Metro Pulse/Cover/Sam Furrow

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Sam Furrow deals in machinery, real estate, wheels, and preservation

by Barry Henderson

Sam Furrow stands tall at the microphone, jiggling his gavel and chattering that stylized stutter that characterizes the speech of the auctioneer at work. Perfectly coifed and resplendent in starched white shirt sleeves and paisley tie, he seems mildly exasperated. The bidding is slow.

On the auction block is about an acre of Sevierville that includes a convenience/gas store at one of the highest traffic locations in Tennessee, where state Route 66 turns onto The Parkway leading through Pigeon Forge to Gatlinburg and the Smokies national park.

Bidding began at $250,000 and has edged above $350,000, with Furrow Auction's vice president, Rob Strickland, running back and forth to the Chinatown Restaurant next door to retrieve bids from its owner. There's a lengthy pause at $365,000, with Furrow calling a recess to allow for feverish cell-phone consultations between bidders and their absentee angels. The bidding ends there, and the restaurant owner, who has come outside, prevails.

Before the break, Furrow gives the bidders and onlookers a piece of down-home counsel: "People, there's not but three ways to get rich. You can marry it. You can inherit it. Or you can buy your way rich."

Sound advice, and Furrow has taken it himself. He didn't inherit or marry money, to speak of. But he's bought, sold, and traded his way from modest childhood circumstances to a position of considerable wealth. At 61, he's been a fixture of the Knoxville business and community-involvement scene for decades. But it is his latest mission—to acquire and renovate worthy historic properties—that has thrust him into the spotlight in 2002. How he went from country kid to big-time auctioneer, machinery merchant, auto dealer, developer, and, now, preservationist, is worth a look.

When Metro Pulse coined the term, "the 12 White Guys," embodying the Knoxville power- and influence-wielding establishment, it was never meant literally. There is no specified dozen, but the names Haslam and Clayton and Lawler would surely be included. So would Furrow.

Regardless of his personal wealth or his station in Knoxville, Furrow seems perplexed that anyone would question the deal in which he bought the old post office and federal court building downtown to restore and lease, partly to the post office and—contingent on state approval—to the state Supreme Court and courts of appeals. He gains historic preservation tax credits and has secured, over the protestations of some detractors, a city grant of $500,000 that must be used for exterior refurbishment. The post office project is a part of a larger plan under which the city would acquire the former state Supreme Court building across from the Knoxville Convention Center, tear it down, and develop a convention hotel there.

Some people, including a four-member minority on City Council, were skeptical enough of the complexity and political implications of the deal to oppose the grant. Furrow insists he just wants the old post office to be preserved and put to its highest uses. He says the grant will allow work to be done on the exterior and grounds that he could not have afforded to do, given what he expects to make from leasing the structure. He wants the best for the old building, he says, and has concentrated on getting that done. He tends to focus totally on whatever is before him at any given moment. This single- mindedness is something that Furrow either admits or boasts of, depending on how you look at it.

What drives Sam Furrow? What has brought him into leadership in Knoxville —a role he readily and proudly acknowledges? In a nutshell, it is an assembly of points that frame his character.

For starters, he has an ego as big as his pocketbook and, some say, a heart to match both. He comes by those traits honestly, if an old associate of his and his father's is to be believed. Charles Sloan, the Sweetwater farm implement dealer and land trader who was a competitor of Sam Furrow's father, Fuzzy, sees a lot of the elder Furrow in the younger.

"There weren't a lot of people just like him," Sloan says of Fuzzy. "He was a good fellow. But he was, I don't know what you'd say, maybe a little jealous. He liked to be the man...he loved that center of attention.

"At the same time, he would help out anybody he thought needed help," Sloan says. He says he remembers Sam from the time he was a little boy hanging around the farm machinery lot through his rise as an implement dealer and auctioneer in his own right. "I'm sure Sam's a lot like his daddy," Sloan says.

