Ready for Anything

Betty Buck answered the phone at 7:00 AM on Monday morning, still groggy from her red-eye flight from Carmel, California, where she and her company had redeemed their prize vacation for winning the Miller High Life Achievement Award.  It was a nurse on the phone, informing her she had to be at her doctor’s office by noon.  Betty’s stomach turned, and she immediately called for her best friend to come over.  She knew she would need moral support for whatever the doctor needed to tell her.

For weeks, Betty had been in unbearable pain, such that she needed to consume an entire bottle of extra-strength Tylenol everyday just to go about her daily life.  Her previous doctor had assured her it was all stress-related, which wasn’t entirely far-fetched considering her beloved father had just passed away, she was in the middle of a divorce, and she had just taken over the family company Buck Distributing Company.  But the pain was so deep and so consistent that she knew in her heart something was terribly wrong.

When she arrived at the hospital, her doctor told her she had a progressed form of ovarian cervical cancer, and that at 8:00 AM the next morning, they were going to perform surgery to remove the 18 golf ball-sized cysts they’d found.  “They told me my chances weren’t good, but that they’d do their best,” she says.  “So I left and had five hours to tell my family, friends, and employees what was going on before I had to come back to prepare for surgery.  In a single moment, I had to put my entire life on hold.”

During surgery the next day, the doctor found her condition was even worse than he had thought.  The surgery took longer than expected, but despite the odds, it was successful.  She spent three more weeks in the hospital recovering, but with the help of her friends and coworkers, who kept the company running smoothly and looked after her three children (five, seven, and eight at the time), she was able to step back into her life without skipping a beat.  “I never once doubted that I would be alright,” she says.  “I had just gone through a horrific divorce, and my ex-husband decided he didn’t want to see our children anymore, so I simply did not believe in my soul that God would leave my children parentless.  I was adopted and always promised that I would give back what I was given, and I hadn’t finished doing that for my kids yet.”

Today, Betty is back in full health and the President and CEO of Buck Distributing Company, a malt beverage distributor headquarters in Upper Marlboro, Maryland.  They focus mainly on beers and crafts, and as of recently have begun to dabble in wine and liquors as well, distributing to all of Southern Maryland and parts of the Eastern Shore.  Her father started the company in 1946 from one brewery in Cumberland and a single truck, which he used to personally distribute his beer.  For years, he maintained his small but dedicated brewing business, until Miller selected him from hundreds of candidates to be their Southern Maryland distributor.  Since then, the company has taken on countless kinds of beers, from Rolling Rock to Yuengling to many craft beers, so that today, comprised of 128 employees, the company sells five million cases a year.

It seems only natural that Betty would now be the head of the company her father started nearly seven decades ago.  Growing up, she was a self-described “dedicated Daddy’s Girl,” following her father everywhere and mimicking what she observed, such that her Barbie Dolls rode tractors and unloaded cases of beer.  As soon as she was able to walk, her father would wake her up every Saturday morning to bring her to the warehouse, where she’d play or get into trouble.  “My mother believed girls should never wear pants,” she recalls.  “So she’d put me in a little dress with white socks and black buckle shoes and send me off to the warehouse with Daddy, only to be horrified by how dirty I was when I came home.”

Betty started formally helping out at the warehouse around six years old doing whatever her Dad asked her to do, whether it was cleaning toilets or salvaging bottles from cases of broken glass to be repacked.  “I wanted to do it because it gave me a sense of independence,” she laughs.  “It was fun for me, and I loved going down and messing around with the guys.  We’d all have lunch together on Saturdays, and Dad would make sure they cleaned up their language when I was around.  It was like family.”

Betty’s parents had always wanted children, but after three stillbirths, they realized adoption was the path for their family to take.  They first adopted their son Howard, and then Betty ten months later, just hours after she’d been born.  She was not aware she’d been adopted until one day at Sunday School when Betty was six years old, her childhood friend Becky announced, “Betty Jane, you can’t come to my birthday party because you have adoption.”  Naturally, Betty was horrified, assuming that to have “adoption” must be synonymous with some terrible disease like the measles.  When she went crying to her mother, her parents decided the time was right to sit their children down and tell them the full story.  “We weren’t at all bothered by the news because my parents raised us so that we knew how very loved we were,” she comments.

While Betty spent most of her time at the warehouse with her father, her brother, Howard, had gotten into just enough trouble to land him a spot at Charlotte Hall Military Academy.  Their father wanted to ensure Betty stayed out of trouble, so, much to her horror, he looked into an all-girls boarding school for her to attend.  She desperately wanted to stay home with her parents and attend a public school with her friends, so father and daughter struck a deal that she could stay as long as she got straight A’s in every class she took until graduation.  “The only class I came close to not making an A in was in chemistry in eleventh grade,” she admits.  “I was one point shy of that A, so I begged my teacher to let me write extra credit assignments and clean beakers for all hours after school—anything so that I wouldn’t have to be sent away to boarding school.  I explained the situation to my teacher, and he could barely believe it.  He gave me the extra point, but to this day, I think he gave it to me as a gift.”

