So Ely (rhymes with feely) began instead at the Trust Co. of Georgia, as a runner in the factoring department. But it was June 1940, and rather than let events dictate his future, Ely, wanting somehow to do his duty without interrupting his private progress in business and in life, took an army-reserve correspondence course and six weeks later received his commission. The army sent him to Philadelphia, to the quartermaster depot, the apparel-procurement division. "Pure luck," Callaway says, denying that family influence played any role. "I didn't want to go get shot at. I didn't do anything to avoid it, but I wasn't dying to go out and be a hero."
After his year was up Callaway could have gone home -- 22 of the 25 junior officers he started with did -- but he chose to stay. For by then he was fast gathering responsibility: he was the head man in charge of cotton clothing, a major at 24, the boss of two lawyers and 70 civilians. He was also a friend to Levi Strauss, Hart Schaffner & Marx, and the Arrow Shirt Co. as the buyer of some 70% of the total production of the U.S. cotton-apparel industry. When the war ended, Callaway turned down offers from several manufacturers and went to work instead for a supplier -- Deering, Milliken & Co. -- figuring, shrewdly, "the best thing I can do is get a job selling to the people I've been dealing with."
So began Act I of Callaway's brilliant career, in textiles. He rose quickly at Deering, Milliken. Maybe too quickly. Roger Milliken fired him in 1954 after he ran afoul of Milliken's brother-in-law, Dick Stroud. (That was a "real emotional blow," Callaway says. "I felt bad for about a week.") He landed on his feet, of course, at Textron, under chairman Royal Little, where he oversaw the merger of American Woolen, in Lowell, Mass., and Robbins Mills, a modern southern upstart. It was a huge job -- shutting down American's cavernous, antiquated mills, salvaging what equipment and trademarks still had value, and transferring operations to the South. After he succeeded, and after Textron sold Callaway's division to Burlington Industries, Callaway went along, too.
He was married now, with three children, a true New Yorker with a big house in a leafy Connecticut suburb and an apartment in the city -- making his own way in the family line of work, yes, but not in the family business, and that was the key. In 1968, the same year Callaway Mills passed from family hands (to Deering, Milliken), Ely ascended to be the president of Burlington, "the biggest textile company on earth, that the planet has ever known," says Callaway, his voice rising in pitch and volume. "By double!" He was 48 years old.
And all that, it turns out, was a prelude. Two acts would follow, and the drama would build. Callaway's goal at Burlington was the chairmanship -- nothing less would do -- and when he was passed over, in 1973, he quit. He walked away from corporate heaven, fled the East Coast, and moved to California to make wine. It's impossible to imagine Callaway doing anything rash, and the decision to leave Burlington was anything but. He had told the board members years earlier that he'd leave if they ever gave the top job to somebody else; he even told them about the land he had bought and the grapes he was planting, just in case.
And so Callaway became a wine maker in Temecula, Calif., which these days calls itself a wine region. (The vineyards vie for space in the valley with clumps of orange-tiled adobe subdivisions that call themselves Chardonnay Hills and Vintage Hills.) But 21 years ago it was by no means an obvious place to plant grapes, sitting as it does in the middle of a desert triangle formed by Los Angeles, San Diego, and Palm Springs. Callaway was first. He gambled big-time, with his own money. ("I want to keep my friends," he says, explaining the principle.) The risk paid off spectacularly in 1981, when he sold his vineyard to Hiram Walker for $14 million. And so the curtain fell on Act II.
Callaway, by then past 60, was entitled to take it easy, maybe play more golf -- he'd been a tournament champion in his youth. And so he did, until one day shortly after cashing out, he came across a hickory-shaft club with a steel core. He liked it so much he bought its four-month-old manufacturer from the founders, who had run out of money and were looking for help, and put his own name on it. Act III. Callaway sold golf clubs the same way he sold wine: with a story. With the wine, it had been the genealogy of the grape, the slant of the slope, the caressing breeze that carried cooling moisture from the ocean. Now it was gun-barrel production techniques, exotic metals, and an oversized driver named for Big Bertha, the World War I monster cannon that could drop a shell on Paris from six miles out. Today Callaway Golf -- not Spalding, Wilson, or MacGregor -- is the industry sales leader, with revenues of $255 million in 1993 (up from $132 million in 1992 and $22 million in 1990) and a 17% after-tax profit margin. In February 1992 Callaway took the company public, and since then, through the third quarter of 1994, the stock price has risen sevenfold. The total value of shares outstanding has come to exceed $1 billion, of which $86 million (including options) is in Callaway's personal account.
"He considered himself very fortunate in all that happened to him in his life." That's what it will say on Callaway's gravestone; he's already put it in writing. He's not talking about good luck -- of the kind that brings gifts that maybe a person doesn't deserve -- but an absence of bad luck, the killing kind that derails hope and undermines industry. "Most people have quite a bit of bad luck," he says simply. Then, building to a falsetto crescendo, "I don't think I've had any bad luck."
* * *
Dick Egan grew up in a three-decker (middle floor) on Minot Street, in St. Brendan's Parish in Dorchester, in what was then (in the 1940s) Boston's Irish ghetto. He had his own room, and so did his sister, but his parents slept in the dining room. The family therefore ate meals in the kitchen, at a wobbly table that made Egan feel ashamed as a small boy. When he finally got a job at a cobbler's shop ("I started as a shoeshine boy, then I worked on women's heels, then I went to men's heels, and eventually I did soles"), the first thing he bought with his own money was a present for his mother and father: a chrome dinette set with padded vinyl upholstery. The second thing he bought, for himself, was a radio. "I loved that goddamn radio," he says.