Fuzzy Furrow, who died several years ago, dealt in farm equipment all over the Eastern half of the United States. He was an auctioneer, too, who erected metal buildings at one time and who started a catfish farm when almost no one had ever heard of the idea. He sent his son to auction school before college. It was an auspicious decision, made by a father who had been divorced from Sam's mother since his son was two years old.

Born to Sell

Sam Furrow, whose mother was a schoolteacher when she was younger, was born in Loudon, but his mother moved to Paint Rock after the divorce. Paint Rock, along Watts Bar Lake in Roane County, is such a small dot on the map it can hardly be called a town. That's where Sam grew up. When he was in sixth grade, his mother moved to Knoxville to work on her master's degree, her son says, and he went to Park Lowery Elementary, Park Junior High, and East High School, always living in East Knoxville.

Classmate Bobby Denton, the celebrated Knoxville broadcaster, says from the time Furrow came to Knoxville he was "always popular...just like he is now." Furrow played basketball for the legendary coach, Buford Bible. "Sam was his favorite," says Denton. "Sam was always a salesman, and he sold Buford Bible on himself. Bible claimed he didn't have favorites, but he did."

Jim Justice, Furrow's best friend from school days and a business partner since college, says, "A lot of people don't know it, but when Sam was a freshman, he was maybe 5-foot-two and 110 pounds. He did all his growing in high school. He was about 6-4 or 6-5 when he graduated." By the time he was a senior and class president in 1959, Furrow was a star, excelling in rebounding even more than scoring, he says.

Just before he was to enroll at UT, Furrow says, his dad sent him to Decatur, Ind., to auctioneering school. He used that skill to work his way through college. He was on the freshman basketball team at UT, but didn't make the varsity and didn't become a cheerleader, though he tried. His college accomplishments included being cadet commander of the Army ROTC Corps at UT and founder and first president of the Phi Delta Theta fraternity chapter there. "When he first got started auctioneering, it was under a tent at UT," Justice laughs and says, "He auctioned off used textbooks."

Furrow took his Army commission and served as a training officer at Fort Lee, Va., taking time away from there only to go to jump school. When he got out as a 1st lieutenant, it was 1965, and he went to work with his father at Sweetwater for about a year.

Furrow says he looked in the mirror one morning and told himself if he was ever going to go to law school, he had to do it right then. He entered UT law school in the fall of 1966 and was advisor to the Phi Delt undergrads that year. He got to know the fraternity's sweetheart, Ann Baker, who'd been far more of a whiz kid than he. She'd been a phenomenal high school basketball player at Maryville High School and was at UT on a golf scholarship. There was no women's golf team then. She was on the men's team on full athletic scholarship, the only woman ever to do so. She also won the first Neyland academic scholarship.

After their first "get-acquainted" date, she says, she went back and told her roommate, "That's the man I'm going to marry." She took him home to meet her family the first weekend. And that was that. Except for his name. On his birth certificate and up until their wedding, Furrow had been "Sammy Joe." With a twinkle in her eye, she quips, "I wasn't going to marry a Sammy Joe." As it turned out, she didn't. On their wedding day in 1967, Furrow's uncle, then a Roane County court clerk, gave him a wedding present, a legal name change to Samuel Joseph Furrow. She also had a name change, of sorts, when she was in second grade, she says. Always known by her first name, Melissa, she was playing in a junior golf tournament at Knoxville's Whittle Springs. "They asked me my name, and I said, Ann, my middle name." She was Ann thereafter, except around home. "I knew that Ann was a better headline name," she says, with only a trace of a smile.

Within four years of their marriage, Ann was appointed the first, and still the youngest, at 26, member of the UT Board of Trustees, where she served for 18 years.

And at the same time, Sam, whose part-time auctioneer's earnings in his last year in law school exceeded the salary of the law dean, had graduated, passed the bar, and passed on a law career ("I couldn't afford it") in favor of the auction business.

