411. “You’ve Got to Kick the Doors In” | The Untold Story of America’s First Black Tycoon with Butch Meily

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Butch Meily:
Things like race, or your religion, or where you come from, or come from a poor background, you can't let that stop you.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Hello and welcome to The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster. Food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, tools to win at life. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, and whatever you do, this is the show that is going to help you become the best version of yourself. Each episode, you will hear from some of the most amazing, talented, and successful people on the planet who followed their passions and strive to help others. Join our movement to get a million people each day to commit acts of kindness for others. Together, we're going to make the world a better place. Are you ready? Because it's time for your Daily Helping. 

Thanks for tuning into this episode of The Daily Helping Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. I am so excited about our guest today. His name is Butch Meily, and he has lived much of his life shuttling between two countries and cultures, the USA and the Philippines. He served as Vice President of Communications for TLC, Beatrice International, a food company in New York and Paris for 11 years. He's worked for several New York public relations firms. He's written articles for Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, Black Enterprise, and RealClearMarkets.com, to name a few.

But he's here today to talk to us about his book, From Manila to Wall Street: An Immigrant's Story of America's First Black Tycoon, which you can pre-order now and it's available everywhere, any day now. So, Butch, welcome to The Daily Helping. It is awesome to have you with us today.

Butch Meily:
Thanks so much, Dr. Richard. I'm really glad to be here with you.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Well, we're glad you're here as well. And I love that this is a memoir because, like we talked about a little before, stories are so important. It's the stories which make us connect to our humanity, learn lessons. So, what I usually ask people is to tell me, to kind of jump into their own personal time machine and tell me about the things that impacted their life, that put them on the path they're on today, and yet your whole book is basically that. So, I am going to be quiet and let you start sharing with us this very important story.

Butch Meily:
Well, Dr. Richard, I wrote this because I was at the point in my life when I thought I should look back on everything. And I wanted to tell this story to reach as many people as possible, but the most important person I wanted to reach was my son. Because at the end, I say, I want him to know how we lived, why we did things, and what it was all about. And if that's the most important audience for me is being able to have my son read about it and understand why I am the way I am and what we did in the '80s and the '90s, and how I was with his mother. And that's it. But I wanted to put it down somewhere, and I just couldn't rest without getting it up in the book.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
And an immigrant's journey with America's first black tycoon. So, let's talk about the immigrant part, right? Let's talk about the journey.

Butch Meily:
Well, I first came to the States in 1977. I was a young kid back then, and I fell in love with the country. I really did with the people as well. And it was like really getting out of a convent, or a prison, or something because I was raised in a strict Catholic background. And just coming to the States for the first time feels like a breath of fresh air. 

And as a cousin of mine there told me, you can do anything you want as long as you don't bother somebody else. And that's really true. And I found the people very open. Everybody's point of view was welcome. And the Americans are very generous people. I mean, just talking to you today, I get that feeling. And I'm not sure they realize that about themselves as much, that people around the world really admire the United States. So, I think that's important. That's part of the story that I tell, the wonder of somebody coming into this brand new country and realizing its greatness.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
And so, you come into the country, it's kind of like a Shangri-La for you. You learn you have all kinds of freedoms you never had. I wanna kind of move us forward and talk about the business piece of this, especially how you came to meet Reginald Lewis, which is essentially the other star of the book besides you here.

Butch Meily:
Yes, that's true. Well, I got a phone call when I was working in my windowless office in New York City at a PR firm there, and it was from a woman who I didn't know. She said she'd gotten my name from a Wall Street Journal reporter and could I please help her husband. He had a PR problem. So, I said I'd never heard of her, I'd never heard of him. And she said, don't worry, he'll be a big client someday. 

And I got a phone call after that. It turned out to be one of his vice presidents. And he came on the line, talked to me about it. He had a problem with the New York Times story that came out. I told him I knew the reporter, and I promised to meet him in the lobby of the New York Times after I set up a second interview for him, hoping for a better story. And I didn't realize until he walked through the revolving doors of the Times that day that he was black. And when I saw him, I said, "Well, whoa," because at that time, it just wasn't that common for a black businessman to be there in the Wall Street area. 

And as I say in the book, he was like the sun. And we were like minor planets that revolved around him because he had that sort of personality. He was very magnetic. And long story short, we got a great story out of the New York Times reporter who he had yelled at a few days ago. In those days, you could get your phone number out of the phone book. And he didn't like his story, he found his phone number, and he called him up at 6 a.m. in the morning to yell at him. But we turned it around. He came out with a great story. 

