Transcription of Jim Wellehan for the show Kids Count #225
Dr. Lisa: When I was younger, one of my earliest memories on coming to Maine was to go buy shoes with my mom at Lamey Wellehan. It’s very interesting that life being what it is, I now have the opportunity to sit across the microphone from Jim Wellehan who is the co-owner and CEO of Lamey Wellehan which is a Maine-based family owned shoe company. This year, he was the recipient of the Corporate Giraffe Award given by the Maine Children’s Alliance for his dedication to family-friendly policies and fair wages for employees.
Thank you so much for coming in, for doing all the work you’ve done, not only for putting shoes on my feet, but the shoes on the feet of many Mainers, but also the work that you’re doing for families in Maine.
Jim: Lisa, it’s all been fun. There’s a lot of issues. There are many, many social issues, as you know and we all know, in Maine. You grew up at a time when life was a little bit easier, a little more rosy, and so did I. When I was a kid, we just came through the recession or the depression, and we had World War II going on. Then, I grew up. We had the wonderful days of the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, but somewhat rather, everyone in town had a job, families stayed together, there was social cohesiveness. There wasn’t a big drug problem. When I was a kid, I will confess to making a couple of cans of beer in senior year, but that was it.
Now, I was at a meeting with some school board members. This is in Auburn about two weeks ago. One of the sad things, they were talking about is the heroin epidemic. We’ve gone so far. 20 to 25 years ago, kids used to puff on the weed, and it wasn’t a good thing. Don’t misunderstand me but heroin is just so much more deadly, so much more addictive, so much more destructive of life that we’ve come a long way. It hasn’t all been good.
Some good things are happening. Don’t misunderstand me. If we sit talking together for a while, we think of one or two of them, but lots going on. As I came into Portland today, it was sad, and I noticed when I go to Portland, I see lots of homeless people wherever I go, and that wasn’t the case when you were a kid or when I was a kid. I think we’ve got lots of issues, and we’ve got to resolve them, but you get the essence with those. See what you can do.
Dr. Lisa: I don’t know if I have the answers that’s why I bring people like you in so that we can have conversations to see what you think. You were born in Lewiston on 1938. That’s an interesting and pivotal time in our country.
Jim: I think there’s nothing but pivotal times. This is an interesting one now. I look at where we’re at, and it’s interesting in many areas. We check retail sales and see what’s going on. In many communities, retail sales is going on a slight downgrade in general merchandise sales for the last five, six, seven years. That’s true in Augusta. It’s true in Bangor. It’s true in Androscoggin County. You look at that and say why. When you look at the income and equality we have, and Maine is not as bad as many states, don’t misunderstand that, but when you’ve got that, there are lots of people who can buy nothing.
It’s just an awful way to have, and to have so many people in desperate one. Most of us are doing all right. Don’t misunderstand me. There aren’t many people who just want to spend and spend, and live this extravagant life. There are few but not too many, but it’s initially what we got as a society. The major top to bottom pay ratio for the top CEOs in this country compared to the base worker is 347:1. You’re smart, you work hard, but you aren’t 347 times smarter than the other people you see, and you don’t work 347 times as long, or as officially, or anything, nor do I. You could look at these things and say, “How do we make it a fair society where we can educate all of our children, we can bring up all of our children, we can enjoy each other as people, and we can be society?” That’s a challenge.
Dr. Lisa: Tell me about these family-friendly policies that you’ve taken to heart within your company?
Jim: First, you’re very kind to ask about that but if you pay people $7.50 an hour, they cannot live very well. We’ve tried to put incentives in our pay structure, and the average pay for all of our non-managerial people is $15 an hour, and that works. We have high expectancies of our people, and we want everyone to do well, and they take pride in their work. They stay a long time, and they enjoy it, and their children, it doesn’t happen as often as ever a situation where it comes up, they’re welcome to be at the office for a bit, and do what they need to do, and so forth, and draw some pictures. The couple we’ve had in have always been well-behaved, much better than I would have been.
