- [Announcer] This is a production of WEDU PBS Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- As you think, so you become.

Tampa Bay entrepreneur Gus Stavros lived those words.

He was a civic leader with a passion for philanthropy, education and the arts.

- Gus was a member of the greatest generation.

His energy and dedication to others was inspiring.

Gus Stavros passed away October 18th at age 97.

As a tribute to his life well lived, WEDU PBS is honored to rebroadcast this 2006 Suncoast Business Forum profile of Gus Stavros in his own words.

- [Announcer] Suncoast Business Forum brought to you by the financial services firm of Raymond James, offering personalized wealth management advice and banking and capital markets expertise, all with a commitment to putting clients' financial wellbeing first.

More information is available at raymondjames.com.

(upbeat music) - Welcome, I'm Geoff Simon.

After World War II, a number of ex-GIs came to Florida looking for a place to raise their families and build their careers.

One of those Vets was Gus Stavros, the son of Greek immigrants.

He came to Tampa Bay in the 1950s and started a company called Better Business Forms.

Over the years, the company thrived becoming one of the largest business printers in the country.

But in addition to business, Gus had a passion for community service.

Over the past several decades, Gus Stavros has been a champion of education.

He founded Enterprise Village.

He's been a leading force behind economic education in Florida and beyond.

He's chaired two university capital campaigns that have raised more than a half billion dollars.

He's been a driving force in culture and the arts, he's played leadership roles in state and local chambers of commerce.

He's received three honorary doctorates, and that's just the short list.

Gus, it's great to have you with us.

- It's great to be here, Geoff.

- Gus, I'd like to pose to you a quote that you actually put in a newspaper column that you wrote about 20 years ago.

And it starts like this, "He who is silent is forgotten.

"He who does not participate is left out.

"He who ceases to grow greater, becomes smaller.

"The condition of standing still "is the beginning of the end."

What does that quote mean to you?

- Well, Geoff I've always felt that no matter what you achieve is you can't stop and say, why, look what I've done.

You've got to continue going further ahead, looking for new goals.

I've always been one to set goals.

Whenever I have reached a goal, then I set new goals.

And I think you have to do that, it makes life worth living.

And I think it adds to your lifespan, in my opinion.

- Now, even when we're young, were you someone who kind of embraced this philosophy?

Did people ever say, well, Gus, you know, he is kind of shy and reserved, or did you always have that kind of gusto?

- I've always been active and even in high school when I was a senior in high school, December 7th, 1941, Pearl Harbor, and I was busy then for the rest of the year selling war bonds because I felt it was important to do that.

In fact, I got so busy, I had neglected to apply for college.

And one of my teachers thank her, she got me one day and said, "Come to my office, fill in this application for a scholarship to Columbia."

And that's the only school I applied for and I did get my scholarship and I did go to Columbia.

- Well, we're talking about your younger years.

Let's talk about your childhood.

Let's go back a little further.

Tell me about your parents and tell me about your family.

- Well, my mother and dad came from the Island of Crete.

That's that large island, just below the mainland.

And they came here, they didn't meet there, they met here.

And you know, the ancient way, the old way of getting married, my father saw this beautiful girl at one of the dances one day and went to her father and said, "I wanna marry your daughter."

And that's really how they got married.

And my dad when he got here from Greece, came with no money.

And by the way, it's strange that people don't understand that the life that they had in those years, back in the early 1900s, he was sold by his parents when he was nine to a wealthy man in Athens to be a gardener's assistant.

And that's what he did for about five years.

And the money that he made, was sent to his parents on Crete and only every year he got one coin on his name day, St. Anthony's Day.

So basically that's what he did for many years.

And as a teenager, he was sent into Athens on some errands and unfortunately as teenagers, he didn't fulfill it all and he kind of got a whipping and he decided he was gonna leave.

So he ran away, went to Perez where there was an aunt, she helped him get a job in a factory.

He worked in a factory, raised just enough money to buy a ticket to come to the country that the streets were lined with gold.

Well, he came here with no money in his pockets.

He found the streets were not lined with gold, but they were lined with opportunity.

He naturally got into a restaurant business, he had-- - How old was he then?

- He had to be about 15, 14.

And he got to be a dishwasher at the beginning and eventually they taught him how to cook.

So he became a chef.

So from then on, he had his own diners and that's how he got into the diner business.

So that's what my dad did.

- [Geoffrey] Your dad ran a Greek diner.

- He ran a diner, it was called the Twin Diners back in New Jersey on the main road between Elizabeth Newark to New York City.

And he was quite a marketing person, I have to tell you.

