Otterblog

For as much as all the iterations of RJR have oozed with native pride, it’s largely been run by people not from around here for the past 30-some years. Ross Johnson. Lou Gerstner, Andy Schindler, Susan Ivey. Ty Wilson and Paul Sticht.

Sticht died today, at 89. He was a corporate chieftain like few others, at a time when what was R.J. Reynolds Industries straddled the globe. The path of RJR from tobacco company to conglomerate to LBO poster child for greed to holding company to smaller, more focused, independent company is a neat dovetail with the history of late 20th Century capitalism. And Sticht, who started out in the steel business and later moved to soup and retail, was the catalyst and in some ways the main character in the company’s rise, fall and rise. Johnson, with his larger-than-life personality and extravagances, gets a lot of the billing, but for my money, Sticht was the great Roman tragic figure in all of this.

We wrote about this extensively in the late 1990s with our Lost Empire series. Sticht is the aging monarch who turns over too much power to a young turk (Johnson) who has curried favor with him and sown discord about the other heir (Wilson). The results are dramatic for the company and its hometown, and the aftershocks still get felt today.