Those are some of the things that we do. We have a little top to bottom pay ratio. It’s 3.5:1 top to bottom. That’s enough. Kath and I live well. We’ve got nice kids and good grandchildren, and you need enough, you don’t need too much.
Dr. Lisa: You came into the family business after having done other things?
Jim: Everyone does other things. I enjoyed my graduate school at St. Pats and St. Tom’s High School. Then, I went off to college at Holy Cross, but when I was a sophomore in high school, I began working in the stockroom. When I was in college, I sold shoes. I used to work in downtown Portland too. They had some very cute girls come in from Montreal. I decided I was going to learn how to speak French better. Having lived in Lewiston where it’s a very Franco-American community, I thought that so many of my friends were from French families inside of St. Toms, so I learned French, but after I met these Montreal girls, I was like, “I’m going to perfect this thing.”
I worked at it, and I enjoy the language, I enjoy the culture. I am still very active at the Franco-American Center and things like that, but we just want our people to have enough. If there’s somebody who has an illness or somebody has some time that they need to go off and something is going on, we try and find to make that happen. It’s what you have to do. That’s why we have people, we have Nancy has been with us for 38 years. We’ve got a lot of people with us 30 years. A great many of them with us 20 years. If they don’t like it, they go someplace else but most people really enjoy it and they stay with us.
We have very low turnover for a retail operation. If you have a low turnover, you can work with your people, they can be better at their jobs, they can learn more. We make sure all of our people have pedorthic trainings so they’re very good at foot deformities, foot issues, and so forth. Again, you can work with people to help make them more comfortable. The funny thing is when people walk out the door and says, “Boy, this is great. My feet haven’t felt this good in years,” when somebody says that to you, you feel good. That’s one more reason to stay.
Dr. Lisa: Why did your family choose to focus on shoes?
Jim: My dad is born in 1888 which is a few years ago. He had to leave high school in 9th grade because there was no money in the family. His dad had come out of the railroads being built. Dad got a job with Horace Foss at Dingley-Foss. It was a shoe factory in the western York. In the shoe factory, they got thrown out of the job. Then, he went to work for Peck’s Department Store. They were a wonderful operation to work for. In fact, Peck wrote a book, The World a Department Store about his operation. He’s very socially concerned about people at the time as well.
Dad was a sign painter and window trimmer, and he would start trimming the windows in a Saturday night where his job closed at 10, trim them all Sunday, go up to church to St. Jo’s, and keep on trimming up to the French Department, and crawling to bed and sleep for five to six hours, seven hours, eight hours, and he’d wake up in the morning, he have a new collar to button on to his shirt, and new cuffs to button on to his shirt, and he went to work. I don’t think he’d take a full shower. It was a different world then. Life keeps on changing but he and Charlie Lamey got to be friends. They went to the shoe business and they did well.
They opened on St. Patrick’s Day because we are a good Irish operation. They saw the thing. Dad loved it. It was a wonderful thing. Right up down, he met my mom down at the old orchard back when he was 40 or so, and they had my brother, and then they got me. It was just always what Wellehan’s did. I went off. After I taught overseas for a year in Lesotho, when I came back, and I said, “What’s next?” I worked for the shoe store for six months when they have active reserve for six months, active duty at Forth Dix, and you can call me Serge, by the way, and I said, “If I am going to do this, I better learn something.”
I went and then got a master’s degree in business, in marketing. That was the good old days before they had the wonderful course of lying, and cheating, and stealing. It was part of all of the master’s programs in business but they don’t really have that. I am kidding you, Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: I was going to say my brother is actually at Wharton right now.
Jim: Is he really?
Dr. Lisa: I was about to ask him about that course work.
Jim: What is he doing in Wharton?
Dr. Lisa: He’s getting his MBA.
Jim: Is he? That’s interesting. It was a great place for me, and we’ll talk about that later, but it was a good experience. I came back and went to work. I guess I liked it over time. It was a very rock-me community back in Lewiston. It was fun to be with everybody and all that stuff with all the old friends. Old friends are good friends. Things kept rolling along. When dad passed on in ’76, I was the guy he said, “Okay, Jim, you’re in charge.” I’ve been increasingly making decisions for a while, and it was a good way to go into it. Dad had two people work with him who are very capable. He had a lot of long-staying people as well, the same sort of thing. He took good care of his people, this example that he set, and I knew that was what you’re supposed to do, so I did.