Furrow began dealing in mining and manufacturing equipment, worldwide, in the 1970s, and the auction trade he maintained flourished. Over the years, he's auctioned off everything from millions of dollars worth of heavy machinery to "a barnful of manure" in Union County. He says it was his most unusual request, and it brought $42.

Cars and Land

In about 1980, Furrow ventured into a new business. "I was driving a Mercedes, and I was taking it to a mechanic I knew, because the service at the dealership wasn't good at all," he says. "I said then that if it ever came up for sale, I was interested. Not too long after that, I got a call." Furrow put together a partnership and bought the dealership. In 1984, he bought out his partners in Knoxville Motor Co. and now holds that Mercedes franchise, plus Land Rover dealerships here and in Chattanooga. He's now negotiating for the Jaguar franchise in Chattanooga.

The dealerships have been great investments, Furrow says, as the car-buying public has gone ever more upscale. Selling Mercedes cars also kept him in contact with those Knoxvillians at the top of the income and personal wealth scale, even though Furrow insists the typical new Mercedes sale, averaging $40-$45,000, goes to someone who is "thoughtful, conservative, practical, not necessarily someone who's rich. You never see a Mercedes in a junkyard, just like you never see a Harley-Davidson in a junkyard. They're forever recycled."

In 1989, Furrow formed Prime Commercial Real Estate, now known as Archer Furrow & Associates. His fraternity brother and long-time auctioneering executive, George Archer, is president of the real estate business, and Ann Furrow is the company's broker.

Along the way, Furrow, his company, and his various partners have bought or developed quite a few pieces of real estate. Among them are the former Dean Planters Warehouses in East Knoxville, a 25-acre parcel on Lexington Drive in West Knoxville, a 50-acre industrial park on Cherry Street, and, also along Cherry Street, the former Levi Strauss plant and offices. Furrow redeveloped the 300,000-square-foot Levi Strauss structure and now leases it to several companies, among them Knoxville Wholesale Furniture, seatbelt materials manufacturer Tennessee Webbing, and records security firm Smith & Richards. About 120 people work in the buildings.

In a move similar to the Levi acquisition, Furrow says he's negotiating to buy the 39-acre site being vacated by Plasti-Line in Powell, where 362,000 square feet are under roof. He has no tenant in mind, there, he says, but he's sure something will come up.

"Real estate is a holding game. If you hold onto it long enough, it'll give you a return," he says.

Still, not every investment he's made has been a good one. "One time I bought a 10-unit motel in Eaton's Crossroads [Loudon County]. This was in the '60s or '70s some time. I would have lost money on it, but it burned," he says.

Among Furrow's many partners is Bob Talbott, president of Holrob Investments. A few years ago, they set out to redevelop his former Knoxville Motor Co. headquarters on Kingston Pike in Bearden. The site of the bustling Mercedes Place turned out to have an underground storage tank, a potential environmental hazard and cleanup expense that the partners hadn't known about.

"I told Sam," Talbott says, "and he told me not to worry about it, 'That's my expense. It was my property.' He didn't have to do that." Using that attitude as an example, Talbott says, "You couldn't have a better partner."

Preservation Passion

Real estate development led Furrow to his current PASSION, preservation of valuable older buildings. He bought a 19th Century brick house on North Fifth Avenue at Gill Street to house Furrow Auction, and it got him interested in preservation because of its workmanship and detail work. When he bought it, an elaborate porch was missing. "The guy I bought it from told me his daddy had got drunk and sold the porch for its columns, got $150 for them," Furrow says. "I did a little checking and found out they'd been sold for a movie premier here, Walk in the Spring Rain. I ran down the guy who'd bought them, and he said he still had them. They were in the back of this dusty warehouse, and I asked him what he wanted for them. He said, 'Well, I'll take $200 for them.' No telling what they'd have cost to duplicate, but I had the originals. Then I spent $25,000 restoring that old porch to what it had been." Furrow says it was a labor of love by then, and he was hooked on pretty old structures.

