the firearms maker, needed better distributors. The partners converted their lumber trucking fleet and became a Winchester distributor. They grew to be the largest on the East Coast and operated a skeet and trap gun club.

Two incidents stand out about my time with him. When I was 17, one afternoon he called me to the office and said, “Take my car and go to the bank in Winston-Salem. Deposit this $600 check and $1,100 in cash.” [$18,000 in 2022] When I walked to the cashier’s window, looking like a beggar, having come straight from the lumberyard, and presented the deposit, the teller looked very surprised. The significance didn’t strike me until thirty-five years later. When Donald sent a kid off with that much money and his car, he was giving me a message: I trust you, and I expect you to honor that trust. Act like a grownup and don’t disappoint me.

In 1961, I finished undergraduate school, and somewhat directionless, I went back to work in the lumberyard office. I had been working for six weeks when he asked, “Do you think you can get back in school? I’m not sure that our business is strong enough this year to keep you on.” I immediately enrolled in an MBA program. One of his daughters said recently, “He never felt the need for a college education, and it was strange that he encouraged you to attend graduate school.” Again, he was sending a message: You are not cut out for this rough and tumble of trading and entrepreneurship. You need an education for a different profession.

61 years later, I think he was right in his second assessment, and I hope that I have lived up to his first challenge. When I became an investment adviser, he became a client for the rest of his life, and his three daughters and their families have asked me for financial guidance. These relationships are built on trust that started decades ago. His unspoken message still echoes: I trust you, and I expect you to honor that trust.

Donald Bingham was not only a good businessman. He served his community through church and fraternal organizations and one term in the North Carolina legislature as a Representative and another as Senator. He was well liked by everyone. He had a great sense of humor and a distinctive, hearty laugh that you could hear even across a crowded restaurant.

In all the years I knew him, I learned only one thing about his military record. I naively asked, “What did you do in the War?”  He answered, “On Guam, the base had a water pump driven by a small gasoline engine. My job was to keep that engine running.” That was his last duty before his discharge.

He never said that in the spring 1945 he was in the Eighth Army’s assault to free the Philippine Island, Mindanao, from the Japanese. Rugged and mountainous with severe heat, humidity, and constant rain, it had crocodile-infested rivers, swamps, and dense groves of tall trees, ideal for Japanese snipers. But the worst was acres covered with thick stemmed, twenty-foot plants, close as sugar cane. Visibility was rarely more than ten feet. Scouts located enemy positions by advancing until they received machinegun fire at a range of three to five yards. Hell on Earth for an infantryman. The Army sent a color guard to honor him at his burial.

But not because he could repair an engine.