Commercial Appeal journalists cover the important moments in Memphis
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- FedEx founder Fred Smith overcame childhood Legg-Calvé-Perthes syndrome to become a pilot and serve in the Marines.
- Smith was a close friend of John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee of 2008.
- Smith was a major investor in Alcon Entertainment, which produced films such as “The Blind Side” and “My Dog Skip.”
The story of Frederick W. Smith and his revolutionary overnight delivery company, FedEx, is familiar to many people, especially Memphians.
It’s perhaps not surprising that the story of a billionaire businessman would be told and retold. But Smith — who died June 21 at the age of 80 — was a complex character with numerous interests.
Here’s a look at some perhaps under-reported aspects of his life.
The first Fred Smith
Frederick W. Smith’s death made international headlines, but he wasn’t the first transportation-industry Fred Smith whose obituary was on the front page of the Memphis newspapers. “Death Comes to Fred Smith, Builder of Bus System” reported the Memphis Press-Scimitar in boldface type on Page 1 of its Nov. 20, 1948, edition; “Rites Will Be Today for Frederick Smith, Bus Company’s Head” was the front-page headline the next day in The Commercial Appeal.
Although the earlier James Frederick Smith is best-known today as the father of the Fred Smith who revolutionized air delivery and became a billionaire in the process as the founder of FedEx, the elder Fred Smith was a notable Memphian in his own right, with what The Commercial Appeal characterized as a “Horatio Alger” life story: “The firm he headed grew from one bus which he drove himself” into “a business scheduled to move into a three-quarter million dollar home,” the newspaper reported. (Similarly, the FedEx story boasts that the company began operations in 1973 with only 14 aircraft delivering 186 packages numbers; today, FedEx operates hundreds of planes that deliver about 16 million packages daily.)
The Press-Scimitar, meanwhile, lauded Smith as a “self-made man” who “launched a fabulous career in inter-state bus transportation from the humble beginning as a mechanic in a Memphis garage.” Starting in 1926 with the lone bus he personally drove back and forth between Memphis and Rosemark, Smith expanded into what became the multi-state Smith Motor Coach Co., which in 1931 merged with Greyhound to become the Memphis-based Dixie Greyhound Lines (which operated until yet another merger with a larger, Lexington, Kentucky-based Greyhound company in 1954). He also became what The Commercial Appeal called an “ardent yachtsman,” continuing an interest in river travel he perhaps inherited from his father, Capt. James B. Smith, “a master of steamboats on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.”
Is it any wonder the FedEx founder (who was 4 years old when his father died from what the newspapers called “heart trouble”) was fascinated by transportation?
Crutches to cockpits
Also possibly motivating his passion for swift movement and speedy transportation (and perhaps his devotion to sports) was Smith’s struggle with Legg-Calvé-Perthes syndrome, a potentially crippling disorder. As a child, Smith used crutches and leg braces.
By the age of 10, according to biographers, Smith had outgrown the condition. By high school he was an enthusiastic athlete and by 15 he had earned his pilot’s license. After graduating from Yale in 1966, he enlisted in the Marines, and served two tours of duty in Vietnam, flying as a forward air controller. Said Smith, in a 2022 interview: “My Marine Corps experience was the bedrock on which FedEx was formed.”
Meanwhile, Smith’s sports interest — manifested most by his company’s $92 million purchase of the naming rights of FedExForum — was rarely dormant. He was a minority owner of the NFL’s Washington Commanders (formerly the Redskins). He owned the Memphis Mad Dogs, the 1995 Canadian Football League team. He was a sponsor of the recent revival of the Memphis Showboats of the United Football League. And he’s the proud father of Arthur Smith, 43, former head coach of the Atlanta Falcons and current offensive coordinator for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Pal of presidents (and almost-presidents)
At Yale University, Smith was a Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity brother of future U.S. President George W. Bush; in fact, Smith was the fraternity’s president when Bush (two years Smith’s junior) was a pledge. Also, both Smith and Bush were members of the Skull and Bones “secret society” at Yale, as was John Kerry (a year older than Smith) — the Democratic nominee who lost the 2004 presidential election to his fellow “Bonesman,” Bush. Because of this connection, Smith felt “kind of like the Forrest Gump of American politics,” he said in 2004 in an interview with The American Enterprise, a public policy magazine.
