Meeting

Report

HOW I GOT WHERE I'M AT
Steve Montgomery, Elsie Garner, Don Esposito and Henry Scholz
By: Henry Bostic

Programmatically, Charlotte Rotary picked up in 2004 where it left off in 2003 with another club-favorite session of “How I Got Where I’m At” and four new members introducing themselves. John Lassiter introduced the program.
 
Steve Montgomery, managing director of Aon Risk Services, Inc. of the Carolinas, grew up in Whitsett, NC, in rural Guilford County and has never lived outside the Tar Heel state. He is the middle of three boys with enough cousins to populate a small town. His father was the youngest of 17 and his mom, the youngest of 12. A graduate of Western Carolina, he went to work as a claims adjuster, which he called an excellent place to learn the casualty insurance business. Describing himself as a “quick study,” Steve said it only took him seven years to realize that selling is where you make money in insurance. After 16 years with Aon in Winston-Salem, where his family became well entrenched, Steve invited them to take a “character-building” move to Charlotte about five and a half years ago. His daughter at the time was 16 and had just been selected a cheerleader. He was not a popular man at home. Steve said his life is like a long train ride. “You never know who’s going to get on around the next bend.”
 
The new president and CEO of WTVI, Elsie Garner is an American by choice, having decided to become a citizen at age five. She, like all the rest of the women in her immediate family, was not born in the United States. In her case she was born in Peru where his parents were missionaries. After graduating from high school in Tampa, she went to work at a local public television station. Then came marriage and a seven-year stint in Bolivia where her husband ran an international boarding school. Back in Tampa, she returned to TV work where her first job was as a dancing Christmas tree. Over the years she worked at just about every job at the television station, had two children, adopted two more teen sons and picked up a degree from the University of South Florida. She also became a staunch member of Tampa’s downtown Rotary Club. Elsie described hre work in public television as her “avenue of service” to the community, a virtue her parents instilled at an early age. The author of the book Bowling Alone, decries the decline in civic involvement in the U.S. and attributes much of it to “two boxes,” the automobile and television. Elsie describes her role in public television as trying to reverse that trend and make public television a positive force for civic good.
 
Don Esposito, an antitrust attorney with the firm of Womble, Carlyle, Sandridge & Rice PLLC, attributed his being in Charlotte to three factors; his wife Audrey, his daughter Addy and Suzanne Bledsoe’s husband Louis. Don grew up in Clemmons, west of Winston-Salem, and graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill. After a year with an international cultural exchange program in Tokyo, he headed to Harvard Law School where he said for the first time “people could pronounce and spell my last name.”After graduation, classmate and Charlotte native Louis Bledsoe convinced Don that the Queen City was just as good a place to practice law as Atlanta or Washington. When wedding bells rang, his new bride Audrey, a Hickory native, decided she’d had enough of the nation’s capitol and that a job with Duke Power’s lobbying arm would give her frequent “inside-the-Beltway fixes.” He worked a while as an assistant attorney general for the state, commuting weekly to Raleigh, but the arrival of daughter Addy brought him permanently back to Charlotte and his present position with Womble, Carlyle. He actually took that position during Addy’s third trimester in 2001. Pretty good timing!
 
Henry E. “Chip” Scholz, of Scholz and Associates, an executive coaching firm, grew up in Wheaton, IL, home of legendary football hero Red Grange for whom the high school football field is named. Chip described his hometown where Wheaton College, the alma mater of Evangelist Billy Graham, is located as “conservative.” He said, “people in Wheaton don’t make love standing up because it looks too much like dancing.” He attended Illinois Wesleyan College planning on becoming a minister until he joined a fraternity. His first job with Del Monte brought him to Charlotte for the first time in 1979 when he “sold beans, corn and catsup to A & P and traveled most of North and South Carolina.” He was introduced to liver mush in a Lowe’s store in Rutherfordton where it was cooked on the butcher’s “heat sealing machine.” A job with CF Airfreight led him first to Atlanta then to Tampa where he met his wife. “She came in for an interview. I didn’t hire her. I married her.” And in the deal he got three “wonderful daughters” now 33, 31 and 29. Chip and the family then moved to Los Angeles where he got into community affairs work with BFI. “I became a trash man.” He also got involved in volunteer work. By his count he has served on 19 chamber of commerce boards, chaired four (including most recently the Lake Norman Chamber), and 63 non-profit boards. Chip also got involved in Republican politics and once introduced Congressman Sonny Bono as “Representative Boney.” He returned to the Charlotte area with his wife in 1998, and since then all of their daughters have moved to the area. “I’ve been blessed,” said Chip, as President Tom “brought out the hook.”
 
   
Head Table:
Chip Scholz, Don Esposito, Tom Wright, John Lassiter, Tom Robertson, Elsie Garner, Steve Montgomery
 
Visitors and Guests:
Jim Alexander; Health & Happiness: Ed Turner; Song: David Erdman; Invocation: Rob Thomas
 

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