His name is Reginald Lewis. Within a month, he told me he's going after a multi-billion dollar company, and he was going to bid a billion dollars to buy it. The company's called Beatrice International. At the time, it had Tropicana Orange Juice, Orville Redenbacher popcorn, Samsonite luggage, a lot of the name brands. The part he was interested in was in 64 companies in 31 countries. And nobody ever thought it would happen but within a couple of months later, we helped him engineer the bid. I helped break the story globally in a few key papers and everybody following the lead. And after that, he hired me, and he became part of my life till he died 66 years later at the age of 50. And it was just an extraordinary experience for me.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
So, as you look back on your time with Reginald, what would you say were the three most important lessons he taught you?

Butch Meily:
Well, one is the importance of hard work. He never let up, and his  motto in life was, keep going no matter what. And it's something that I remember to this day when I'm a little bit slow in getting up in the morning or getting to work. But that's the moral he kept pushing. It's something that kept me going. 

And I guess the second thing would be that idea that nothing was beyond your reach. Practically, Dr. Richard, he taught me a little bit of what it was like being black in America at the time. I'd read about stuff, I'd watched movies, but I experienced stuff with him and through him that I hadn't seen before. And it really sensitized me to the whole experience. And he often accused me of viewing the United States as a candy cane version of the country that I'd seen through Jimmy Stewart movies or Gregory Peck movies that I believed in and I loved. And he showed me that life wasn't necessarily like that. But he also taught me that anything is possible no matter where you come from, no matter what your race or creed. And that's important. 

And another lesson he taught me, perhaps which he didn't mean to teach me is that I've worked with five CEOs, one Jamaican prime minister, and at the end of this whole span, arc of my existence, I really come to believe that ordinary people who come home, and have a beer, and kick back, and watch a baseball game are much happier than people who are at the top, who have a lot of wealth and fame. It doesn't mean anything. A lot of them are not happy, I found out, and they're quite miserable. 

I've been with CEOs who spend seven days a week working. It's especially true in Asia, where they're a little less respectful of your personal time, and they don't hesitate to call meetings on Sundays or something, which doesn't happen very often in the States, unless it's an emergency, unless there's something urgent. But over in Asia, that's just the norm. They'll call meetings on holidays. It takes away from your family. So, I guess the third lesson I learned was that your family is important and people you love are important, and you can't lose sight of that.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
It's interesting, there's some research that came out after COVID because what you talked about - the culture in Asia, the call at night, the meetings on holidays, it didn't really happen here. But when the pandemic happened and everybody who had a job was now doing it from their home, we went into that environment without any rules, or guidance, or structure about what does it look like now. Because now, all of a sudden, because your home is your office, if an email came in at 11 o'clock at night, is it your requirement to take that? Or to respond to that? 

So, unfortunately, I think a lot of those boundaries got eroded a little bit over here. But I think as we've kind of gone back into the office and hybridized, if you will, because I think a lot of people are still, at least, partially working from home, it seems like that pendulum has shifted the right way a little bit more.

But I want to shift a little bit because I know the book is laden with stories, and you have so many stories. Pull one of them, pull something that comes to mind, a story with your time with Reginald Lewis that you think would be valuable for the audience to hear.

Butch Meily:
Well, there's a bunch of them. But I mean, when he built this huge mansion in the Hamptons, and it was one of the largest houses over there, and he was proud, he was about the only African American there in that particular area, a town called Amagansett, and he took a lot of pleasure in it. But we were in Paris one evening, because that was our headquarters at the time, spent a lot of time there, and he got a phone call saying that the house had burned down in the middle of the night. 

So, he told us to pick up, and not to bother to pick up our clothes or our toiletries or anything at the hotel. Just get up and get on the corporate jet with whatever we had on and rush back to Long Island. And really, we wound up digging through the ashes of the mansion because he just didn't believe it was an accident. It may very well have been, but on the way over on the plane, while we were flying on the jet, he drew up a list of suspects. And it included almost everybody he'd ever met or worked with, and included some of the guys on the plane with me. 