"Auctioneering is what I do best," but I enjoy building restoration as much as anything," Furrow says. His initial experience with the North Fifth and Gill house led him to inquire about the former Tyson Junior High School on Kingston Pike near Neyland Drive. He called manufactured-housing mogul Jim Clayton, who'd bought the property from Knox County Schools. The next day, Clayton sold it to Furrow.

The building was converted to offices. Its exterior was spruced up, and its interior spaces were lavishly fitted for office use. Though an expensive project, Furrow says, the building is now completely occupied with about a dozen tenants, among them two architectural firms, three law firms, and an accounting business. The venture has emerged in the black, thanks in part to tax credits he obtained because of the building's historic designation.

Furrow's own office, with Archer Furrow, is next door in the beautiful old infirmary building, once Mayor Victor Ashe's grandfather's medical clinic. Furrow and his businesses have also restored it.

"We're very fortunate to have some of these buildings still around," says Furrow, who points to architectural and interior details that make them exceptional and "beautiful, in comparison with what we've been building in the last three or four decades." He says the workmanship can hardly be replicated today. It were accomplished in a period of labor-intensity and tradesman pride that practically ended when low-cost materials such as pre-cast concrete and huge glass or metal panels became available.

"There are very few buildings, really, that you can identify with a particular generation or time," he says. "We need to keep them...keep them useful and viewable to coming generations. We can't replace them."

Holrob's Bob Talbott says Furrow's commitment to restorations is risky. "Renovation is a crapshoot," he says, "because you never know what it's going to cost to restore a building. It's not like new construction, where you start from the ground up with a materials and cost list."

Judge Gary Wade of the state Court of Criminal Appeals, who has known and been friends with Furrow since college, says he knows something of the difficulty entailed in re-using old buildings. An early advocate of getting the old federal courtroom back in use by the state, Wade says he was poring over paperwork, trying to build a case to get the state to buy the old post office, but worrying out loud that the state's financial condition was so bad that such a purchase was unlikely, when Furrow happened by his office. The next thing he knew, his friend was buying the building and offering to lease the court space to the state. "He was in the midst of the deal," Wade says.

When asked whether the courtroom itself, with its elaborate brass and marble and woodwork touches, might cost as much to recreate today as the $5.5 million Furrow paid for the building, Furrow does some quick per-square-foot computations in his head, then says, "Not quite that much. but nobody would do it today. It would cost too much, and I'm not sure you could even find all the materials."

While Furrow is focused on restorations, his other businesses are doing quite well, he says. The managers he has working with him, he says, have been with him an average of 20 years.

His daughter, Lee Ann, has been around for 31 years. She sports a couple of masters degrees and is graduating from UT law school this year. When she graduates, she will become the president of Knoxville Motor Co., Furrow says, and explains that the experience she's picked up in the auto sales business makes him confident she'll serve the company well.

Furrow's son, Jay, 29, is the president of Innovo Group Inc., which has offices in Los Angeles and Knoxville. Innovo sells clothing and small fashion items that are mostly produced overseas to retailers such as Wal-Mart, Sears, and Saks. It is a small company by publicly traded standards, but a fast growing one; total sales were less than $10 million in 2001 and more than $25 million this year. Innovo was previously based in Middle Tennessee. Furrow and Talbott recruited the company and its founder Pat Anderson four years ago to be a tenant of the old Levi Strauss Plant. Today, Furrow owns about 20 percent of Innovo's stock.

Furrow himself stays active in the auction company, which has six auctioneers and was conducting auctions in the last few weeks around Knoxville and also in such scattered locations as Memphis, Richmond, Va., and Batesville, Miss. Auctioneering, done well and selectively, is a cash cow, commanding six to 10 percent of the auction proceeds, depending on sale costs and direct payments by the seller.

Auctions are also getting more popular in the Southeast, says Bear Stephenson of Stephenson Realty & Auction in Clinton. A friendly competitor with Furrow and his auctioneers, Stephenson says he's been auctioneering for 18 years and used to explain his practice in terms of being "the Sam Furrow of Anderson County."