Dr. Lisa: What was it like being Irish in Lewiston?
Jim: It was great. I’ll tell you a story, Lisa. When my dad was a kid, a French-Canadian who’s just coming in because the western writ failed up in Quebec, and they had to go to something else and all this. It may surprise you but the French communities had very large families, 10, 12, 13, 14. I had one friend who had 17 brothers and sisters. They came in, came down, and they looked for work in the mills, and came to Lewiston and in Waterville, in Westbrook, in Bedford, in Orange, Mass, Lowell, Mass, in Manchester, New Hampshire, and good people. As they went to work in the mills, they took their areas, and that became their territory. The Irish had their territory, all these places.
An Irish kid didn’t walk through a French neighborhood without another 20 Irish kids with him, and a French kid didn’t walk through an Irish neighborhood without another 20 kids with him. Then, all of a sudden, Shaw noticed that Monique was pretty cute. Something started to happen there. Then, John Pierre was looking at Patricia, or Sheila, and boy, it was great. Pretty soon, we got to be in a mixed group. There used to be the French-Irish baseball games. As the thing went down to the end, an old friend of mine, a former coach, Harry Lezatte used to play for the Irish team despite having good French names.
It was an interesting thing. The Irish, despite their ability to breed quickly in many areas, in Lewiston, they stayed home and took care of the folks. If you go to Mount Hope, you’ll see a lot of Irish names, and that’s just the way it was. The French took over, and they were good people. I really came to like French values very much, and I am emotionally and spiritually at least have French as well as Irish, and we brought up our kids to speak French too. All my friends didn’t bring up their kids to speak French because they have been mocked and kidded when they were young, and you got this accent, and when they went off to college, and when they went off into the service, they were kids. They named all their kids Patrick, or what have you, Michael, or whatever. Just come up with a good Irish name because if you aren’t French, I guess Irish will do, one of those where you’ve gotten to be friends over time.
Now, it’s funny to watch the way communities change. It’s not always the community over the last 10, 12, 15 years, and they honestly have done a wonderful job in the community. I don’t know if you’re aware but Lewiston won the state soccer championship this past weekend. There were ten Somali kids and a white goalie, and they’re a great team. It was wonderful to see everyone cheering the team on. They’re calling up the names and so forth, just as easy as if they’re French, or if they’re Irish, or if they’re Somalis, and they are a wonderful asset to our community. We’ve been very blessed to have them.
Mayor Gilbert did a great job with them. His daughter, Karen, works with me here who is an old friend. She used to work in our store. We make sure they had a good place to be. This election coming up, and I hope if Mayor Macdonald wins, he goes through some rethinking because these are good people. They come in with nothing to live on and hard times, and they need to have help just the way the Irish did. Years ago, when I was first married, we’re looking at maybe almost 150 years ago, there was a 100-year of a column. It was almost 50 years ago when I first married, there was a 100-year-ago column in the Sun Journal, and it talked about a cave in in the street, and said, “No one was injured. Two or three Irish men were buried,” and the first Irish church in Lewiston was burned to the ground.
We all are very slow to accept new people, and we’re very defensive, but as I see, the world is changing, and I see more different races coming in. Us becoming more mingled, I think, is one of the greatest things that can happen to learn from each other, develop from each other. Also, if you look at world peace, it’s a wonderful thing. I really don’t want to go to an Island, and if we’ve got some Somalis who don’t want to go with Somalia, and some people from Congo or wherever, and when the Syrians come in, we start to think we’re all one race. We’re a little bit different. You’re blonde and I was dark-haired, and so forth, but we are all really one people. We need to work together and we need to help each other, and whether with selling shoes or building a better world. That’s what we need to do.
I’ll tell you a story, Lisa. I see you’re nodding there. You want to another story. You didn’t know I was so chatty, did you?