And he asked me to look at it, and he asked me, "Who do you think did it?" And I said, "I don't think anybody on that list did it," but my name wasn't on the list, which I was happy about. But yeah, we wound up landing there, and digging through the ashes, and just buying our underwear in Walmart or whatever department stores were there and staying out there. And we got an alcohol, tobacco, and firearms truck there to dig through the ashes because he pulled some strings from the president then. And Mayor Dinkins sent some people from New York City who got chased away because the Long Island folks didn't like the fact they were intruding on their territory, so there were headlines about it. 

But in the end, we didn't find anything. But I'm not sure what he ever believed, but the fact that he drew up the list of suspects, people who had been his friends, that surprised me.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
To me, that's a cautionary tale too, right? I can't help but think, you know, he achieved an unparalleled level of success, and yet believed that everybody he had worked with, including his allies, potentially burned his house to the ground. And so, you teased it earlier as one of the, kind of, the third lesson, right? 

Butch Meily:
Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
But this, to me, speaks to that work-life balance as well, not so much from maybe the hours you're directly putting in, although that's part of it, but relationships. Like that, to me, is really sad. And I'm saying this, obviously, through the lens of a clinician, but if somebody is essentially paranoid and believes that everybody - yourself excluded, you weren't on the list- but basically everybody else in his life, including people traveling on the jet with you guys, was a suspect. Did you find him to have kind of a tinge of paranoia in other instances or was it just kind of related to the mansion thing? 

Butch Meily:
Well, going out anywhere with him, Dr. Richard, and I have to believe that Grace had something to do with it because we could never have lunch or go to dinner anywhere and just relax because, was the service a little slow? Were we seated next to the toilet? Was there some hint of disdain or disrespect? And he was the type of guy who wouldn't let anything pass. I mean, he'd let you know if he felt that you're treating him wrong. And so, it was never a very relaxing experience. 

And so, there was always the suspicion. Even when we first went into the New York Times reporter, he had this real distrust of the mainstream press. And I mean, he'd tell me stories, no matter how rich you were, if you got pulled over by a cop, you had to be extra careful. And so, I think some of it stemmed from that. But it was just never easy to relax around him because anything could set him off. 

And he felt better when we were in Paris. We spent a lot of time there. He said he had a headache every time he went back to New York City. But he wasn't easy to be with. Part of my job was to be with him almost all the time. 

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Which I'm thinking about something else. One of the things you said earlier was that he believed that no matter who you were, where you came from, your upbringing, your race, your ethnicity, that you could achieve phenomenal success.

Butch Meily:
Yeah.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
He also felt that there was a high degree of importance of luck related to success in life.

Butch Meily:
Yeah.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Which to a degree is a little contradictory, right? Like you have agency to empower yourself to achieve anything you want, but you got to get lucky, right? So, talk to us about luck and success as he viewed it, as you experienced it, and then let's try and kind of reconcile those two ideologies.

Butch Meily:
Well, let me talk about his belief in luck. He always believed in the number nine, Dr. Richard. And all his offices, whether it was in New York, Paris, or wherever, were always numbered nine. When I first met him, he was working out of 99 Wall Street, a small rinky-dink office. After he bought Beatrice International, he moved to 9 West 57th Street and Fifth Avenue, big, solo building there, big number nine. And then, he moved into his office in Paris, TLC Beatrice Paris, because Paris was the headquarters for the whole empire, he picked an office with the number 99 Rue de la Paix, which is a big jewelry street there. 

And so, he believed in luck. And he believed that his luck changed in 1991 when he tried to take the company public and we failed. He wanted to be the first black- owned company on the New York Stock Exchange. Everybody was courting him. Merrill Lynch took it. But we got torpedoed by a big story in Barron's, which was a very powerful publication at the time, and it killed the whole thing. And after that, things started going down. He said he never felt quite as lucky after that. The house burned down and so on. And he felt his luck changed. And maybe that was a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

But in terms of succeeding despite everything, I mean, he was the living proof of it. Maybe it took him 20 years, 30 years, but he made himself what he was. He saw himself as a success story and that's what he became. He was drinking Cristal champagne, smoking Monte Cristo Cuban cigars in a tux, looking out the Paris window at the Place de Paulet Bourbon, one of the fancy streets over there in Paris. And he was at the top. He had his own jet. And he was living the life. And so, you know, that's the proof that hard work does succeed. 

Dr. Richard Shuster:
And he succeeded, although it feels like he succeeded with these obstacles in his way. How did he achieve that level of success based on your time with him without kind of selling his soul, right? Without compromising his ethics, his integrity, who he was?

