As 1960 was winding down, the man who would come to define modern surgical device management, who’s arguably the single most consequential medical device manager of the modern era and who trained two generations of orthopedic and spine executives—whose managerial culture now infuses an entire industry—was wondering what he’d gotten himself into at Don Richard’s young company on Madison Avenue in Memphis.
To make matters worse, young Leander Dallas Beard (LD Beard) had turned his back on a stable, well-paying position at the largest private employer in the entire northern Mississippi and western Tennessee region—Firestone Tire and Rubber. Oh, and he’d also walked away from nine years of seniority or, as he would say in later years, “I was one year away from having a vested retirement there.”
At Richards Manufacturing LD was standing in the lobby for, what he expected, would be his first day as Richard’s new shipping manager. His college friend, Johnny Dean, was shipping manager before LD and was trying to move from shipping to sales. Johnny had personally recruited LD.
So there LD was, on a Saturday morning in August 1960, with Johnny Dean when who should be passing through the lobby but Don L. Richards himself, founder and President..[i] Dean introduced him to LD and told Mr. Richards that LD was taking over his job in shipping.
Richards looked surprised, which in turn surprised LD.
And what, asked Richards, was Dean, his current shipping department head, going to do?
“I’m going on the road to become a distributor in Ohio and Michigan,” said Dean. Which also surprised Richards, who then asked when this transfer was taking place. Only when the new man was fully trained, Dean assured him, which would take about two months.
“Oh, well,” said Richards, “I just own the place. You don’t have to tell me anything.” And walked off.[ii]
Not like Firestone, thought LD, where employment procedures were clear and formal.
Overtime, LD would come to learn that sarcasm was a Don Richards trait, but at the time all he could think was “What am I getting into?”
Later that day, back in the shipping department, Beard met Harry Treace, who was #2 at the company and had formerly been Homer Stryker’s partner and co-founder of the Stryker Corporation in Michigan.
Treace was at least cordial.
During their first conversation Treace asked about LD’s service in the Air Force, Beard told him he had been trained as a radio operator, and Treace remarked that he had been a radio operator in a B-29 in World War II. LD volunteered that despite his training that radio was not something he really cared about.
“Neither do I,” said Treace. “I don’t care if I never see another one.” It was not the last thing they were to have in common, but neither could know that at the time.
In the days that followed, LD became more dismayed when he saw how shipping and related operations were handled. Again, it was nothing like Firestone. In fact, it worse, even, than the Air Force.
The shipping system was, LD would recall, “one of the most inefficient operations I had seen.” And part of it, he concluded, stemmed from his buddy Dean who’d been “a one-man show”, processing and filling orders himself. No system.
By November 1960, Richard Manufacturing’s shipping department was in LD’s hands. And what he had was a real fixer upper. LD had a lot of work to do.[iii]
Yet, Richards Manufacturing was fairly typical of medical device companies in the late 1950s and early 60s.
In retrospect, it was obvious what LD would do. He would bring the logistics skills and best practices he learned at Firestone, the U.S. Air Force and, most critically, his own ability to analyze and break-down operational problems in a way that created new systems and taught the employees who ran them, how to operate an orthopedic/spine medical device business with both logistical precision and world class medical standards.
Within a decade, LD had Richard’s running like a modern medical device company, but more importantly, he was training a corps of young executives—notably E. Ron Pickard, who would eventually be the greatest of all medical device executives—a man whose legacy to the industry, to physicians and patients is almost beyond description.
Hardscrabble Entrepreneurs and Logisticians
LD Beard was part of a generation of hardscrabble entrepreneurs that emerged after World War II in the American South. This generation, forged by the economics of the American South post-Civil War, would transform retailing, trucking, food processing and, yes, orthopedics and spine.
For most of the 100 years after the civil war, which had destroyed the American South economically, the southern U.S. was significantly poorer than the rest of the country. The South’s economic gap was neither strictly agricultural (although the South from 1860-1940 was predominately agrarian) nor racial. Wages of black and white farm laborers were virtually identical and farm labor wages were closely linked to wages in sawmills and textiles—the two largest southern industries.
The South relied extensively on timber, cotton, and other agricultural products for its economic health prior to the 1960s, when a group of entrepreneurs emerged in Arkansas and Tennessee.