He had a big sign on top of the diner that said, "Free soup with meals, all the coffee you could drink for five cents."

People, the truck drivers were lined up for a mile to go to his diner 'cause he had this marketing expertise.

He also had something which he gave to me.

His day was four in the morning till eight at night, seven days a week, that's 16 hours that he worked.

And my mother, who my father by the way, had only a third grade education, but he taught himself to read and write in two languages.

My mother never had any education, never went to school, but she knew how to count, so she was able to be the cashier and that's what she did in the diner.

So they both worked very hard.

My mother was very devout, she was very religious.

We always had an icon with a candle lit constantly as many Greek families have and that was what she taught me.

So my dad taught me industry and working hard, made me a workaholic and my mother taught me a faith and religion.

- So your father had a third grade education, your mother had no education.

They worked long, long hours, and their son Gus lo and behold goes to Columbia University, one of the finest colleges in America.

- Well, it was, you know, in those years, and that's what makes me wonder today how difficult it is for some people to get an education at a great university.

When I went there, the tuition per semester was $400, two semesters, $800 and I had a scholarship for that.

So that didn't cause my parents anything.

But the room for the year at one of the dormitories that was $180.

So under $1,000 I could go to Columbia.

My folks gave me $10 a week the first year that I went there and I would go to Broadway to Chock Full o'Nuts or some little place to get some food, but then on the weekends, I went home to my father's diner.

But that's how we started, that was the first year before the war.

- Now you cut short your education at Columbia because World War II broke out, am I right?

- Yeah, when I went to Columbia, I was 17.

Well then after my first year I was 18 and they had the draft then.

And I joined the Army Specialized Training Program, it was called the ASTP.

And I had to wait till they called me, which was July of '43.

And they sent me to this small school in Gainesville, Florida called the University of Florida.

And I spent four months there in basic engineering.

And I was supposed to be there 18 months while all of a sudden, at the end of four months, and I always show my Gator friends my certificate of completion there after four months, they said, the program is canceled you all in the infantry.

So that's how I ended in the infantry and in Patton's Third Army in World War II.

- Now you went overseas, you fought in Patton's Army, these were the tough battles of World War II.

This is after D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge.

- Yes, I fought through three campaigns, Ardennes, Northern France and Rhineland.

Those are the three campaigns that I was involved in.

And it's a tremendous thing to realize that being in the infantry at the time 19 years old, I hadn't lived much because I lived with a very religious family.

Here I am now over in Europe, our division, the 94th division was involved in the Bulge and other things and we ended up by being the furthest most point forward of Patton's Army in Europe.

And what happened was my company became the finger, the leading finger, and we were the tip my platoon of 36 men or the platoon I was in, it wasn't my platoon.

'Cause I had by this time acquired a great title of Private First Class PFC, 19.

And we had tremendous battles.

And that one battle where I was wounded, we were attacked.

Our 36 men were attacked by 400 of the enemy.

And we were able, at the end of almost 12 hours of battle, in fact more, 14 hours of battle, we were able to disable, wound, kill 200 and the other 200 surrendered.

And in taking them back to the company CP, that's when I was wounded and that was the end of my army career.

- Now you actually had a very serious wound.

You had a wound to the head.

- Yes, I, at the usual thing, as we took the prisoners back, I heard an explosion on my left, an explosion on my right, I never heard the third one because the next thing I knew, I was lying in the snow and I had shrapnel go through my helmet and they put me in one of trenches that they had and waited for the first aid men to come and get me and take me to the aid station.

And four men took me and we had to go through the enemy lines and went down some snow mountains, so to speak, to the aid station where the person nearest to God on this earth, a doctor who looked at the wound and would say, Yes, he can make it, send him to the MASH hospital, or no, he's not gonna make it, put him in the corner to die.

So fortunately he sent me to the MASH hospital and they helped me, they took care of me.

I found out later I had one of the best brain surgeons in the US Army that operated on me.

Somebody was looking over me and they sent me an article which explained the toughest action that our division had and it was this one here.

And they explained it how we had been surrounded and without food for so many days.

And they finally, and they said, and then one of the young GI's who was wounded was being carried off in the stretcher and was babbling in a foreign tongue.

And the fellow who sent it to me had underlined it.

And I said, wonder why you underline and then I suddenly realize that it was me, I was speaking in, I was always been taught by my mother to pray in Greek.

So I was praying in Greek after being wounded.

So as I thought back there, Geoff, I feel that I was spared for a reason.

A lot of my friends and buddies were killed.

It was a difficult action then through the Siegfried Switch, I feel that I was saved for a reason and that's one of the main reasons I get so involved in community involvement.

