When you see those crazy Mountain Dew television commercials -- the guy butting heads with a bighorn ram, the guy chasing down a jaguar to extract a can of Dew from its belly, the guys piloting an alien flying saucer like a global-hopping skateboard -- remember that the guy who started it all is an industrial engineer. However, being the first to bottle and market the highly caffeinated, citrus-flavored soda pop is not the sole achievement of Charles 0. Gordon Sr., or even his primary claim to fame. This businessman extraordinaire, fund-raiser extraordinaire, civic leader extraordinaire, family man extraordinaire, and IE ancient has gained admiration from the furniture marts of this country to the halls of the Pentagon, from the campus of Virginia Tech to the citrus groves of Florida by being successful at just about every endeavor he ever undertook. Gordon, who graduated with an IE degree from Virginia Tech in 1942, didn't really have a career as an industrial engineer, per se. Still, IE training lies at the core of the man who effectively gave us Mountain Dew, presaged the current health drink market by 40 years, turned Quonset huts into model factories, built a furniture empire via contemporary designs, and raised two future industrial engineers in his sons. He does leave an industrial engineering legacy in those Quonset hut factories and through his alumni activities at Virginia Tech, but, really, his primary contribution to the profession is inspiring all industrial engineers to aspire to such a lifetime of achievement. Varnish in his veins The 81-year-old Gordon holds three titular positions: chairman of Tri-City Beverage Corp. and Peace River Citrus Groves Inc., and chairman and CEO of Bydand Corp. He calls himself semi-retired, working a couple days a week at his Johnson City, Tenn., office. Bydand is a holding company formed in 1988 by the family (Gordon, his three daughters, and three sons) when he sold Gordon's Incorporated Fine Furniture to Thomasville Furniture. The name Bydand, derived from Gordon's Scottish coat of arms, means "standing fast." That may seem an ironic motto for a man who has been constantly on the move demonstrating entrepreneurial agility all these years. Yet, the motto hints in another way at the secret to his success. "When he did something, he was in for the long haul, very seldom the short haul," says W Hanes Lancaster Jr., a Johnson City businessman who has known Gordon about 55 years. "He looked at the ramifications involved in the long haul of what he was getting into. A lot of that was his engineering training. " "All business ventures, especially entrepreneurial, have good times and bad times," says Charles Gordon Jr., known as Chuck to differentiate him from his father. "He'd never let those bad times discourage him in any way because he knew good times were right around the corner. And, generally, they always were." Chuck headed Gordon's Inc. when it became a Thomasville subsidiary and served 10 years as a senior vice president at Thomasville until its sale three years ago. He now owns Giorgio Collection in High Point, N.C., selling high-end Italian case goods. He also holds an IE degree from Virginia Tech, having graduated in 1969. From the perspective of his engineering training, Chuck said he doesn't necessarily consider his father an engineer. "But he couldn't have done anything he did without his vast engineering knowledge because back in the days when he created these businesses, he did a lot of it himself, building the plants and laying out the factories. A business major couldn't have done any of that; he w ould have had to hire somebody," Chuck says. Having introduced the younger Charles O. Gordon, we will hereafter refer to the elder as Charlie. That is as it should be; he seems to be on a first-name basis with everyone. "He'll talk to anybody" says son Jack C. Gordon, now president of Bydand, Peace River Citrus Grove, and TriCity Beverage. "He'll talk to a waitress in a restaurant, and he'll know the waitress' life history by the time he leaves." Jack is a 1976 graduate of Virginia Tech's industrial engineering program, but his father convinced him to pursue an M.B.A., and he quickly moved up the financial ladder to the family business' ceiling. From this perspective, Jack said he doesn't necessarily consider his father a businessman. "Quite frankly, I would never say that business was his forte. He had to hire people to do that. Dad's forte, and the common thread that runs through all his successes, is that he's a tremendous people person. That comes from his forthrightness, his honesty, his sincereness, and a very high sense of values." "Charlie is the kind of guy who was always willing to take the first step and then get other people to come along and support him," says Henry J. Dekker, 81 years old himself, whose friendship dates back to their days as Virginia Tech classmates. Charlie helped form the German Club Alumni Foundation, and with fellow club member Dekker he forged the construction on campus of the German Club Manor in 1981, giving the club a social home and the university a meeting venue. Charlie and his wife donated heavily to the Manor's construction