Dr. Lisa: I’m happy to hear your stories. Yes, give me one.
Jim: When I taught in Lesotho, that was a very interesting year. Lesotho was a small British protectorate surrounded by the Republic of South Africa, and a pact tied was in style. It was very harsh, and they believed in predestination. If you’re white, you’re going to be saved and if you were not white, looks tough. That’s the way the world was in the African people, the Basotho in the country would go to work in the mines for a nine-month or six-month period, and they have to leave their families. The wives would do the planting and so forth, harvesting of the food. It’s a very tough world.
I was walking down the street one day, and a fellow behind me in the African National Coast hit me, raised his thumb, and said, “foreign language,” and that means white man, get out. I said, “foreign language” and that means that’s a crack of bull. He said, “Hey, you’re white. You must go out.” There’s no such rule. I said, “Give me your arm.” I took his arm and I put next to mine. I’ve been out building buildings, and after school, and doing things I need to get done. He is a really light Basotho. I was surprised how little difference there was. I asked him, “Is there much difference for you in these two arms?” He didn’t look down. He kept looking me in the eyes. “Yes, you are white. I am black.” “Take another look. Look at these two arms.”
He looked down. I said, “Is there much difference.” He says, “No, there is not much difference. I said, “Is there any reason these two arms can’t work together to build a better country?” He said, “We can do that.” In that short bit, we had become friends, established relationship, common goals. We can do that. We can work as a humanity towards peace, towards kindness, towards love, towards sharing. This is what we need to do.
Dr. Lisa: I agree. It’s interesting you have that experience, and now are living in Lewiston where I’m guessing that probably 50 years ago, you wouldn’t have thought we would be seeing Somalians?
Jim: No, not at all. It’s funny. It was a very light community. I went to Holy Cross, and when I was at Holy Cross, there did have to be three African Americans there, but they’re in different grades, different years. I never get to know any of them. I remember reading a book. Times do change as you probably have noticed. I remember reading a book, and one of the questions was talking about African Americans of where they said, “Would you want your sister to marry one of them?” I didn’t have any sisters but I still didn’t know the answer, but when I get over to Lesotho and get to know the people a little bit, I knew the answer. Which one? Same as the white guy. It makes no difference. It’s just good people, and good people for your sister, and they come in all stripes and colors. Let’s work to be one.
Dr. Lisa: It seems like it would be helpful for us sometimes to think about where we’ve actually been, where we’ve come from the time of, say, the Civil Rights Movement or …
Jim: How about slavery?
Dr. Lisa: Or slavery. That’s not that long ago either, but really, any of these major social causes, and they weren’t that long ago.
Jim: No, but we’ve made great progress and it’s good to see; although as you see the cartoons that’s on the newspaper with President Obama, the big ears, the thick lips, much different from his real lips is just so wrong, so gross to push this on a belief. We got to be in it together. I have many, many faults, one of which is I’m a left wing, socialistic, environmental, extremist, peace radical but as I look at Ben Carson running, I think it’s wonderful seeing another black candidate. He doesn’t have to be my candidate, as you might expect, but it’s good to see that he feels free to run. This ability to be who you are and what you are is critical for all of us.
Dr. Lisa: This idea that you have strong environmental interest, from what I understand, you’ve translated that into some of the business precepts within Lamey Wellehan?
Jim: We’ve been very lucky. We’ve had all the people very involved in it. My wife is Kathy, and she has been very concerned about the same sorts of things but it’s just seeing the world, it’s gotten a little more messed up since I was a kid. We decided we needed to recycle things. We started recycling. In work, we recycle 95% of the solid waste that comes into our store. It went up to ’96, but Kath got it started back in ’94, and we are one of the Governor’s Waste Management for recycling.
The other thing is I went for a run this morning around the neighborhood, and most people are doing a wonderful job putting out two or three bins of recycling, and a few people just put it all in the waste basket and the trashcan. It’s just not the way it should be because if you’ve got stuff, you want to throw it away, and cut down some more trees, dig out some more minerals, don’t you want to use this stuff? If you’ve got it, why not use it. There was a wonderful ad. I was watching Bloomberg this morning after I came back and there was a wonderful ad on it from Timberland, and they’re talking about making tires now. These tires, once they’re finished, they’ll all be recycled, and turned into soles for Timberland boots. It’s the way things should be.
