Fallen Giant

"I don't know what all the fuss is about speaking well of the dead. He was an S.O.B. when he was alive. Now he's a dead S.O.B." - George Boury.

A giant has fallen.

George Boury was a giant among entrepreneurs in this part of the country. He was surely, abrasive and cranky just as certainly as he was astute, shrewd and clever. Along with his two brothers, he built an empire in the last half of the 20th Century and he lived long enough to see it collapse.

I came to know George during the declining days of his impressive reign - the 1990s. At that time, he was already a local legend. In his late 70s and 80s, he was a short, wide man who filled any room he was in. He looked a little like a toad - his eyes seemed to be set into the sides of his face - possibly as a defense against predators. George dressed impeccably, wore an expensive toupee and drove a Cadillac much to the peril of anyone else sharing the road.

When he hired me as his Director of Marketing for his corporation - Boury Enterprises - it was only a year after I had last applied for work with him. Twelve months prior to my accepting the position, I was a copywriter and creative type for a small local advertising agency, with a six-year stint at a local television station behind me, where I had been production manager, promotions director and creative services director. It wasn't good enough for George to consider me. But I had since accepted a job as Marketing director for a burgeoning luxury resort with a corporate headquarters in Pittsburgh. A little less than a year into that job, it was clear to me that it was a mistake. This time, when my friend, mentor and advertising consultant Arnold Lazarus suggested to George that I would be an asset to his company, George hired me on the spot. I had worked in Pittsburgh, so now I was an expert.

At that time, the Boury corporate headquarters was at 1233 Main Street in downtown Wheeling. It was an impressive, modern building adjacent to a parking lot and the storefront business of Boury, Inc. That business was an appliance retailer and restaurant supply company - and a viable enterprise specializing in personalized service in a world quickly moving to big box retailers. With his brother Michael, George oversaw the operations of that store, along with a disparate collection of other enterprises. These included a custom cabinet making mill, a hotel, several restaurants, a liquor store, some card shops, an outdoor advertising company and a consulting business. The two brothers were developing a new restaurant in an unlikely setting - an old car dealership with limited parking on National Road in Wheeling. It was this new restaurant - to be named after and run by Michael Boury's son-in-law, that convinced George he needed a marketing director. Highly anticipated locally as a fifty yard-long mural depicting local sports legends was hand-painted on the storefront, the local buzz was that it would be George's Folly. But that place - TJ's Sports Garden Restaurant - became the Boury Brothers' last successful gamble - bringing in over $2 million in its first year.

The Bourys had already been through their rags to riches to rags saga. The way George told the story, as a young man, he took over his father's business - which was a confectionary stand. George's father was an immigrant from Lebanon who built his business in Wheeling during the Depression. The elder Boury bought a few used refrigeration units to support his business, and was soon in the appliance industry, and he began supply other small restaurants. But when the old man's health failed, the business faltered and George stepped in. With his younger brothers, Michael and Ellis, they guided the company to solvency.

In the late 1950s, they developed their own restaurants, named Elby's. A precursor to today's fast food chains, Elby's was a big success in offering low-priced short-order meals based upon hamburgers and other sandwiches. The success of the first restaurant spawned another and another and eventually grew to an enormous chain, with 81 locations in West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio. For some time, Elby's owned the Big Boy franchise, dropped it again and, ironically, in the end, sold the entire chain to Big Boy's parent company.

At the peak of the Elby's era in the 1980s, the company employed over 6,000 people. The Bourys were a hot commodity in the business - sharing their expertise through a consulting enterprise with other aspiring restaurateurs. I observed George and Michael in their later days and their attention to detail was remarkable. No one knew food quality and costs better than Michael Boury; he had the gift of being a human calculator and taste-tester unparalleled. George was so meticulous about aesthetics and operational efficiency that he would drive employees mad with seemingly nit-picky orders such as "move that counter one quarter inch higher" or "that wall has to come out because the kitchen needs exactly 18 inches more space for prep." Sometimes the time and expense seemed frivolous, but in the end, he proved to be right.

He was shrewd. Some say the remarkable growth of the Elby's chain was attributable to their expertise in placing them at strategic locations - such as off exit ramps on Interstates. (This seems obvious now, but in the 1960s and 70s, it was innovative.) And sometimes locations had to be cultivated strategically. George owned the property upon which a gas station was operated on Banfield Road in St. Clairsville. He was trying to build up the development of the area to increase traffic around one of his Elby's Family Restaurants, so he offered to lease the land for one dollar a year. He said, "I'm the only Arab around who is in the oil business and doesn't make any money at it."

The Elby's restaurants were the collective cash cow of the Boury Empire, but something - I can't tell you exactly what - went wrong. Almost certainly, there were excesses. The Bourys had huge houses, vacation homes, and vacation homes to get away from their vacation homes. They had a private jet, yachts, and every new expensive toy imaginable. They staged huge parties and spent exorbitantly.