and subsequent expansion. Other alumni contributions include a professorship endowment for the industrial and systems engineering department and serving for a time as rector of Virginia Tech's Board of Visitors. "I call him Sir Charles," Dekker says. "He traces his family back to France before William the Conqueror into the ninth century He always had a very, very strong family connection." In recognition of what he calls "Charlie's great familial spirit" and love of history, Dekk er had a six-foot-tall painting made of Charlie in his Gordon clan kilt, a portrait that now hangs in the German Club Manor. Just as Charlie likes to trace his blood roots back 12 centuries, it's easiest to recount Charlie's various career achievements by tracing them to their roots. He was born March 7, 1920, in Marion, Va., the surviving half of twins born to Lawrence and Mary Pearl Gordon. Lawrence, who began in the furniture business when he was 13, was superintendent of the Virginia and Lincoln Furniture Co. during Charlie's childhood. "I grew up, you might say in the furniture business because as a kid I played in the factory," Charlie says. "I knew the workers, and I loved going around watching them do their jobs and talking to them. I knew I always wanted to be in the furniture business." Chuck and Jack make similar comments of their own childhoods in Johnson City Clearly, in the Gordon blood-stock, furniture making runs thick as varnish. The key ingredient for Charlie's overall entrepreneurial attitude also developed during his Marion childhood: a strong work ethic. Because his father never gave him an allowance, Charlie worked often and hard. "That didn't bother me," he says. "After all, I knew my mother and dad had come up the same way and that suited me fine." He sold Burpee seeds door-to-door in the spring, and when in his early teens his father moved out of town to a farm, Charlie worked on the farm. He also worked for Mr. Catron, proprietor of the grocery store downtown. "I'd go to work at 8 o'clock, and at 5 o'clock I'd go out by the cash register where he'd pay me for my day's work. Twenty-five cents, that was it. And I was happy with it because it provided me enough money to get a haircut and have 10 cents left over to go to the movie." In the 1930s when New Deal legislation introduced wage and age restrictions, Mr. Catron had to pay Charlie 50 cents for just three hours of work. When I checked out in the late morning and he'd pay me , I'd go out the front door, go up the street and around the block to the alley and go in the back door of the store and get back to work. He'd never know I was back there, but I felt better by doing it." Charlie always considered himself mechanically oriented, but the only thing he knew he wanted to do was run his own furniture factory. His junior year in high school he happened upon a course catalog for Virginia Polytechnic Institute and a description of the school's industrial engineering program. "It just impressed me that that's what I would like to have." He then visited Virginia Tech. "A beautiful, beautiful campus with thousands of acres around it belonging to the university; I knew then that's where I wanted to go." Charlie was offered a football scholarship at Tech but turned it down to devote his time to studies, knowing that his future would be in furniture making. His life-lasting devotion to the school carried on not only to two of his sons (the third graduated from North Carolina State), but to his grandchildren. Chuck's twin son and daughter are now sophomores at Virginia Tech, majoring in business and sports medicine, respectively. Other lifelong qualities of Charlie Gordon emerged during the Tech years. One was his civic mindedness. "Charlie was very much involved in the corps [of cadets] and leadership and organizations," recalls classmate Dekker. "Charlie is quite a doer, somebody who does and gets things done. He did that at Tech. He had a great sense of organization and the ability to bring people together to accomplish projects and big things." One of those "big things" involved the German Club. As president in 1942, Charlie organized the club's 50th anniversary on the campus, an event that included a nationally broadcast dance featuring Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Paul Whitman. His sense of civic duty continued in his professional life at Johnson City, where he has been an active member of the Lions Club, Rotary Club, Masons, York Rite, Scottish Rite, the Shrine, and the Salvation Army, from which he's received national recognition. He also served for a time as mayor of Johnson City "We had some problems here and put in Charli e to get it straightened out," Lancaster says of Charlie's political career. "Charlie was the type of person that when something would come up in the city or east Tennessee that needed to be done, everybody would call on Charlie." COPYRIGHT 2001 Institute of Industrial Engineers, Inc. (IIE) Reproduced with permission of the copyright holder. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission. Copyright 2001, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company. NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.