Roy Exum
Back in the 1930s…and remember this was with the Great Depression and the not so far away rumble of war drums being heard…a group of five prominent Chattanooga business leaders and the County Mayor showed up at my grandfather’s office door unannounced one day to deliver a terse message. “We are fixing to lose Erlanger Hospital. It’s a wreck. And we ain’t leaving this office until you promise you’ll take a hard look and tell us what needs to happen. We can’t lose our public hospital…”
Not only was the young famer/grocer successful, he became Erlanger’s Board Chairman for the next 38 years.
He immediately saw that soaring medical expenses could very quickly decimate a young family man so he actually took $1,000 of his own money, flew to Havana, Cuba, and brought back the State Charter for a revolutionary health insurance plan. He called it Blue Cross-Blue Shield of Tennessee. He was its first-ever Board Chairman for BC-BS the next 42 years and did he ever get his seed money back? We’ll never know.
Need I say he ruled both Erlanger & Blue Cross with an iron fist – in a kind but firm way, mind you – and never took as much as a dime from either one. I dare say I knew Roy McDonald himself better than other man alive. I am his namesake, Roy McDonald Exum, the son of his oldest daughter, Helen, so my first ringside seat was a wheelchair. And, trust me, I knew him.
Yesterday I was slipped a note that said Blue Cross-Blue Shield had just fired 19 employees for refusing the vaccine and I laughed to myself, “It’s a blessing ‘Mr. Roy’ is gone…it would have been 20 axed because he would have run off the idiot who fired the 19 to somewhere as far away as Macon!
This isn’t how you manage any top asset. The pro-versus-con vaccine wars have gotten ridiculously far out of hand and with the political hatred between the right-versus-left now ablaze, the devil in hell is laughing hysterically at all of God’s children. I can assure you “Mr. Roy” wouldn’t have tolerated such foolishness as this. Sacrificing 19 employees for an intrusion on their personal freedom? Pshaw!
For the record I have taken all three vaccine shots. I wear a mask when appropriate and with my own set of infection fears, I wash my hands like an emergency-room clean-up guy. But I would never criticize an anti-vaxxer in a million years nor ridicule anyone for their beliefs. What’s more, if I had a good employee, I’d ask him to abide by his best decisions but – heck no! – we don’t shoot our own soldiers in this army.
Roy McDonald would never allow an employee of Erlanger Hospital, Blue Cross, or his Chattanooga News-Free Press to be fired or even harassed over a flu shot; he valued the employee above all else and he protected each like his own children. He wouldn’t have put up with invading an individual’s freedoms regardless who might be the president and his biggest mandate was…please, never hold up the daily start of his printing press.
What are we doing to ourselves with this needless disdain for one another? Wear the mask if you wish. If your heart differs, follow it but stay in your own lane. Do not…no, never foist your ideals on your fellow man. Respect their beliefs as well. So help me, nothing equals respect for others.
Back in the 1980s, we had two of my uncles, executives at our newspaper who became overwhelmed with United Way flu to such an extent it really crippled relationships with some of our employees. So driven were these two Kool-Aid drinkers they came up with the preposterous idea that to get 100% participation, they sold my grandfather on the idea that every employee must sign a card, whether they wished to give to the organization or not.
Now, the United Way is a great organization but at the time they had some ringers on the scorecard, plus they had these “levels of greatness” to award corporate leaders who would browbeat and harangue their employees to get into what was really “The Circle of Madness.” If an employee turned in a “do not wish to give” card, it was destroyed, a $10 bill was stapled to a new pledge ticket as a “One-time donation” so we could get to the “100% Circle of Idiocy.”
It was so phony. And I’ve got two uncles strutting like peacocks at the weekly stirring of the United Way cauldron. Please. The ruse finally came to a climax when these two geniuses declared a list of those who have not returned their “gift pledge” was published and posted on each floor of our building. I went berserk. I ran to our employee relations office, demanded my turned-in card, and tore it to bits. “You put my name at the very top of your tardy list!”
My grandfather immediately summoned me and I told him that coercion wasn’t my game and to fire me if I would ever put a ruse ahead of an employee’s right. Whew, baby! The United Way ruse was busted…and people were reprimanded including my two uncles (who got their pictures into our newspaper anyway) but you must never threaten your greatest resource with “a good cause.”
You dadgum right COVID is real, but human beings are a whole lot more “real-er.”
Blue Cross-Blue Shield may well have just blown 19 employees to the wind on Wednesday but it should have been 20.
A Judas goat is worse than any disease and when all of this is in hand, and common sense is allowed where paranoia and panic reigns instead of common sense, I want the person who just stood for “corporate,” while serving BC-BS mightily, to sing us “Silent Night.”
royexum@aol.com