Sam Walton, born in 1918, while not the first, is the most famous of these hardscrabble entrepreneurs, each of whom founded their companies—incredibly—within a few miles of each other.
For Sam Walton, rural poverty was not a bug, it was a feature. He opened his first store in a small Ozark town—Rogers, Arkansas, population 4,900—to supply the lowest priced consumer goods possible. To do that, Walton famously innovated retailing operations cutting inventory, labor and transportation costs and passing those savings to the consumer. Today we call that logistics management. But in 1962, in Rogers, Arkansas, it was entrepreneurism matching the hardscrabble life of his customers. Walmart is the largest retailer in the world today.
Six miles south of Walmart, in Lowell, Arkansas, J.B. Hunt, the son of sharecroppers started a trucking company in 1961, one year before Sam Walton opened his first store up the road.
Hunt’s innovation was to pay his drivers as low as possible which—ironically, put more money in each driver’s pocket. Lower prices let Hunt schedule more freight. Of course, Hunt landed the Walmart contract.
Hunt’s greatest innovation, one that transformed the global logistics business, was multi-modal (ships, trains, and trucks) container shipping. In 1980 inventory and transportation costs were 18% of the U.S. economy. Because of multi-modal shipping, inventory and transportation costs dropped to 8.5% of the U.S. economy. J.B. Hunt trucking grew to become the 3rd largest shipping company in the world.
Five miles south of J.B. Hunt, John Tyson in Springdale, Arkansas, founded a company that, today, supplies one-fifth of the beef, chicken, and pork in the United States. John and his sons were also hardscrabble entrepreneurs who figured out how to squeeze costs out of the meat processing system by vertically integrating the entire system of growing and processing meat. Tyson also introduced the first ice-pack processing line.
And 200 miles southeast of Tyson Foods in Little Rock, Arkansas, Frederick Smith founded Federal Express in 1971. Also in Little Rock was the company that helped to fund these companies—Stephens Group—also founded by, you guessed it, hardscrabble bankers who started their business in the depths of the Great Depression by selling near-bankrupt state bonds and Bibles in the South.
That’s a story for another day.
Frederick Smith, the founder of FedEx, the quintessential logistics company, who created the concept of the overnight package delivery, started operations in 1973 170 more miles east of Little Rock in Memphis, Tennessee.
And it is in Memphis that we come to the Richards Manufacturing and LD Beard—a man who shares the same formative upbringing and training as the more famous people mentioned above—but whose impact on orthopedics and spine around the world was no less transformative.
Here is the story of LD Beard—the man who formulated modern medical device management.
Leander Dallas Beard
Leander Dallas Beard, Jr., was born in Dallas, Texas, on December 13, 1932, to a family whose roots were firmly in Tennessee. “Usually Christmas and during summer vacation, we would come back to see all the relatives in Tennessee,” remembers LD. “We’d go from one place to the other seeing my mother’s and father’s relatives. That was every summer and Christmas.”
LD’s father, known as “Dal” always owned a decent car, none of LD’s Tennessee relatives had one. They were that poor. Both his father and uncle sent money to their older sister in Tennessee so that her daughter would have clothes to wear for high school graduation. LD’s mother’s relatives also struggled as tenant farmers. To LD’s Tennessee relatives, the Texas Beards must have seemed like rich folk.
In 1943, the Texas Beards decided to head back to West Tennessee. Dal found a job at the Milan Arsenal and LD started a new school at Moore’s Chapel, a small community in Gibson County on the road between Milan and Trenton.[iv]
LD discovered very quickly that small town Tennessee schools are nothing like a Dallas Texas schools. “To fit in, to be one of the guys, you had better not study or earn good grades or put on airs. If I used a word like ‘logical’, LD recalled, “I was accused of using a big word.” The lesson was clear, exert the least amount of effort in school necessary to earn the minimum passing grades. “I didn’t have to excel, but I knew I had to pass because if I didn’t pass my dad would have put me on a construction crew some place.” LD was eleven years old.
When he wasn’t in school LD worked. Farmers in Gibson County raised a lot of fruits and vegetables, and there were seasonal jobs aplenty. “During the summer, they had big pack sheds where the farmers would bring in their produce, starting with cabbage early in the year. I would work in the pack shed, eleven years old, and make thirty-five cents an hour, which I thought was great.”
