ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, May 29, 1996 TAG: 9605290096
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B-8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: LOCUST GROVE, VA. (AP)
SOURCE: MICHAEL ZITZ THE FREE LANCE-STAR
TO SUPPLEMENT HIS $16,500 salary some years back, Bill Meadows opened a summertime produce stand. It made $87,000. He changed careers.
He introduces himself simply as ``Farmer.''
And he's one of the nicest, most down-to-earth guys you'd ever want to meet.
But he's not the average working stiff. He wears a gold Rolex and carries huge wads of cash in his pockets that sometimes spill onto the ground.
He lives in a contemporary castle, a 13,000-square foot home a mile off Virginia 20 in Locust Grove on a 2,000-acre cattle farm. Why cattle? He always liked cows as a boy.
He owns a quirky golf course near Lake of the Woods in which one hole is laid out to look exactly like a baseball diamond.
He and his wife are in their 60s, but have two beautiful grade-school age children who are the result of artificial insemination and surrogate mothers.
He's a multimillionaire, owner of Meadows Farms Nurseries, the largest private distributor of nursery plants in America - sales volume, $25 million a year.
Bill ``Farmer'' Meadows is the personification of the American dream.
He was the son of a grocer in Beckley, W.Va. By 1960, he was a Fairfax County P.E. teacher and Falls Church High football coach, also teaching sex education to 12-year-old boys at a Bailey's Crossroads intermediate school, a subject about which he holds a clear opinion.
``It was better then than it is now. They believed in teaching everything. I don't think parents can do it [teach kids about sexuality] as well as someone in the school system.'' He says a tip from him to police once led to the arrest of men working at a carnival who had molested boys in his class.
He'd been named Virginia Teacher of the Year, but that didn't pay the bills. He was making $16,500 a year and thinking about summer jobs to supplement his income.
Meadows decided to open a couple of roadside fruit and vegetable stands because he'd always liked gardening when he was growing up.
The rest is business history.
In 10 weeks of the first summer, using high school kids from his football team as employees, he made $87,000.
``As much as I loved teaching, I found'' making lots of money was ``exciting, too. I think the creator put me here to coach football, not to have nurseries - but I'm not sorry, because I made more in a year than I could have in a lifetime of teaching.''
He decided to give up teaching and go into the fruit and vegetable business full-time.
When The Washington Star newspaper folded, he bought eight of its delivery vans for $300 each. He gutted seven, painted them red and placed them in shopping center parking lots. The vans were loaded down with fruits, vegetables and plants and manned by teen-agers. The eighth van he used to make 2 a.m. produce runs to stock the other vans.
Soon he decided horticulture was easier than agriculture, and began buying land for bare-bones nurseries. He revolutionized the industry, which had been based in the 1950s on providing customers with knowledgeable service people. Instead, he went with kids ``who didn't know an azalea from a rhododendron,'' but worked cheap and kept costs down. ``Not displayed well. No service. But quality plants for half-price.'' People flocked to buy from his stores.
Today, he's altered his philosophies some, mixing in a few older, more knowledgeable, higher-paid adults with his legion of high school employees. His prices are no longer the lowest around, but the formula is working well enough to keep sales rolling in.
Now he has 23 nurseries.
Along the way, he began buying properties for his nurseries. During Northern Virginia's explosive growth, he sold those properties for millions in profits.
He and his wife Betty, high school sweethearts who married at 18, moved to Orange County because there they could get more land for their money.
``In general, I like the people here, but sometimes they're a little too laid back,'' Meadows says. ``Here they want to work 40 hours. In Northern Virginia they want overtime. Sometimes I have to hire people here who are not as aggressive as myself.''
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP 1. Bill Meadows' company is the largest privateby CNBdistributor of nursery plants in the United States. He has 23
nurseries today. 2. graphic: map. color.