When Betty was not devoted to her studies, she kept busy by giving back or getting involved in her community.  She was a cheerleader and basketball statistician, and on weekends and over vacations, she volunteered at the main office of her high school.  When she was old enough, she began working at a dress shop, and eventually, as a lifeguard.  “In our family, you worked,” she laughs.  “You never sat around or spent your summer lounging by the pool.  You always had a job, even if you weren’t paid for it.  That was certainly a life lesson I learned growing up, which I think ultimately helped me fight my battle with cancer.”  It also taught her to never take no for an answer, like when she tried to join the boys’ baseball team.  “Coaches from other teams got upset, but I tried out just like everyone else.  I was better than a lot of the boys,” she smiles.  “I even beat my old boyfriend out of third base.  He was so mad he wouldn’t take me to the prom, so some other boy did instead.”

While she was tough on the boys, her father was tough on her.  Most often, he refused to let her out of his sight, such that when she was sixteen, he bought her a canary-yellow Gold Duster with a block engine.  “He wanted to make sure he could not only see me coming from twenty miles away, but also hear me,” she laughs.  “He knew everyone in town and made sure they kept him updated on my whereabouts.  If I was driving up to the warehouse, he’d know who I was with and what I was wearing before I even arrived.”

Before graduating high school, Betty was awarded a full scholarship to Lawrence University to play classical piano.  She desperately wanted to go because she had earned her spot there after years of hard work and practice, but her father decided Appleton, Wisconsin was simply too far away, and that she would be better suited at the University of Maryland.  Even after she gave in and started at the University of Maryland, he would get in touch with his business friends on campus to find out where she was tutoring and when, so that he could conveniently run into her.  “I was so mad at him that I changed all my classes and refused to come home, so I didn’t see him from August to Christmas Eve,” she says.

Despite her efforts to make the best of her college experience, Betty felt too unsettled by the vastness and impersonal nature of the university, so she took a job at the National Association of Manufacturers in D.C. after her first year and never looked back.  “I was 18, making good money, making lots of friends, and visiting New York City every week, so I was just having a ball,” she says.

In a mere matter of months, however, her father asked her to leave her job to join the family business and computerize the company.  “I was still mad at him for the whole issue with college, so I told him I would only come if he gave me a contract that specifically set aside an amount of money for me to spend on technology that he couldn’t touch, and of course he said no,” she says. “We are both hard-headed people, and I was trying to teach him a lesson, so for two weeks, we didn’t say a single word to each other, even at the dinner table.”  At the end of the two weeks, her father came home and threw a legal contract in front of her that his lawyer had drawn up, which specifically met her demands.  “He upheld his end of the deal, so in 1975, despite a salary cut, I joined Buck Distributing,” she says.  “Since that time, I only had to pull out that contract once when he was being difficult.”

Betty spent the next ten years modernizing the company, which, for a company that has a tendency to retain employees for decades, has been on ongoing process.  Her father was naturally gifted at math, with the ability to store all the necessary numbers and details in his head, so it was a long road to shift the company culture away from taking notes on the backs of envelopes, to putting every piece of information in a database and becoming familiar with the iPad as a daily workplace necessity.

Betty never directly asked her father for more responsibility, but she never had to.  Gradually, he began assigning her more and more tasks.  “He would come to me and say, ‘I don’t have the patience for the politics anymore, so I want you to take over the Chamber of Commerce activity,’” she says.  “After I’d do one thing, he’d pass off another task to me, and then another and another.”

This pattern continued until one day, in 1985, he told her he just was not hungry anymore, and he wanted her to take over the company.  His news came as a surprise for everyone, but even more shocking was his ability to completely step away and let Betty take the lead.  “We would have coffee together at the office after he stepped down, and once I asked him for his advice on a huge decision I had to make for the company,” she says.  “He refused to tell me anything, even though the wrong decision would have cost us $25,000.  I ended up making the wrong decision anyway, and I asked him how he could have knowingly let me do that.  He just said I had to learn that is was okay to make mistakes, and that usually, they were always fixable.”

Betty’s transition to taking over the company was far more complicated than simply taking her father’s place.  Because the company represents Miller, Betty had to travel to Milwaukee to seek approval from the president of Miller, Leonard Goldstein; however, Betty had known Goldstein for most of her life, and naively felt it would be a seamless transition.  When she arrived in Milwaukee and told Goldstein that her father was retiring and planned to hand his position over to her, the President was stunned.  “The problem was that I was I was a woman, and I was 28, so I would be the youngest person to ever run the company,” she explains.  The President decided to call an emergency meeting with all the Vice Presidents, who put together a list of classes and sales targets she would have six months to accomplish before they even considered her.