But in the late 1980s, it all crashed. Some say it was gambling that did them in. Rumors abounded that they were involved in drug trafficking. (I never saw the slightest evidence of drugs.) Whatever happened, it brought down the brothers Boury. They put Elby's up for sale. Ellis split from the other brothers. They each took their shares of the remaining holdings in businesses and real estate and chilled. When Elby's was finally sold to the Elias Brothers of Michigan, George was left with a decaying empire.

But like any great entrepreneur, his spirit was indelible. He leveraged and invested in his remaining properties, such as the Best Western Wheeling Inn, developing a trendy nightspot called Fabulous Fannies and later built a deck overlooking the Ohio River in the hotel, which he developed into the Riverside Restaurant. When the State of West Virginia gave up its monopoly on liquor retailing, George was among the first to buy a license and created the Cut-Rate Liquor Store near Wheeling Island. He sold or spun off some of his businesses, such as the card shops and the outdoor advertising company. He rebranded his cabinet making firm, naming it after the company's manager, after a labor dispute. And when a part of the company was clearly losing, he shut it down. The worst thing I ever had to do was travel to Columbus with a team of five other managers and without warning shut down all the local Shoney's Restaurants, putting 100 people out of work.

Still, George was always looking for the new angle - the next big thing. But he was an old man when I knew him, and he was set in his ways. I heard stories of how he took waitresses to task in front of customers. Some people called him a racist. But like anyone else, George was a complicated character who shouldn't be reduced to a single stereotype. I did see evidence of bigotry. Once, on the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday - which was not a holiday for his employees - it snowed in the early morning hours. When he came into work that day, he said, "See what God did on the King holiday? He turned the whole world white." I'm not sure politically incorrect humor qualifies as racism, but if it does, there was much evidence to the contrary. He hired and promoted black people and gay people; the fact is that he was of Lebanese decent and one of his best friends and confidents was Jewish.

And, yes, he was self-righteous, but he wasn't the arbitrary demon some believed him to be. As his marketing director, I insisted that he stop paying for typesetting and buy me a decent computer and let me do all his print with desktop publishing software. He groused and complained, resisted and finally threw me out of his office, telling me if I brought it up again, he'd fire me. An hour later, he called me back into his office and said, "You know, I've been thinking about what you said, and I think you may be right."

He did that more than once. My previous boss had claimed he didn't want a "yes" man, but I had soon learned that if I disagreed with him - ever - I was in real jeopardy. George was outspoken and opinionated, but he had the wisdom to consider other viewpoints and change his mind.

Despite his successes and his love for being in the center of the universe, he was a lonely man. Often, he would call me into his office to look at an ad I had designed. He would pick at it, painstakingly repositioning a single line of text by one eighth of an inch, struggling to cut the paper in his swollen hands and taping it the way he hoped to see it. As I sat watching him, I was convinced he just didn't want to be alone in his big glass office.

He would accept phone calls without screening them. He said that back in the 1960s, he had his secretary screen his calls. Once, when local mobster Big Bill Lias was subjected to the call screening, he took George to task for it. George never screened his calls again. At the time, Lias had been dead for 30 years.

Sometimes, as I sat in the office watching George fumble with scissors or accepting unscreened calls from unsuspecting stock hucksters, he would fall asleep. I would get up quietly and go back to my desk, where I tried to fix the ad the way he was attempting to tape it back together.

It was perhaps his fear of being alone that caused him to fly me to Las Vegas once for a food and beverage convention. He was attending, but his primary objective was to gamble. I had little to learn there, I don't like to gamble, and we didn't even travel together. But we got together every evening and had dinner before going our separate ways. I think he just didn't want to eat alone.

I wish I could fairly capture all that was George Boury - but I only knew him a relatively short time. When we parted company, I was in the midst of a divorce and he was in no mood to be nurturing. (Okay, he never was.) Still, he sought me out a couple of years later and retained me as a marketing consultant. He hadn't changed a bit and neither had I - something that was a relief for each of us.

A few years ago, the empire collapsed. George had lost the big shiny building on Main Street, sold the restaurant supply business and closed or lost nearly everything but his hotel, where he had finally set up an office in a small banquet room. Finally, the bank was closing the hotel. On the last night of his ownership, a sizable collection of people gathered at the hotel's riverside restaurant, where George and his cronies had played liar's poker, where his son Gregg had been instrumental in facilitating the Mystery Theatre company that I still run to this day, where I once dee-jayed on Fridays at Happy Hour just to take my mind off my divorce. It was a wake. We drank and partied and shared stories of the good times. George had authorized the party - but he wasn't there. It turns out, I guess, that it was George's wake. He lived several years after that - until just this past Saturday. But there will be no memorial service. We already had that at the Riverside when the giant's kingdom fell.

And I don't know if it turned out this way, but my aforementioned mentor and George's friend Arnold Lazarus said of George, "On his deathbed, he'll be bargaining with the Grim Reaper - 'Just one more deal, God!'"