The last of the citrus barons - Ben Hill Griffin Jr

Nation's Business, Feb, 1989 by Tait Trussell

A film honoring Griffin called him the "last of the old-time citrus barons ... one of the state's most down-to-earth colorful crackers."

He is surely down-to-earth. Born during a hurricane on Oct. 20, 1910, Ben Hill Griffin Jr. has made the land his life and his livelihood. By the time he was 5 years old, he was working on his father's farm and in the family grove. He studied economics and agriculture at the University of Florida for three years. When he learned all he'd wanted, he traveled first to New York City, where he looked for work. Not finding any, he went home to Frostproof, the Florida town where his father had settled and where he has hung his hat ever since.

Griffin's father had figured that citrus should be planted on hilly slopes to the south of large, deep lakes where the cold air was least likely to settle and destroy a crop.

The area south of Lake Wales seemed to meet those requirements. So in 1917, he moved to what is now Frost-proof, a place so named because the oranges and grapefruit there escaped the great freeze of 1895.

Today, Ben Hill Griffin Jr.'s office is in a handsome brick colonial building with white columns, which seems almost too big for little Frostproof. He spends many hours in his roomy but unpretentious office, which is decorated with memorabilia. But when he arrives at work about 8:30 a.m., he already has talked by phone from his home to a dozen or so people, beginning at about 6 in the morning, and has made a half dozen important decisions. He saves travel time by flying in his own plane--with the pilot he has had for 25 years.

Take a morning drive to Frostproof now, and you will see acres upon acres of citrus trees, their emeralf leaves glistening in the sunlight. Go down the main street of the town, and you will pass Griffin Motor Co., a Ford dealership appropriately painted orange and green. You also will pass the processing plant, which Griffin sold to Procter & Gamble. And you will see a small, green, concrete-block building with two gas pumps in front. That's the local office of multimillion-dollar Alico Inc.

Ask Griffin why he has been so successful, and he smiles as he tells the story of the time the big New York banker with whom he was doing business came down to Frostproof. "Now, let's see your long-range plan," Griffin remembers the banker said to him. He replied: "Staying in business this year is my long-range plan."

That has been his credo: Stay in business this year. One step at a time. Hang loose. Keep a nest egg. And let Mother Nature help you turn land into money.

At the moment, for example, the Griffin-Alico interests are mining rock and sand in southern Lee County, Fla., between booming Fort Myers and Naples. Then their 1,100-acre tract will be ripe for housing developments. On other acreage, Griffin is starting to grow sugar cane.

And although he says he has no long-range plan, Ben Hill Griffin Jr. is thinking about the day when his fruit juice will be on the breakfast tables of millions of people in China.