Furrow, Stephenson says, has been "a great ambassador for the auction industry. He has a good organization, gets good value for his clients, and has broadened the auction's appeal as a method of marketing."

Incidentally, Stephenson says, Furrow has "raised a lot of money for a lot of good causes."

Auctions to benefit charities and non-profit organizations are held virtually daily around the region. Stephenson says his firm did 69 charity auctions in 2001 free of charge to the beneficiaries. Furrow says his company does about 100 such auctions each year. That represents an enormous in-kind contribution to a huge assortment of service organizations, when the value of the auctioneers' time is computed.

"These charity auctions...I've always done them...are often scheduled 12 to 18 months in advance. I've flown home from Europe [on vacation] to keep a commitment and flown back," Furrow says.

There's no question he does enjoy such a grand gesture, even if it inconveniences or costs him greatly.

When a preservationist from Savannah, Ga., made a dinner presentation to a group of Knoxvillians at Regas' last year, the evening concluded with a request for separate checks, each diner to pay his or her own bill. Furrow says he stood and asked of the group, "Who here drives a Mercedes?" One other man stood, and Furrow said, "O.K., he and I will divide up the checks." As it turned out, Furrow says, he was putting the other man on the spot as a joke. Furrow paid the whole bill, for 30 or 40 dinners, he says. "Mercedes has been good to me," he says with a wink.

Among the Mercedes' perks has been a lot of world travel at the German company's expense, but he and Ann have also traveled a bit in her role as a recruiter for the UT women's golf team. Sweden has been on her itinerary, and a trip to Stockholm resulted in a hobby for Furrow. He had a model of the restored Swedish naval vessel, the "Vasa," shipped home, and he's building it in his basement, he says. The Vasa is celebrated by Swedes, even though the imposing warship rolled over on its maiden voyage more than 300 years ago and sank in Stockholm Harbor as a result of engineers' miscalculations. Other than the model and a love for boating and cruises, which he shares with his wife, Furrow has no hobbies. "Being busy, that's my hobby," Furrow says. Ann Furrow uses almost the same words to describe him, and says the thing she likes most about her husband's career is the variety. "We both like variety," she says.

"We're a lot alike. We like a lot of the same things. We think a lot the same about people. We both like to lead. I have to follow. No, really, I do follow. I do my thing with leading somewhere else," she says.

The variety Ann Furrow speaks of isn't limited to Sam's career, or careers. His activities are those of a leader. His friend and mentor, (Big) Jim Haslam II, the Pilot Oil founder and chairman, admits he put Furrow up to some of the community service jobs Furrow has held. "I did ask him to be United Way chairman [in 1990]," Haslam says. He demurs on whether he influenced Furrow to become chairman of the commission that wrote and advanced the Knoxville/Knox County unification charter, which failed at public referendum in 1996 (the fourth such referendum defeat since the 1970s).

The mark of Haslam was also evident in the initiative that formed the Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership, merging the chamber of commerce with several other organizations in 1998, when Furrow was chamber, and then partnership, chairman. Haslam concedes that he got Furrow interested in Leadership Knoxville, where Furrow is the current chairman, but not the Knoxville Zoo, which Furrow also chairs.

"I hope I've been a good influence...he's followed me in various things," Haslam says. "Sam is an enormously talented individual, with great energy and integrity, who wants to do what's good for the community." About that energy, Haslam says, when car phones first came out, and they were radio/phones, really, and there were only about three channels available in Knoxville, Haslam had one of those phones. "I'd go out and get in my car in the morning, and the first thing I'd push that channel button, and Sam was always already on it," says Haslam, who adds that he himself was getting up earlier then than now.

"He's also the consummate entrepreneur, one who is willing to take chances, but who knows real estate values, equipment values, business values as well as anyone I've ever known." Haslam says.

That sort of sums up Furrow's path to success. "Our job is to recognize value," is Furrow's capsule definition of an auctioneer.