When he was about 13 or 14 years old, LD’s father moved the family to Memphis to be part of the post-war building boom. During LD’s school years, the family moved often, and LD would eventually attend seven different schools in eleven years.
His final school was Whitehaven High School in Memphis, which, he remembers, was wonderful educational environment: “It had, really, at that time, a cadre of teachers who had been there for a long time. They were really great teachers. No matter what class you were, I mean what your economic status or whatever was, you were accepted very well there.”[v]
Despite his natural curiosity and intelligence, LD was an indifferent student. In fact, to hear him tell it, he never studied: “My dad would say, ‘I thought I remember buying you some books at the beginning of the school year, and I haven’t seen them since then. Where are they?’”
By his senior year, LD was working part-time at the Hogue and Knott grocery store on the corner of Park Avenue and Highland Street. Saturday nights he sometimes had to work until the early morning hours of Sunday, but that was okay by him. Finding a job was always easy for LD, New employers quickly spotted his talents and energy.
LD graduated from Memphis’s Whitehaven high school in 1950.
Firestone Tire and Rubber
That same year LD registered with the local employment office, which soon scheduled an interview for him with Firestone.[vi] “I took the tests and filled out the application, and the comptroller was interviewing me and asked me, ‛Why do you want to work for Firestone?’”
He was hesitant, not knowing the right thing to say, but the interviewer prompted him: “Is it because you want a job, and we have one?”
“I said, ‛Yes, sir. You’re right.’”
“You’re hired,” said the man.
The Firestone Tire and Rubber Company built its Memphis plant in 1936 on land in the northwest corner of the city previously occupied by a wood products company. Over time, the site would go through numerous expansions, eventually covering 35 acres near Thomas Street, and by the 1950s the company could advertise the factory as the “largest single tire producing unit in the world” with a workforce of approximately 4,000.[vii] Demand for its products was high and climbing, the pay and benefits were good, and in 1951 it was the kind of place where a young man just starting out might begin a career.
The twenty-year-old Beard, glad to have a full-time job, went to work for Firestone as a mail clerk in March 1951. His daily routine seldom varied: he and one other clerk would drive to the Thomas Street Post Office, bring back the company mail, sort it, and distribute it to various office around the massive plant. On their rounds, they would also pick up the outgoing mail, any bills of lading that needed signatures (for railway shipments), and any deposits. The latter two tasks required errands to offices in downtown Memphis before returning to Firestone to pick up any additional outgoing mail. A final trip to the main post office in downtown Memphis would mark the end of LD’s day. Not especially challenging tasks, but it meant a paycheck.
Shortly after he started at Firestone, his supervisor offered LD a promotion to the paymaster’s office, which puzzled him. Delivering mail did not draw the attention of supervisors—until he found out why they wanted to keep him.
The comptroller’s secretary explained.[viii] “She said, ‛You know why they hired you, don’t you?’ And I said I thought they needed to carry all this mail around. “And she said, ‛You know that test you took?’ And I said yes. And she said, ‛You made the highest score on that that anybody has ever made.’”
The boy who had been satisfied with just sliding by in high school was surprised by her remarks although he did recall taking similar tests during his senior year at Whitehaven High School. In fact, the guidance counselor there had been astonished by his aptitude for numbers and had repeatedly urged him to pursue a career along those lines. At the time, he had dismissed the idea, but now, he thought, maybe there was something to that after all.
LD Beard was one of the youngest employees that had ever worked in the paymaster’s office. Firestone’s weekly payroll was close to $300,000, and each employee was paid in cash.
Earnings had to be verified and individual salaries counted and recounted, a sometimes tedious job but one at which LD excelled. The money was then put into envelopes, which workers in the paymaster’s office would distribute to the employees, person by person, shift by shift. LD would finish the last shift around three o’clock Sunday morning and not have to report back to work until Tuesday.
It was also at Firestone that LD realized that he had a knack not only for dealing with numbers but for dealing with people as well. Over the next 18 months he would come to know and get along with just about everybody in the plant. There was only one exception: “I had one union steward who was determined to make my life miserable. If I didn’t get out there right on the minute he thought I should, he’d file a grievance.” But instead of overreacting to the hostility, as would many teenage boys, LD simply viewed it as part of the job: “We lived with it.”[ix]
He liked the other employees he met, including the men on the work floor, and they liked him. “They all kidded me. I went off one weekend and got my hair cut off, and they rubbed my head and called me ‛Fuzzy.’ They all worked in the plant, and I’d come in with a dirty head. But it was a good job to have.” LD would remain in the paymaster’s office for nearly two years—$240 a month was a good wage—and would leave only because he had to.
