CEO and Marine Fred Smith, 80, died Saturday

Classic bit of urban legend:  student submits a thesis with a business plan to set up package delivery on a hub-and-spoke system with guaranteed fast delivery – and the professor rejects the concept as unworkable and fails the student’s paper. The student founds FedEx  and becomes a billionaire.

We, actually Fred Smith DID submit his concept for FedEx to a professor at Yale, but the professor neither rejected the concept nor failed Mr. Smith.

In 1965, while he was earning a Bachelor’s degree in economics at Yale University, Frederick Smith penned a term paper for Professor Challis A. Hall’s Economics 43A class which contained an outline for a delivery service that would use a “hub and spokes” concept to handle the routing of parcels. (This plan entails first directing packages through a central sorting facility before dispatching them onwards to their intended destinations.) Such plan did eventually form the backbone of Federal Express, a company Smith started in 1971 upon his return from Vietnam, where he served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps from 1966 to 1970.

A number of sources assert the term paper earned a C from the instructor who marked it. However, while that aspect of the tale has been widely touted as fact, it does not appear to be verifiable. Smith himself fed the acceptance of this element of the story by once stating in an offhand comment about the term paper “I guess I got my usual gentlemanly C,” but in a 2002 interview Smith acknowledged “I don’t really remember what grade I got. I probably didn’t get a very good one, though, because it wasn’t a well-thought-out paper.” Snopes

Mr. Smith was faced early adversity.

Smith was crippled by bone disease as a small boy but regained his health by age 10.  Wiki

After graduating from Yale, Mr. Smith went on to Vietnam as a 2nd Lieutenant in the Marine Corps.

He served two tours in Vietnam and was awarded medals for bravery and wounds received in combat before leaving the military as a captain in 1969.BBC

After graduation, Smith was commissioned in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving for three years (from 1966 to 1969) as a platoon leader and a forward air controller (FAC) in South Vietnam, flying in the back seat of the OV-10.

He served two tours of duty in the Vietnam War, and was honorably discharged in 1969 with the rank of captain, having received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and two Purple Hearts.Wiki

Lest you think he spent his time at altitude, here is a section from his Silver Star citation:

On the morning of 27 May 1968, while conducting a search and destroy operation, Company K became heavily engaged with a North Vietnamese Army battalion occupying well-entrenched emplacements on Goi Noi Island in Quang Nam Province. As Lieutenant Smith led his men in an aggressive assault upon the enemy positions, the North Vietnamese force launched a determined counterattack, supported by mortars, on the Marines’ left flank. Unhesitatingly rushing through the intense hostile fire to the position of heaviest contact, Lieutenant Smith fearlessly removed several casualties from the hazardous area and, shouting words of encouragement to his men, directed their fire upon the advancing enemy soldiers, successfully repulsing the hostile attack. Moving boldly across the fire-swept terrain to an elevated area, he calmly disregarded repeated North Vietnamese attempts to direct upon him as he skillfully adjusted artillery fire and air strikes upon the hostile positions to within fifty meters of his own location and continued to direct the movement of his unit. Accurately assessing the confusion that supporting arms was causing among the enemy soldiers, he raced across the fire-swept terrain to the right flank of his company and led an enveloping attack on the hostile unit’s weakest point, routing the North Vietnamese unit and inflicting numerous casualties.  Wiki

Mr Smith used a business theory he came up with while at Yale to create what is now known as a hub and spoke delivery system.

Such a network relies on co-ordinated cargo flights centred around a main hub – which Mr Smith set up in Memphis, Tennessee, which remains FedEx’s base.BBC

Think we can all say what he accomplished was impressive – and helped change our lives.  Had some interesting friends, too.

In his college years, he was a friend and DKE fraternity brother of future U.S. president George W. Bush. Smith was also friends with future U.S. Senator and Secretary of State John Kerry; the two shared an enthusiasm for aviation and were flying partners.

If you have a copy of the Tom Hanks movie, “Cast Away” you have seen Fred Smith – he had a quick cameo in it.

Category: Marines, We Remember