Being the savvy businesswoman that she is, Betty agreed to their decision and returned home to accomplish the tasks, all the while caring for her three small children and running her company.  Almost as soon as she took the assignment, however, her luck turned, and it seemed every possible obstacle was out to keep her from her goal.  “All three of my children got the chicken pox, and a month later I caught my husband cheating, so I suddenly had a divorce on my hands as well,” she says.  The most trying of it all, however, occurred when she was in Milwaukee for a class, and received news that her father had suffered a massive heart attack.

She raced home and spent the following weeks sleeping in the Intensive Care Unit, since she was the only one who could keep him calm.  “I was there every night, and we had some of the most amazing conversations I’ve had in my entire life,” she says.  “He asked me one night if he’d ever really hurt me, and I told him the one time was when I was 16 and got in my first car accident.  He came out to make sure everything was all right, but then he just left me there.  Of all the times my older brother got in trouble, he never once left him behind, but the one time I did, he left me to fend for myself.  When I asked him why he did it, he started crying and said he did it because I didn’t need him.  I could handle it, but he was sorry for having hurt me.”

To everyone’s surprise, her father stabilized enough to go home, so shortly after, Betty returned to Milwaukee to finish her remaining classes and then awaited the President’s final decision.  “I stood up at that meeting and told them, ‘Don’t even think about telling me no.  I did everything you asked in less time than you gave me, and all my reports are better than you required me to do.  I don’t want to play your game.  I’m capable of doing this, and my father, who you all love and trust, believes in me more than anyone else for this position,’” she recounts.  “They approved me, and Goldstein joked that none of them had the guts to tell me no after all I’d been through.”

One of her first major accomplishments as the new owner of Buck Distributing was to honor all the hard work her father had done during his career, so Betty entered the company into a prestigious contest for highest beer sales.  After submitting endless reports and paperwork, they managed to win the Miller Masters Award.  “We didn’t tell Dad we had won; instead, we hung the huge banner they gave us outside the warehouse for him to see when he drove up to work,” she says.  “He was always this big, 6’8” tough guy, and that banner made him cry, he was so proud.  We’ve managed to win it every year since.”

The Buck family celebrated Betty’s accomplishments until, in July of 1986, her father succumbed to his failing health and passed away, and barely any time passed before Betty started experiencing the ominous pain that would turn into her battle with cancer.  She had the tests done the day before she left for the Miller High Life trip in California, so while it was a wonderful time, she felt troubled and unsettled for most of the vacation.  “I went driving around by myself to try and find some peace, and I ended up finding the Carmel Mission, which is just a beautiful place,” she recalls.  “I met a monk there who insisted I walk with him to look at the children’s festival they were hosting, and I finally found my peace that day.  I truly believe that experience helped keep me calm during my surgeries and the aftermath.”

Since triumphing in her battle with cancer, Betty has brought Buck Distributing to a new level of success.  She’s grown the company, doubled sales, and won countless awards, all of which she feels sure is the direct result of her strong team.  “As a leader, I make sure I pick the best team to surround myself with, so I can trust them to do their jobs and make the right decision,” she says.  “I don’t like to micromanage.  I like to let people do what they know how to do, and so far, my team has been exceptional at doing just that.”  Even with all her success, she has always made an extra effort to give back to her community in any way she can, be it through a company golf tournament to raise money for Cerebral Palsy research, to mentoring children and volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club.  She also makes a point to spend time with young people entering the business world so she can share her leadership experience and advice.  “I always tell them to pursue something they have a passion for,” she says.  “But no matter what, they have to give back.  There will always be someone who has less than you, and even doing the smallest thing can mean the world to someone else.”

While she is proud of her awards and business success, her greatest accomplishments are her four children, three of which are biological, and one who was adopted after her divorce.  “I always wanted to give back the way my parents did, so I adopted my youngest son, Timmy,” she says.  “I’ve been open with him from the start that he is my special gift, and I let him know that if he ever wanted to seek out his biological mother, I’d help him.  I sought out my biological half-sister, and we were very close until she died of brain cancer last year, but it was such a gift to find her.  I would want that for my son as well.”  Beyond Timmy, Betty’s family has continued to grow with the addition of her loving husband, whose she been with for the past ten years, and his two children.

As her company continues to excel, Betty hopes to pass the legacy of her company on to her children, who have all sought to get involved.  Her oldest daughter, Kelly, is the Craft Beer Specialty Manager, while her second daughter, Erin, is the Sales Manager.  As of recently, her youngest son, Tim, decided to join the business as well, and Betty has started all of her children where her father started her: at the bottom, helping on the delivery trucks.  “I know family businesses can be hard, but I think we do so well because we’ve never allowed each other to cut corners,” she says.  “I think the fact that my father was hard on me made me tough in business and in life, so now I’m treating my kids the same way, so that when the company is ready to pass on to the third generation, they will be ready for anything.”

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