Not the type of corporate executive for a coat and tie,
casually dressed CEO Larry Dent takes a break at Roane
County Family Health Care Inc., the Spencer clinic he
rescued as a kind of itinerant interim-management specialist
(Photo by Chip Ellis)
By Sandy Wells
Staff Writer
wvgazette.com
He's probably best known as an accomplished old-time fiddle player, but that's just one side of Larry Dent's unconventional, unpredictable lifestyle. (No wonder he didn't last as a lawyer.)
He sees himself as an adventurer, "a corporate soldier of fortune."
An Arkansas native with a knack for management, he swoops in on sick companies, gets them on their feet and moves on to the next patient. Between cases, he likes a break.
Better known as an old-time fiddler than a CEO, Larry Dent was photographed during a session with fellow musicians at a folk festival in his native Arkansas.
One hiatus covered 10 years, a music-dominated, whatever-whenever decade that ended when the money ran out.
At the moment, he's CEO of Roane County Family Health Care in Spencer, one of the businesses he brought back from the dead. Two more years on his contract and he's off to South America and Bulgaria with the artist wife waiting for him in Miami.
At 69, he hopes his episodic life has a few more installments to go.
"I was born and raised in Bay, Arkansas, about 50 miles west of Memphis. I had the distinction of seeing Elvis Presley in person in 1956 in Bono, Arkansas, sitting on a high school gym floor. He was on the same show with Johnny Cash. I think we paid 50 cents to get in and we thought that was too much.
"My father was superintendent of a consolidated school. Bay had about 50 people. When he went there in 1926, they were using covered wagons for school buses. This was cotton country, the flat lands of Arkansas. My grandmother lived out at Bono. We hitched up a team of mules to go to church every Sunday morning. It took us almost two hours to get there and two hours to get home.
"My mother was a concert pianist, conservatory trained. She thought old-time music like I play was pure trash. So I was kind of a closet fiddle player. I started out playing piano at her insistence, then took violin lessons from Arkansas State University and played with a community symphony in high school. I converted pretty quick to old-time fiddle music.
"I lived through Little Rock in 1956, when Eisenhower nationalized the Arkansas National Guard, but the first we lived through was Hoxie, Arkansas. It was very visceral. The hatred really boiled up when they integrated the Hoxie school district.
"I grew up in era when there were 'colored' water fountains. I had a very good friend in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, who was a black physician, a pediatrician.
He treated every kid that came to him, and yet he couldn't eat breakfast in Pine Bluff.
"I was raised by a black woman, a maid in our house. I picked cotton as a kid with a lot of blacks. That's where I really got into music. Those guys would sing those spirituals all day in the cotton fields. I remember going to Memphis as a kid and listening to the blues on Beale Street. That's where I got my musical heritage.
"I wanted to be a pilot. I would go to my grandmother's farm and right in front was an old World War II training field. I would lie in the grass and watch the old P-6s land and bounce. When I went to sign up for ROTC at Washington University, the Air Force recruiter gave me a long spiel about how only a few in the Air Force actually flew. I wanted to make sure I got commissioned, so I went with the Army. I was on active duty for two years. I learned how to fly on my own. I've been a pilot since about 1961.
"After I got out of the Army in '64, I wanted to get an MBA. Washington University didn't offer a night MBA program, and I had to work, so I went to night law school. I practiced a couple years and hated it. I've got wanderlust. Law was just too restrictive. I ended up getting a job with the Corps of Engineers, taking care of titles when they were buying up all this land for the basin project.
"I took my fiddle and I would find old fiddle players out in the country. I was part of the original Missouri Friends of the Folk Arts, and we got a $10,000 grant and did a two-record album on old fiddle players.
"My family hated living in the country, so we moved back to St. Louis. We ended up getting a 7Up delivery franchise and grew it into the largest 7Up distributing company in St. Louis. During holiday times, I would get on a truck and deliver 7Up myself.
"My life changed dramatically in 1978. 7Up sold out to Philip Morris, so they called in all their franchises. I wasn't aware that my wife and the preacher were a little closer than was comfortable, so we got divorced. I had our four kids for a year. When they decided to go live with their mother, I found myself with total freedom. I was bitter for a long time. I've always been a workaholic. But one day, I got over being bitter and thought of it as a wonderful opportunity to do anything I wanted. I was 38.
"I got a job as a corporate pilot. That lasted about six weeks. I was more of a glorified taxi driver. I had a lot of doctor friends going broke, so I started doing practice management. My forte was taking a company and making it work. I got into working with ambulance services around the country and taught a management workshop in the mid-'80s at Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. Out of that workshop, I introduced a concept of data-oriented management, the concept of looking at your data to make your management decisions.
"I spent several years in Seattle. I wrote a national textbook on how to make ambulance services work, and that's how I got to West Virginia the first time. Mark King, who was state EMS director, liked the book and they hired me. I taught a management workshop at Canaan Valley. Bill Garvin of Cooperative Ambulance, owned by Ruby Memorial in Morgantown, had been in my workshop and hired me to dismantle that company. They were losing $3 million or $4 million a year.
"I spent a lot of time during this period really getting to know myself. What I really do best is just short bursts of high-energy work and then not work for a while. This is my 30th year of going into a company that's failing and getting it on its feet and handing it off and not working for a while.
"I came here in '88 to do the job for Ruby. I fired 54 people the first four weeks. I got it all polished up, and they ended up selling it. I was 50. My kids were adult and doing well. I spent the next 10 years in Morgantown, just hanging out having fun playing the fiddle and doing a lot of art stuff.
"We had a band called Mojo and played a lot of art gigs. I think my total earnings in 10 years of playing the fiddle was like $68.70. I liked West Virginia a lot, the people, the music. I got into heritage music preservation with Augusta and John Lilly and Goldenseal. So I basically retired in '90 and was retired for 10 years.
"Then I got really depressed. I got broke, depressed and remarried in that order. In about 2000, it got to where I couldn't get off the couch much. Connie Banta, who played music with me, her words of wisdom were: 'Get off your ass and go back to work.'
"I got hired as executive director of West Virginia Wood Industry Training Consortium in Elkins. Nobody knew what that was. It was a one-year grant, so it was perfect for me.
"I met my wife in Miami Beach. She's Bulgarian, but lived in Cuba most of her life. When I left Elkins, we were going to South America and on to Bulgaria, but a friend said they needed some help at the Spencer Committee on Aging, so I ended up getting hired as their executive director.
"My wife, an internationally known artist, said she had never lived anywhere where they spoke English as a primary language, so she wanted to come to West Virginia. She had total culture shock. She went back to Miami Beach. I fly back and forth.
"This place was ready to shut its doors. They asked me to take it over. I moved over here in 2003. I had it turned around in about six months. I've got two more years on my contract.
"Life to me is a big adventure. When you're a consultant, you're never unemployed, just between clients. I really want to teach. There's a real niche in teaching CEOs and CFOs how to use electronic medical records to manage. I want to write another book on management. There's a lot of stuff they don't teach you in business school.
"I've talked to the National Association of Community Health Centers about doing some training sessions around the country. After you do this for a while, you get a nose for it. You're sort of a corporate soldier of fortune."
Reach Sandy Wells at 304-348-5173 or san...@wvgazette.com.
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