Fire, Flood, ?49 Ford Shaped Williams? Life

On Christmas night in 1943, four-year-old Doyle Williams thought he was dreaming when he saw a curtain on fire across the room.

His father snatched him from bed, and the family fled just before newspapers tacked to the single-plank walls for insulation caught fire and the shotgun house burned to the ground.

“We moved into an abandoned sharecropper’s house on the bayou,” Williams said. “People gave us pots and pans so we could re-establish life a little bit.”

Williams can still see that fire. It’s the earliest memory of the man who is now dean of the University of Arkansas’ Sam M. Walton College of Business. Since taking that job in 1993, Williams has helped raise more than $80 million for the college.

The son of Nuell and Lurline Williams, Doyle Zane Williams grew up in the community of Ajax in rural Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, about 70 miles south of Shreveport. The family farmed about 60 acres of cotton and 40 acres of hay.

Williams was named for Zane Grey, a semiprofessional baseball player and half-hearted dentist who turned to writing and became the best-selling Western author of all time in the early 20th century.

Williams said he never thought of his family as poor, but times were hard in general in the rural South back then, and he quickly learned the importance of education.

Ajax, Louisiana

Williams said he also remembers rowing in a boat up to the front door of the house on the bayou. The family was trying to salvage a few belongings before moving to a Red Cross tent camp after the flood of 1945.

“In the summer, we moved back in,” Williams said. “The government, to help with mosquito control, came by and sprayed all our houses with DDT.”

One of Williams’ younger brothers didn’t survive — but not because of the DDT. Just before his first birthday, the baby fell into the fireplace and died in his mother’s arms during the 11-hour trip by horse and wagon to the nearest doctor.

Williams said his father borrowed $250 to help pay for 57 acres of timberland. “It took him 10 years to pay it back.”

The family moved into another abandoned house where they lived while his father built a house on the land he purchased. In 1947, they moved into the new house on what is now Nuell Williams Road.

There were seven students in Williams’ graduation class, the largest ever for Ajax High School. The town was named for a spear-toting Greek giant in Homer’s Iliad.

When Williams was growing up, the town had a post office, school and grocery store. All of that is gone now.

“When you think of Ajax, maybe there’s one family there now,” Williams said. “There’s a community center, a Masonic Lodge and one house.”

Being able to pick 99 pounds of cotton in a single day was a mixed blessing for Williams. That meant it was time for the ninth-grader to work regularly in the fields because he could pick his weight in cotton daily. On days when it was dry, Williams often would stay home from school to help his family pick cotton.

“I’m convinced there was a conspiracy to invent the mechanical cotton picker after I left home,” he said.

Williams’ father was a high school graduate. His mother dropped out in the 10th grade to help take care of her seven younger siblings. While working in the fields, Williams said, he realized his parents expected him to go to college.

That sounded just fine to Williams.

College Impact

In 1957, Williams enrolled at Northwestern State University of Louisiana in Natchitoches.

College had a profound and immediate impact on him.

For the first time in his life, Williams got to talk on a telephone, take a shower and wake up in a warm room on a winter’s day. Williams grew up without running water or steam radiators.

“I thought I had died and gone to heaven,” he said. “I had never had a shower in my life. We had baths in washtubs. I had never had a bath in warm water. …I thought, ‘I’m not going to do anything to give this up.’ “

He worked in the student union for 40 cents an hour cooking breakfast. Later, he worked in the business department where he graded papers and assisted professors.

During his junior year, Williams’ father bought a 1949 Ford from a neighbor for $100. “Pieces of it were scattered all over the place,” Williams said. His father and brother put the car together and got it running so Williams could take an accounting job off campus with a farm distributorship.

If he didn’t succeed in college, Williams knew he would have to go back to working in the fields on his father’s farm.

“So when I went to college, there was a great motivator to do well and stay there,” Williams said.

Williams has been in college ever since, so to speak, but since that modest beginning, he has been the one making the impact.

From Lubbock to L.A.

At the age of 20, Williams received his bachelor’s of science degree in business administration and accounting from Northwestern State.

After a year with the accounting firm of Haskins & Sells in New Orleans, Williams went back to college, this time to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. At LSU he earned two more accounting degrees, a master’s degree in 1962 and a Ph.D. three years later.

“I found teaching much more appealing,” Williams said. “I found it very rewarding.”

In 1965, Williams took a job as an assistant professor of accounting at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. While there, he met and later married Maynette Derr, a professor of home economics. The couple had one child and adopted a second.

Williams worked for Texas Tech off and on until 1978, leaving for two two-year stints during that time — one with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants in New York City and one as a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii.

By 1973, he was “area coordinator” of the accounting department at Texas Tech, and the department was gaining national attention.

In 1978, Williams was hired away by the University of Southern California in Los Angeles to help start a school of accounting.

Four years after its inception, the USC School of Accounting was ranked in the top five nationally by other accounting department administrators. When U.S. News & World Report began ranking colleges, the magazine also put the USC school in the top five.

Walton College

In 1992, Williams was asked to be a candidate for dean of the UA business school. Williams said he the fact that the deanship was combined with the Sam Walton Leadership Chair led him to believe the UA was “serious” about the business school.

The additional title meant extra funding was available to help the UA to recruit nationally for a prominent dean. (Williams’ current state salary of $134,892 added to the additional funding of $66,948 totaled $201,840 for the current fiscal year, making him the sixth-highest paid employee at the UA in Fayetteville.)

The USC program was well-established.

“My wife said, ‘You won’t be happy in a maintenance roll. Your career is building programs and taking them to the next level,’ ” he remembers.

Williams took the job and arrived at the UA in the fall of 1993. He has been making an impact here as well. For the second year in a row, U.S. News & World Report ranked the UA in the top 40 for public undergraduate business schools. A study by professors in Georgia ranked the UA’s management faculty No. 28 nationally. Before Williams’ arrival, the UA business programs weren’t blinking on any national radar screens.

“We have made some progress,” Williams said. “The business community has responded.”

The most visible response was a $50 million donation to the business college in 1998 by the Walton Family Foundation. Among other things, the donation has helped pay for endowed professorships, so Williams can recruit nationally for faculty.

Enrollment in the past two years has increased by 10 percent per year to 3,366.

Williams said the quality of the student body has increased as well. In 1993, the average grade point average for an entering freshman was 3.01. Now, it is 3.47. ACT scores have increased as well.

“That reinforces my theory that good students want to go where there are good students,” Williams said.

Looking Back

When he thinks back on working in the fields, Williams said, he couldn’t have predicted the life he has led.

“It’s far beyond whatever I dreamed would be possible,” he said. “At the end of the day, I’ve come to realize it’s not ‘What house do you own?’ or ‘What car do you drive?’ It’s ‘What difference did you make?’ ”