We save everything we possibly can, and we’re very concerned of many things. One of the things we’ve been concerned of is global warming. In 2003, we began to work to cut our energy cost, and we’ve taken them down 40% since then. We’ve changed fuels, we’ve changed temperature settings. We’ve increased our insulation. As we built new buildings, the new tops, for example, is a great stuff of ours, and the ceiling is R50 and the walls are R30, and lower your windows, all the lighting is LED lights, and we have an internal vestibule entrance.
It really keeps it nice and not much change in temperature. We keep our settings for temperature. In the wintertime, they come in, if it’s 68 degrees, you’re pretty happy to be inside. We don’t have to be 72, we don’t have to be 75. In the summertime, we keep it to 75 because if you come in from the heat, 75 is comfortable. You just got to adjust all the time and always look at things. We’re happy to have cut out our carbon emissions.
The last couple of years, we took on a new initiative, and that’s to look at plastic in the ocean which is an awful thing, and there are these huge gyres in every ocean although we’re not quite in every ocean. We just started shortly in the Arctic Ocean. There are these gyres, the Pacific gyre, they all vary in sizes, but contract a little bit, but the largest is half the size of the United States, and nothing lives in these gyres in general. If sea turtles eat a plastic bag, they can no longer ingest food, they starve to death. They just found two whales with the same that happened in the Arctic Ocean where they’ve just started gathering plastic there. It all wheels around and goes here and there, and the next place. It’s a tough, tough deal.
We stopped using plastic bags and we said, we shall use paper bags. If you look at paper bags, between cutting of the trees, transporting of the wood, producing of the paper, transporting them again to where their destination is, they give off at least five times much carbon emissions as creating a plastic bag. If you look at our oceans, acidification is a major issue. The ocean is getting warmer. You probably heard the news this morning about the lobsters moving up. No lobsters in Southern New England.
The professor, I believe his name is Mark Green at St. Joseph was saying, “Look, we are not going to be able to have clams because they’re not going to be able to grow their shells and we’re not going to have mussels because they’re not going to be able to grow their shells because the ocean has too much acid in it,” and this is because it’s getting warmer and warmer. It’s going to take all the carbon, and all these things, and put it into its new being, and we’re just doing awful things to the planet we live on.
I’ve got three kids, all good kids, all doing their own thing, nice daughters-in-law, and seven grandchildren, and I really don’t want to see the world destroyed for them. We’re capable of doing that. This year, it’s the first year that carbon emission have been over 400 milligrams per whatever it may be. We got across the threshold. We got to start changing everything we do. All the cars that people drive with, some company cars threw out Priuses, and it’s what we’ve got to do. There are no options on it.
Dr. Lisa: I’ve really appreciated the conversation that we’ve had about the work that you’re doing. I can certainly understand why the Children’s Alliance has given you its Corporate Giraffe Award. How can people find out Lamey Wellehan? Do you have a website?
Jim: We do. It’s lwshoes.com. Doesn’t everyone have a website?
Dr. Lisa: I’m assuming everybody does have website, yes. Go to the website, people who are listening, or go to the Lamey Wellehan Shoe Store, and see what’s going on there for yourself.
Jim: They’re nice people, and you’d like them, and they like you.
Dr. Lisa: I’ve been there and I do like them. I’ll go back again, and I will be reminded. The people who are listening now, they can do the same thing. We’ve been speaking with Jim Wellehan who is the co-owner and CEO of Lamey Wellehan, a Maine-based family-owned shoe company. This year, he was the recipient of the Corporate Giraffe Award given by the Maine Children’s Alliance for his dedication to family-friendly policies and fair wages for employees. Thank you so much for all the good that you’re bringing to the State of Maine.
Jim: Lisa, you must bring it from yourself. Thank you. It’s nice to be here.