The U.S. Air Force
The Korean War was still going on, and by December 1952, the local selective service board had classified LD as 1-A. “I had passed the physical and everything else, but I’d decided that I would rather be in the Air Force for four years than be in the Army for two.” With the help of a couple Army recruiter friends, LD learned that he was on the U.S. Army induction list for the 29th of January, so on the 15th he enlisted in the Air Force for four years.[x]
“About the second day in the Air Force I said, this is not going to be my career. My strategy was going to be to go four years unnoticed. I went through basic training. They gave you a whole series of aptitude tests—the highest score you could make was nine, and I made nines or eights on all of them, except radio operator. I made a five on that one.”
Naturally, the Air Force next sent him to radio school at Keesler Air Force Base.
Radio operator was not how LD wanted to spend four years. His new strategy was to simply fail to meet the work standards. After he achieved a Morse Code score of thirteen words a minute, he pretended he had reached his limit. His scheme might even have worked, but someone was checking his work.
A master sergeant confronted him, and LD would later recall the NCO’s quiet demeanor: he was not angry, but he was emphatic: “We know what you’re trying to do, and it’s not going to work. We can’t wash you out for cause, but we can put you on the front row of the classroom, and you’ll be in there six weeks, and you’ll have six NCOs watching you at all times.”
LD stopped faking. In fact, he increased his code rate from 13 words a minute to 20 in one afternoon. “They didn’t know whether to congratulate me or kill me.”
Over his Air Force career, LD’s responsibilities steadily increased as his base assignments moved from Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod to Tokyo, Japan, then a small air base near Pusan, South Korea, and finally, in 1955, Barksdale Air Force Base outside Shreveport, Louisiana, where he would remain until he was discharged in 1957.
It was during his last posting that LD found his way into some training that might indeed help in his later career, although he was initially not interested in it at the time: “The squadron CO wanted to send me to leadership school because I was Airman First Class. I told him, ‛Major Butts, the Air Force is wasting their money.’”
“It was probably in May of ‛56, or something like that, and the major was insistent.”
He was up for promotion to Lieutenant Colonel, and he intended to send LD and another airman: “One of you will be number one, one of you will be number two, when you come out of leadership school, and that’s going to look very good for me.” [xi]
The leadership course lasted a couple months, and, as the major had predicted, LD and the other airman received the two highest grades.
LD Returns to Firestone
When he left military service in early 1957 LD returned to Firestones and after a short stint back in the mailroom, LD was transferred to the cost accounting department. He finally had a job that was both challenging and rewarding. It exposed him not only to cost accounting but also to engineering. Whenever a new tire design was developed, LD would be involved in running the projected costs, an area in which he became proficient.
“I really got exposed to that part of the business and, of course, you start out with an engineering specification, and you just broke it down into all the various components, whether it was labor or material or whatever.”
But this required more than simply working with numbers at a desk. “That work exposed me to a lot of systems because I had to get out in the plant, and I had to see what they were doing and how they were doing it. I had done that some before because they liked for me to take plant tours through.”
“I don’t know why, but they selected me to take plant tours through for people, visitors who were coming in, so I had already learned some of it, but I had to get out and learn the rest of it.”
At the same time, LD was beginning to form some definite opinions about the operations he witnessed, especially the importance of having the proper equipment. Cost analyses for each product were done twice a year, using a comptometer, a kind of mechanical calculator originally developed in the 19th century, and a simple ink pen. In LD’s view, hardly the best equipment for the task. But there was at least one upside: using the comptometer took a lot of hours, which translated into considerable overtime pay.
Next Chapter: The Birth of the Modern Medical Device Company: Richards Manufacturing
Chapter Endnotes
[i] LD Beard, interview.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Memphis Library and Information Center, Firestone Tire and Rubber Company Memphis Plant Collection. “Scope and Content Notes” processed 2006.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] Ibid.
[xi] Ibid.
