(6 of 11)
Home again by 5, Gray has a single martini before dinner, poured from a full bottle of martinis that he makes up for the week. He usually gets into bed about 9 to read or watch TV (particularly shows with tobacco sponsors) until lights out at 10:30. Gray has few cultural interests (his favorite relaxation: doing jigsaw puzzles), seldom attends church (he is a Methodist), sees perhaps one movie a year. His chief outside-work interest is the farm, where he likes to wander on weekends, carrying a notebook with the vital statistics of his 415 Guernseys and calling them by name—"Emma, Brenda, Belle, Charming." Gray is a millionaire; besides his $160,000 annual salary, he has his father's bequest of 55,000 shares of Reynolds stock (then worth about $3,000,000), now owns a total of 90,000 shares, worth $5,600,000.
Long Tradition. Bowman Gray is the product of a long and inbred family tradition at Reynolds—though his family is no direct relation to the Reynolds clan.
The company got its start in 1874, when a brash youth named Richard Joshua Reynolds, wearing a tobacco-stained mustache that belied his 21 years, took his profits from a family tobacco business, set up his own business at Winston to sell chewing tobacco among the back-country folk. He did so well that by 1888 he was worth more than a quarter million dollars.
But he, like everyone else, soon ran into the formidable ambitions of James B. ("Buck") Duke, a North Carolina tobaccoman who had set up many factories, manufactured the first successful U.S. machine-made cigarettes. Duke pressured the other major tobacco manufacturers to join him in the American Tobacco Co., which became known as "the Tobacco Trust." "I don't intend to be swallowed by Duke," said Reynolds. "If he does, he'll have a bellyache the rest of his life." But Duke did swallow Reynolds by undercutting its plug prices—and Duke soon had his bellyache.
When the Government trustbusters split American Tobacco into 16 parts in 1911, forming most of today's major tobacco companies, Reynolds was on its own again.
Crowed Dick Reynolds: "Now watch me.