In addition, Smith was a close friend of John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee of 2008, who lost to Barack Obama. No doubt the men bonded over their combat flying experiences: McCain was a naval aviator during the Vietnam War, while Smith was a Marine air controller. In 2018, Smith was a pallbearer during McCain’s funeral at the Washington National Cathedral. Embodying what ABC news described as “the range of McCain’s friendships that defied ideological differences, political rivalries,” the pallbearers included Joe Biden, former Texas Senator Phil Gramm and actor Warren Beatty, among others.
Movie mogul
Smith had invested in a few movies, but he became an active motion picture financier when he became the chief backer of Alcon Entertainment, founded in 1997 by Princeton alumni Andrew Kosove and Broderick Johnson, who convinced Smith that a slate of what originally were conceived as low-risk, mid-budget movies could prove profitable.
Some early Alcon releases had Memphis connections, including “My Dog Skip,” adapted from a memoir by Mississippi author Willie Morris and directed by former University of Memphis film student Jay Russell, and — famously — the Oscar-winning “The Blind Side,” based on the real-life Memphis story of football player Michael Oher. In a 2022 interview with the Marine Corps Association’s online magazine, Smith said that “My Dog Skip” is “still one of my favorites… If you don’t have a tear in your eye in the last frame of that movie, you’re not human.”
Some other Alcon projects include “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants”; Christopher Nolan’s immediate pre-Batman-trilogy feature, “Insomnia”; “Blade Runner 2049” (obviously, the “mid-budget” mandate eventually vanished); and “Racing Stripes,” about a circus zebra who becomes a racehorse.
The company (still going strong with such recent hits as “The Garfield Movie”) made money, but Smith’s Alcon investment paid more significant dividends in the forms of his daughters Molly and Rachel Smith, whose early-life access and exposure to the film world helped them become moviemakers themselves; Molly’s production company, Black Label Media, where Rachel is now a partner, has produced such major films as “Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody” and the Oscar-winning “La La Land.” Fred Smith has funded several Black Label projects, including “Devotion,” starring Jonathan Majors, based on the true story of Jesse L. Brown, a pioneering Black aviator killed in the Korean War. “Everybody knows about the Tuskegee Airmen, but nobody knows about Jesse Brown, who broke the color barrier in naval aviation,” Smith told the Marine Corps Association, explaining why the project was “close to my heart.”
Despite all this movie activity, Smith only acted in one feature film; it’s not a film he produced, but one that nonetheless benefited from the cooperation of FedEx. The movie is director Robert Zemeckis’ partly made-in-Memphis “Cast Away,” in which Tom Hanks stars as as a FedEx analyst marooned on a deserted island after a cargo plane crash. Smith makes a cameo as himself (who else?), in the scene in which the rescued Hanks character returns to FedEx.
Horseplay
Speaking of equines (see “Racing Stripes,” above), if you or your children (or grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, or nieces, or whoever) have enjoyed the Grand Carousel at the Children’s Museum of Memphis, thank Fred Smith: The FedEx founder anonymously paid for the restoration of the historic 1909 merry-go-round and its 48 carved-wood horses, which had been deteriorating since 2005, after the closure of Libertyland.
According to A C Wharton, former mayor of Memphis and Shelby County, Smith — lauded for his galvanizing support of such ambitious efforts as FedExForum — often backed relatively modest community projects without taking credit, with the Carousel representing an exemplary instance of his generosity.
“I loved those horses, as a father and grandfather, and told Fred I loved those horses, but there was no way in the midst of a fiscal crisis I was going to spend money on some wooden horses,” remembered Wharton, who was mayor of Memphis from 2009 to 2015. “They had been in storage and needed to be refurbished. And he said, ‘I think there is someone who might be able to accomplish that.’”
Wharton said Smith did not want his contribution to the $1 million restoration project publicized (stories credited “private donors”). “Did he make headlines? No. But that was typical of his approach. And think of all the memories he was able to rekindle with those horses and the new memories that are being made. And the fruit of that generosity goes on and on.”
