SENATOR LEROY PERCY

WHEN OSCAR BLEDSOE TURNED TO SENATOR LEROY PERCY to help him turn his dream of a cotton marketing cooperative into a reality, neither could guess that members of the Senator's family would still be leading the organization 75 years later.

LeRoy Percy was born November 19, 1860 in the Mississippi Delta, graduated from the University of the South and from the University of Virginia Law School and returned to Greenville to practice law and grow cotton. By 1920, when he was approached by fellow planter Oscar Bledsoe, sixty year old Percy had a lifetime of experience which uniquely equipped him to help launch a cotton marketing cooperative for the Mississippi Delta.

At the age of 24, Percy helped organize the Mississippi Levee District in 1884. Eight years later, he had been retained by the Illinois Central Railroad to advise them on local conditions and develop a settlement policy suitable to Delta agriculture. He had served as United States Senator from Mississippi in 1910 and 1911, been a partner in the cotton factorage of Orlando B. Crittenden and Company in Greenville and had raised dozens of cotton crops on Trail Lake Plantation. In short, he had the experience and the status to be of immeasurable value to Bledsoe's cooperative marketing venture.

Senator Percy was an organizing director and was elected to the first permanent Board of the Association. He was still active on the Board weeks before his death in 1930.

His son, William Alexander Percy, was elected to the Board a month after the Senator's death. " Will Percy was not really interested in being a director for Staplcotn," according to Will's nephew and his Staplcotn Board successor, LeRoy Pratt Percy. Will Percy's father did much of the legal work in forming the Association. "He was the legal eagle who put it all together," Will Percy's nephew recalls.

Percy family contacts were called upon to help Staplcotn. An October 4, 1926 letter from Will Percy to Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, whom he had met while serving in the Belgium Relief, asked Hoover to consider a plan for marketing cotton proposed by Staplcotn.

Will Percy served on the Board from 1930 until shortly before his death in 1942. "He enjoyed being with Will Garrard and Mr. Bledsoe, but the mechanics of the thing bored him to death," his nephew recalls. "It was kind of dull."

"Directors are neither useful nor ornamental," the Senator's son wrote. "The only reason he kept going was that he was very fond of Mr. Garrard, and Will Garrard said that he had to come," LeRoy Percy recalls.

"I'm tired of coming to those dull meetings of yours, and I want you to put my nephew LeRoy on the Board," Will Percy told Will Garrard as the Washington County planter's health began to fail in the early 1940s. Young Percy was 22. Mr. Garrard almost fainted, but he honored his dying friend's request, and LeRoy Percy was elected to the Board shortly before he entered Army Air Corps service in World War 11.

"I went in because Will Percy told him to put me on," LeRoy Percy says. "I got on there early on and got to know Mr. Garrard and Mr. Bledsoe and that whole group of older men. Then I had to leave during the war for four years. I learned a lot, particularly about merchandising cotton, and became very good friends with Mr. Garrard. "When I first went on the Board, I was just a kid. The average age of my fellow Board members was probably 60. They were really surprised to see me over there. I didrf t exactly go in with a lot of acclaim," Percy said.

LeRoy Percy set the all-time record for service on a board well known for long-serving directors. "If I had continued for one more year I would have been there 50 years. You're suppose to get off when you're 70, but somehow they got my birth date confused, and they forgot to tell me, so I served an extra term and that got me to 49 years," he said.

"LeRoy Percy is blessed with a very clear mind to see the right path to go and do what was necessary to get the company there," Woods Eastland said. "He loved upper management and to see a business managed properly. He never got diverted by irrelevancies."

"In his very quiet way, he had a major influence on Staplcotn and its policies," Dr. Sayre said.

W A. Percy II is LeRoy's son and Will Percy's namesake. Very few people were surprised when Billy Percy was elected to Staplcotrfs Board when LeRoy Percy retired in 1988. Already active on the boards of Farmers Grain Terminal, Mississippi Chemical Corporation and Valley Chemical, co-op service came easily to the younger Percy.

Billy Percy was born November 17,1939 in Greenville, MS, and graduated from the University of Virginia. He began farming Trail Lake Plantation within days of his 1965 return to the Delta from Army service. When Aven Whittington retired as Board chairman in 1992, Percy's election as his successor signaled the completion of the generational shift in leadership begun in 1986 with the selection of Woods Eastland as president. For Staplcotn, it meant a fourth generation of the Percy family continued the vision fashioned by Oscar Bledsoe, Will Garrard and Senator LeRoy Percy.