A Chicago tourist paused outside the Ida Cason Callaway Memorial Chapel as a man with rebellious eyebrows and a broad smile stopped to introduce himself.
“Hi, I’m Bo Callaway. Welcome.”
“Nice yard,” the visitor shot back, catching the significance of the name.
After a good laugh, Callaway issued an invitation for a return visit.
Like the politician he was, Howard Hollis “Bo” Callaway introduces himself to almost everyone he encounters. It’s more than just pleasantry, though, for the man who must flash an I.D. badge to unfamiliar staff to enter the gardens his parents created.
Bo Callaway is back in Georgia and at the helm of Callaway Gardens, the 41-year-old privately owned gardens, conference center and resort that drew 710,509 visitors last year. The youngest of Cason and Virginia Callaway’s three children, Callaway, 66, took over the day-to-day operation of the 350-room resort in late September after the resignation of Scott Anderson, who served for three years as president.
Although Republican politics-he ran Gerald Ford’s unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter-and the Army have occupied much of Bo Callaway’s career, his life’s work has been to carry the torch of his parents’ dream: a self-supporting garden that is open to the public and dedicated to beauty, inspiration and conservation.
He drives through the unique landscape that first drew his father here in 1930 and points to a rare August-blooming Rhododendron prunifolium, also known as prunifolia, a plum leaf azalea, an endangered species that occurs only within 100 miles of Callaway Gardens and for which it is famous. Their brilliant red blossoms have long since faded, and Callaway has returned to the renowned gardens to make sure the same thing doesn’t happen to his family’s vision.
“Dad planted 50,000 seeds of the prunifolia and about 49,000 of them came up,” his son recalls. “He won the Garden Club of America conservation award for the whole country in the late ’50s.”
Emphasizing the gardens
Callaway Gardens, one of Georgia’s premier tourist attractions, according to the Georgia Hospitality and Travel Association, is composed of 2,500 developed acres “inside the fence”-the part the public sees. It is owned by the non-profit Ida Cason Callaway Foundation, named for Callaway’s grandmother. Included in the foundation’s property are another 11,500 acres of undeveloped land.
Callaway wants to return the resort’s emphasis to the gardens, something some horticulturists say is overdue.
“I’m elated that they’ve gone back to the original objective of the gardens,” says Mike Dirr, horticulture professor at the University of Georgia. “I think it’s terrific if they can pull it off. Callaway (has) lacked national presence from a horticultural standpoint for a number of years.”
The gardens’ new president is in a hurry to get started.
“There was a saying about me in the Army-I’d outrun my supply lines,” says Callaway, who served as secretary of the Army. “I have to be careful not to outrun my supply lines here.”
There are many things he wants to do, Callaway says, and he must be patient and give the staff time to accomplish them.
Callaway, who is not paid a salary, declines to discuss specifics about the finances of the resort and gardens.
“The resort business, whether it’s us or Sea Island (Ga.) or the Greenbrier (Resort in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va.) or anybody you look at, has been down everywhere,” Callaway says.
Callaway recalls his father’s telling him: “It’s a sin not to make a profit. If you don’t make a profit, you’ll go to hell.”
Cotton and the land
That credo may have begun with Cason’s father, Fuller Callaway, who made enormous amounts of money first as a merchant in the late 1890s and later by milling cotton. Cason and his brother, Fuller Jr., followed in their father’s footsteps in the ever-expanding cotton mills in post-Civil War Georgia. By the 1920s, Cason and Fuller Callaway owned 14 plants making rugs, towels, trousers and cord for automobile tires.
Cason, like his father, donated land and money for schools and housing and provided health care for employees. He also became increasingly concerned about replenishing the land that cotton depleted.
Just as his father taught him, Cason passed along to his children the lesson that wealth carries responsibility and insisted that they had to work harder because of it. The lesson wasn’t lost on young Bo.
Bo Callaway graduated in the top 10 percent of his class at West Point. In 1965 he served as Georgia’s first Republican congressman since Reconstruction and was defeated in 1966 in his quest to be Georgia’s second Republican governor since Reconstruction. Earlier this year, he failed to win the chairmanship of the GOP after heading the party in Colorado for many years.
Now he and his wife of 44 years, Beth, are living in a villa in Pine Mountain and setting up his office. A framed flier from his first attempt at business at age 10 leans against a bookcase. It reads, “Bo’s Bargain Bazaar, A trustworthy store that appreciates your trade.”
The Ida Cason Callaway Foundation, which sets its worth at $30 million, also owns Callaway Gardens Resort Inc., the for-profit company that operates the lodgings, recreation, retail and restaurant facilities. The after-tax profits of the resort, along with gate receipts to the gardens (admission is $7.50 for adults), endowments and contributions, make up the funds that pay for the gardens and education programs.
An eye to things Southern
A year from now, Callaway says he hopes the presence of the gardens will permeate every inch of the resort, with even the decor in guest rooms reflecting the native flora that dominates the gardens and the heritage of the South. He plans to add more Southern food to the menu at the resort’s primary restaurant, the Plantation Room.
“We have to make the gardens’ experience more meaningful to our guests,” Callaway says. “If I go to look at the leaves in Vermont, and I go to a little inn there, I’m not looking for black-eyed peas, I’m looking for whatever they do in New England-maybe it’s clam chowder.
Callaway says he will target such groups as the American Horticultural Society and other garden-oriented groups to have their conventions at the gardens.
One of the most evident changes in the next two to five years will be the renovation of the Azalea Trail, one of the most spectacular sections of the gardens. A redesign is in progress, and the foundation hopes to raise money to begin the replanting.
“If you build the finest building in the world, the next day it’s getting less beautiful, less valuable-it’s depreciating,” says Callaway, back in his office, where the focal point is a portrait of his father. “If you build a garden, the very next day it’s prettier, it’s bigger, it’s growing.”