- Well, you know, a couple years ago there was a book written by Tom Brokaw called "The Greatest Generation," which talks about the men and women who were part of this extraordinary generation, the generation that you were part of.

Do you think there was something extraordinary about your generation, your peers, compared to other generations as you've observed over your lifetime?

- Well, I have to agree with him because frankly, like my wife Frances, she was in the waves during World War II, so she was in the service.

We both came through the Depression and you know, we know poor because everybody in the Depression was poor.

My father had a diner, but that's about all, I knew where my next meal was coming from, but I also know that we didn't have a lot of money.

Frances more so than myself because her father worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad and he was furloughed for four years, so he had no job for four years.

And her family, the family that they had, other family that relatives aunts and uncles, they helped them survive and she's always appreciated that.

So that, yes, we went through the Depression, we went back to college, we went to work when $100 a week was a fantastic salary.

And so we've been through all of that and have come all the way through now to this world that we have today with television and all the wonderful things that are happening.

And yeah, I think we were a special generation.

- The generation that didn't take anything for granted.

- You couldn't because you had to survive and you had to work.

And I think also, I think depending on the people, I've always had a positive attitude.

I've always felt that attitude was a key to a person's success.

And I never have worried about money or funding or a job.

I was a workaholic and I knew that whatever I did, I'd have to work hard and do well to succeed.

- Well, after the war, you went back to college, you got a degree, you went to graduate school, you got married, you worked for a betting company as a salesman, you traveled around the country and then you came to Florida where you worked for another company and then started your own company.

You were still a very young man.

- Yes, we came here when I was 33.

And frankly the education I had at Columbia and also at NYU for my MBA, I learned from a lot of people.

And I took a lot of that learning and formed my philosophies.

I know for example, Geoff, that when I was a senior at Columbia, I took college accounting for non-accountants and I had to structure a company that P&L statement, balance sheet and so on.

And I structured a company that had a manufacturing arm and a sales arm 'cause I said, sure, that makes sense.

You can make a manufacturing profit and you can make a sales profit.

And that's what I did with Better Business Forms.

And then I also learned at NYU I took statistics, the value of knowing your product and knowing statistics.

So when I started Better Business Forms, the first thing I did was contact the association in Washington DC and said, okay, what do we need to produce?

I mean, what's the productivity of the presses and the collators?

What should our cost be for labor?

What should it be for material and so on?

And so I structured the company to, we never had a failing month, we always had profits because we watched those statistics.

- Well, you started the company in the late '50s and you built it from scratch to over 500 employees and $80 million in revenue.

What would you say are some of the keys to business and to be being successful in business that you learned at the helm of Better Business Forms?

- Well, you know, I have always felt that a happy employee is a productive employee.

So when I started the business, other than getting statistics, I went to one of the local big companies in Pinellas County and said, I want to see your personnel manual.

I want my employees to have every benefit possible.

And this friend of mine gave me this manual.

And my employees had not only hospitalization, but dental care and eye care and a lot of other things.

And for in fact, also the key thing was I had profit sharing.

And the profit sharing was from our profits, the employees put nothing in it.

My salesman, we split the profits with the salesman.

So the salesmen were happy.

In fact, I had four or five salesmen who were making more money than I was making.

But the most important thing was the employees knew that I was thinking about them and they were happy.

And so that's one of the things, the philosophies.

Another philosophy I had was a friend of mine said to me, "When you start a business, go borrow money from a bank "when you don't need it.

"Pay it back and you develop a very good record with them, "then when you really need money, they'll loan it to you."

And that's what I did.

In fact, that was one of the reasons why I sold the company.

When my wife, a child of the Depression found out that I owed the bank's $11 million, she became quite concerned.

And so we finally decided, okay, Andy Hines, who was a friend that I had met many times, said, Gus, "We want you and we want your company."

And that's when I sold my company to Florida Progress.

- Well, while you were running Better Business systems and then even after you sold it and worked for Florida Progress at the time, and then once you retired, you got very, very involved in the community, both in the business community, civic community, the arts community, and particularly education.

First of all, how in the world did you find the time because your involvement is vast, but what drove you to do this?

- Well, being through the Depression, as I said, also, my wife and I always had a budget.

When we were, for about the first 12 years of our married life, we would sit down at the end of every month, Frances would empty her purse, I'd empty my pockets and we'd check to make sure we didn't misplace money anywhere.

And we were very conscious of a budget.

And in the budget we always had money for charity, we always had money for the church.

So we knew the value of being a community individual.

And so it's just that giving back is so important to us.