Butch Meily:
Well, Dr. Richard, he was very demanding and it didn't matter how good you were. Let's say you thought you were a good psychologist. I thought I was a good public relations person. It didn't matter. I mean, he would always raise the level of your play, level of your game, and he did that with everybody he met, with lawyers, accountants. And he was especially demanding on himself. He had this like extra burden. Like he was very conscious of the fact that he was black. 

And so, every time he was in the game of life or in the game of business, he felt that he had to win because if he lost, it wasn't just him losing, it was like a setback for everybody else. So, he wanted to break barriers. He was the first black man to live on Fifth Avenue, believe it or not, paid a really high price for the condominium over there, but it was a great building with a Rockefeller living there and the sister of Jackie Kennedy living there. But he was the first black man that ever lived there. But he died within a month of moving into that apartment. So, I think, very successful people, they, sometimes, live very short lives.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
I think cardiologists would agree with you generally speaking. I'll be very careful. There definitely is an associated increase of stress with high-level positions like CEOs. Getting back to Reginald, as you look back on his life, what would you say his legacy was? And what can we learn from it?

Butch Meily:
His legacy was a very great one, especially for African Americans. He broke so many barriers in terms of being the first to buy a billion dollar company and to run it, first black man to live on Fifth Avenue, and the first to attempt to try to go public on New York Stock Exchange. So, his legacy, especially to black people, was that you can't let things like race, or your religion, or where you come from, or come from a poor background, you can't let that stop you. It's really up to you, and you've got to kick the doors in sometimes to make it, but you can do it. I mean, it's within your power, no matter where you start in life, to succeed and do well and to do good things for yourself and for other people. His life is that legacy. 

So, I think a lot of people still draw inspiration for him. One of the reasons I wrote this book was that I hoped that he'd become part of the national conversation again, because he'd been sort of forgotten, and that he'd once again start to inspire people with what he achieved. As David Dinkins said, he achieved more in his 50 years than most of us ever did in the rest of our much longer lives.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Amazingly said. I loved hearing the way you reflect on Reginald Lewis. There's obviously reverence and appreciation for the barriers he broke, the legacy he left. I'm going to now kind of turn it back on you. And this is a question that I ask every guest who comes on the show. Based on your learnings, all the years you spent with him, what is your biggest helping, that single most important piece of information you'd like somebody to walk away with after hearing our conversation today?

Butch Meily:
Well, I was gonna start by saying that you should keep going no matter what. That's what I wanted to initially say. But after our conversation, I decided that the most important thing in your life after all this working at these high levels, the most important thing in your life is being with your family and staying close to your loved ones because you're going to regret it if you don't hug your kid, if you don't go to the movie with them, don't watch their ball games, you're going to regret it someday. 

And just tell you something, at his funeral, one of the people he worked with told me, I'm just going up there to look at his casket to make sure that son of a bitch is dead. And I respected him, I admired him, but he left that sort of… he was like everybody else, you know, nobody's perfect. There's no perfect hero. And one thing I would leave, Dr. Richard, is to stay close to the people you love, because in the end, that's all you're gonna have.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Amen to that. The book is called, From Manila to Wall Street: An Immigrant's Story of America's First Black Tycoon. You can pre-order it now on Amazon and other fine retailers. I actually have never said that before. That's fun. Butch, if you could share with us where people can learn more about you online, that would be great as well.

Butch Meily:
Sure. I've got a website, butchmeily.com, that's B-U-T-C-H-M-E-I-L-Y dot C-O-M. You can just Google me, it'll show up. There's an email address there, which is public, and I sometimes get some wacky messages from people. But feel free to email me and I'll answer as many of you as I can.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Perfect. And if you're in the gym, we got you covered. Everything from the link to buy this book to Butch's website will be in the show notes at drrichardshuster.com. Well, Butch, I loved our time together. You are truly preserving Reginald Lewis's legacy, which is amazing. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Butch Meily:
Thanks so much, Dr. Richard. I enjoyed it.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
I did as well. And to each and every one of you who took time out of your day to listen to this conversation, thank you as well. If you liked it, if you're inspired, if you're going to pick up this book, go give us a follow and a five star review on your podcast app of choice, because that is what helps other people find the show. But most importantly, whether today and do something nice for somebody else, even if you don't know who they are, and posted in your feeds using the hashtag #MyDailyHelping because the happiest people are those that help others.