ORIGINAL: rtrapasso
i can only assume Fuqua School of Business is somehow related in some bizarre manner to (the town of) Fuquay-Varina.
Mr. Fuqua, founder and CEO of Fuqua Industries, gave the school something like $15 million in the 1980s. He said he had always loved Duke since it was the only college which, when he was a dirt-poor kid growing up in the Depression, would lend him library books by mail.
While I was there Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy's, donated about $10 million more. I met him after the speech he gave at the ceremony. A really interesting man. He had some fascinating stories about being a HS drop-out (no 4.0 average there!), ex-Army short-order cook who in the 1950s met Col. Harlan Saunders, a bourbon-soaked traveling spice salesman working a route carrying samples in an old suitcase. When Kentucky Fried Chicken got going and had two outlets in Ohio--and one was going bankrupt--Saunders remembered Thomas and offered him a chance to turn it around if he'd move his family across the state and invest every dime he had. Which he did. He made his first fortune selling chicken. He said he never liked chicken, he liked hamburgers, so in 1968 he sold all his chicken holdings, went into an abandoned test kitchen, and developed Wendy's first menu himself. He named the chain after his daugher and made his second fortune. Once he did that he commenced to give most of it away to schools and organizations suipporting adoption, since he himself was adopted.
One MBA student asked him what his 5-year plan was when he started Wendy's? He turned to the dean and asked "Was I supposed to have one of those?" He also said that he knew he wasn't very smart, so he always made sure he hired brains, and he just worried about the food. He was wrong; he was one of the smartest guys I ever met.
With his donation the Fuqua School built the Thomas Center, an addition to the school which about doubled its footprint.
