6 to be Inducted into Hall of Fame
Kiwanis Club honors business leaders
The Birmingham News
September 20, 2005
Six business leaders will be inducted today into the Birmingham Business Hall of Fame by the Kiwanis Club of Birmingham.
The additions of William Charles Linn, Frank Park, Houston Blount, Thomas E. Corts, James Arthur Head Sr., Samford Sr. and Frank Park Samford Jr. will raise the hall’s membership to 47.
The club, which started its hall of fame in 1997, has recognized 41 people who ex- emplified strong leadership or made extraordinary contributions to the greater Birmingham area.
Here are brief biographic sketches of the 2005 honorees:
Blount was named chairman emeritus at Vulcan Materials Co. in 1992, where he served as chairman after retiring in 1987. His roles at the construction materials company include serving as president, chief executive and chief operating officer.
He and his brother, Winton, went into the construction and construction materials businesses in Tuskegee after World War II. Their business merged in 1954 with Birmingham Slag and the joint venture was acquired by Vulcan two years later. Blount has worked with the area’s scouting programs and served on boards at Birmingham-Southern College, YWCA, hospitals and the Arthritis Foundation.
Since Corts became president in 1983, Samford University has grown to more than 4,500 students and its endowment has increased from about $48 million to $250 mil- lion. He plans to retire next year and remain in the Birmingham community where he has been active.
Corts is director of the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama that he helped form. Boards he has served on include the Alabama Poverty Project, Birmingham International Festival and Children’s Literacy Guild.
Head dropped out of high school after one year to help support his family. At 18, he got a job selling office systems to libraries. By 22, he had started James A. Head and Co. to supply libraries across the state. He was involved in the 1952 campaign to relocate Samford University.
President John F. Kennedy appointed him to the Advisory Committee of Alabama to the Civil Rights Commission. Head’s been a longtime member of the National Conference for Community and Justice and took an unpopular stand against segregation in the 1960s.
Linn was born to Swedish parents in Finland in 1814 before running away from home at the age of 15 to become a ship’s cabin boy – a move that eventually brought him to America via New York. Linn went from selling goods on the streets of the Big Apple to partnering with Thomas Joseph in a fruit stand business in Montgomery.
After spending time as a sea captain and then operating a grocery wholesale business in New Orleans, Linn returned to Alabama and set up Birmingham Car and Foundry Co. and the Linn Iron Works in Birmingham.
He later established the National Bank of Birmingham, the predecessor to AmSouth Bank, housing it in the city’s first ”skyscraper,” a three-story building that was the tallest in Birmingham in the 1870s.
He also established the city’s first park, which still bears his name.
Samford, born in Troy in 1893, worked in the state’s banking department and later was Alabama’s first deputy insurance commissioner and manager of the Lumber- man’s Mutual Casualty Co. He worked in Philadelphia for the predecessor to Liberty National Life Insurance Co., where he became president in 1934 and chairman in 1960.
But it was his work as chair of the board of trustees at then Howard College that earned Samford’s name its most lasting place in Birmingham. After he led the private college out of financial difficulty and helped it become a university, the trustees selected Samford University as its new name in honor of Frank Samford.
Samford Jr. worked his whole career at Liberty National and later Torchmark, when the company changed its name. He worked his way up to be president, CEO and chairman of the company.
He served on the boards of numerous companies and chaired a number of campaigns, most notably as a charter member of the Kidney Foundation of Birmingham, Samford Jr. headed the $1.5 million capital campaign for the Alabama Kidney Center at UAB.