News analysis: Where were you on February 9, 1969?

That's the last time Genesco's stock reached the price at which it opened today

Email | Print By E. Thomas Wood

Things that happen once in a generation or less — a really heavy snowfall in Nashville, a Vandy team that goes to a bowl game, that sort of thing — ought to make an impression. But I really can't say what I was doing on February 9, 1969, except that I spent the day at David Lipscomb Kindergarten.

It was an eventful day, to be sure. Sen. Edmund Muskie (D-Maine) began his campaign for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination. In Chihuahua, Mexico, locals found the meteorite Allende that had fallen overnight; at 4.5 billion years old, it is thought to be the oldest thing any human has ever touched. Near An Hoa, South Vietnam, U.S. Marine Lance Corporal William R. Prom was killed while leading his platoon in an action for which he would be posthumously awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

And on the New York Stock Exchange, shares of Genesco Inc. closed at $48½. They would not reach that price again until the market opened this morning. On the news of a potentially hostile takeover bid from competitor Foot Locker, Genesco's came out at $48.55 and has advanced since then. As of 11:58 a.m., it was trading at $49.68, up 14.44 percent on yesterday's close. The market would appear to believe Genesco may get an even better offer before the bidding is over.

Many in Nashville will view this development with wry bemusement. I guess I'm sorry my grandfather, who met my grandmother in 1931 on the factory floor of the Genesco plant at Fifth and Main, and who rose to head one of the company's operating divisions by the time he retired in 1974, can't be here just to see what the stock is doing. But he, like many of you reading this, would be only too aware of having disposed of his once-prized Genesco holdings for a pittance during the decades of crisis and corporate shrinkage that ensued from the 1970s onward.

Genesco was already slipping downward from a 52-week high of 58¼ on that day in 1969, and the steady unraveling of its conglomerate empire would soon be underway. Visionary CEO Maxey Jarman had turned his father's "General Shoe Corp." into the General Motors of retailing by the mid-1960s, buying up such brands as Tiffany & Co., Bonwit Teller, Formfit Rogers and S. H. Kress & Co. Bigness alone proved an untenable strategy, however, and after the board ousted Maxey Jarman in favor of his son Franklin in 1973, one CEO after another came to grief trying to make Genesco a success once more.

Smallness has turned out to be the answer. Genesco is a tiny shadow of the 65,000-employee company it once was. But under the leadership of Hal Pennington — CEO since 2002 and, perhaps significantly, a Genesco employee since 1961 — the company has successfully focused on selling branded headwear and footwear. It no longer manufactures any of the products it sells.

If Foot Locker gets what it wants, the last remnants of the old Genesco may finally disappear from Nashville's corporate landscape. But we'll be left with one of the best Nashville business jokes ever told, as recounted in Bill Carey's book Fortunes, Fiddles & Fried Chicken: A Nashville Business History. Picture a scene at the Men's Grill of Belle Meade Country Club:

One old man says to the other: "I just got back from the doctor, and he told me I had gonorrhea. Can you imagine? Gonorrhea at 85!"

The other old man replies: "Hell, that's nothing. I had Genesco at 58!"