My wife and I feel strongly about that maybe because we were from that generation you talked about before, we made every effort to constantly be involved.

And when we came to Florida, we got involved immediately with education.

And my wife volunteered me to speak at PTA meetings and we just felt it was important to be involved where our kids were involved, our children, we have three children, and as they were growing up, we were involved in their schools, we were involved in the church and we felt that was important to our children to see us to be involved people not just to be takers, but to be givers as well.

- Well, you went from being a member of the local PTA through all the years to becoming a founder of the Florida Council on Economic Education.

And now you have national standing with economic and educational organizations all throughout the United States.

Why economic education?

You have been a pioneer in economic education?

- Well, you know, Geoff, when I had my company and I became one of the leaders in the industry because I ended up being chairman of the International Business Forums Association.

This was an association of 500 companies in 40 countries.

So I was involved there.

Well then at the same time back home, we were involved in education.

And I knew for a long while that this is the greatest country in the world, the United States of America.

And the reason for its greatness is its economic system.

And if we don't teach our children about our economic system, we're missing our responsibility.

So that's how I got involved in economic education.

We had a Suncoast Chamber of Commerce, which was a county Chamber of Commerce and I chaired the economic education there.

And then I had a call from a fellow by the name of Howard Hensley, who was the superintendent of schools.

And he said to me, "Gus, we need to start "an education foundation and I want you to be the chair."

And also we need to do something like, he had been to Exchange City, which was Hallmark Cards back in the Midwest.

And he said, "I saw that I want to do something like that here."

So we met and we decided with Exchange City, they had the ABC company, the XYZ company and we decided in talking that we would have real companies.

I knew a lot of the people here, I'd been here a number of years.

And so what we did was we came up with Enterprise Village.

At the same time I said, "Okay, I'll chair the foundation."

And I chaired it for six years and knew something that has always been a part of my philosophy and that is that nobody accomplishes anything alone, it takes people working together.

And what we had accomplished with the Pinellas Education Foundation, it was just a true, wonderful partnership between education and the business community.

And getting business people involved because they know the importance of education for their employees and for their children.

And so that I got very involved there and the next thing I knew I was in Florida Council Economic Education.

And we traveled around the state and set centers up at all the various universities.

And forgive me for saying, but the very best economic education center in the whole country is the one at USF with Dr. Puglisi and it has my name on it, but it really has great programs.

It teaches teachers who in turn then get into the classroom to teach children about our economic system.

- Well, you've moved beyond just the public schools, you've moved up to the university level.

You co-chaired two capital campaigns, one at USF, one at FSU here in the State of Florida, those were together 600 million practically.

So you're not only talking the talk, but you're putting yourself to work and raising tens and hundreds of millions of dollars.

- Well, Geoff, you know, the universities are critically important naturally, we have the best university system in the world in this country.

And the Florida system is an outstanding system.

I realized that education can't do it alone.

They can't do it alone, they need help.

They need people to be involved.

And so therefore, at the universities, when I went up to Florida State and also here at USF, my first and most important move was to get everybody together and say, look, Deans, boosters, alums, we have to work together for this university.

It's not the foundation only, it's the university we're working for.

So that's how we were able to succeed up in Florida State where we over 300 million or almost 300 million here at USF by getting everybody working together for the university.

- I have one last quote I wanna share with you and we only have about a minute left.

You once said in an article, "Watch your thoughts, they become words.

"Watch your words, they become actions.

"Watch your actions, they become habits.

"Watch your habits, they become character.

"Watch your character for it becomes your destiny."

- That's my philosophy about attitude.

I have spoken to a number of commencements in universities and I tell the young people, "As you think, so you become," the quote that you just made there.

It is so important to have a positive attitude and to know that you can succeed.

I mean, I've quoted Thomas Edison, who when I used to challenge Thomas Edison, about 25,000 failures of the electric light, he said, "No, they're not failures.

He said, "Now know 25,000 ways that will not work."

And that's an attitude, that's an attitude of going forward.

So I do believe that it's very important our young people have faith in themselves.

At the Temple of Delphi in Greece, they had some philosophies and one was know thyself and know yourself.

Know what your talents are, what are you good at?

What do you enjoy doing?

And that's an attitude, go for it.

And so it's been something I've expounded to young people and I believe that I've helped some, I've done a lot of counseling.

And I just think that if you have that attitude and as you think so you become, you'll succeed in life.

- Well, you've helped many people.

Gus, I'm afraid we're out of time, but it's been a pleasure having you with us.

- Thank you Geoff, I've enjoyed it myself, thank you.

- It's great to have you here.

- Good.

(upbeat music) (gentle music)