FedEx retiree remembers Fred Smith’s big heart

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC) - A FedEx retiree shares a story with the late Fred Smith that she promised to keep secret for decades.

Memphians Thonda Boals and Garry Barnes fell in love at Kingsbury High School.

They graduated in 1972 and married at age 19 in December 1973. Some couples etch their initials in trees or maybe football stadium seats or wooden classroom desks.

Garry, ever a creative soul, inscribed his loving devotion on the bottom of a dresser drawer that Thonda’s mother discovered years later.

The penciled message says, “Thonda, someday you will read this and know that I love you.” When Garry wrote those few words, he had no concept of what a treasure he created, words that are cherished by Thonda and her daughter, Christina, to this day.

The couple was enjoying their Memphis life until a health crisis. “He was diagnosed with inoperable brain tumors in 1980 when our daughter was just 16 months old,” Thonda told me on the couch of her home in High Point Terrace.

After working as an art director, Thonda says she became the family breadwinner and went to work at FedEx in 1983, specifically because the company offered health insurance for a spouse’s preexisting condition.

Thonda eventually became one of Fred Smith’s letter writers, the people who responded when customers had a FedEx concern they felt so strongly about, they wrote a letter to Smith himself back when people wrote letters.

“We had to research it that day, resolve it, and if we couldn’t resolve it, we had to send an overnight letter that night saying we were working on it,” Thonda told me of the process Smith’s team used to respond promptly when customers wrote to him.

Thonda says Smith read each of their response letters, rarely changed the wording, and signed them promptly. “That was his commitment to the customer,” Thonda said.

Through Thonda’s FedEx insurance, Garry underwent regular radiation until a doctor decided to check his status one day and discovered, quite unexpectedly, that the man in his twenties was tumor-free! “We thought this was the power of prayer because we had people all over the country praying for us,” Thonda said.

Garry stayed tumor-free for four years and even returned to work, hiring on at FedEx himself. Thonda worked in customer relations on the first floor of a FedEx building on Airways Blvd while Garry worked in the trace department on the 4th floor of the same building.

But one day, a co-worker called with an alarming report, “Something’s wrong with Garry, he can’t walk, he’s stumbling and falling,” the caller said. This time, Garry became paralyzed and made the rounds of doctors that left Thonda frustrated, as their original neurosurgeon had left practicing medicine to teach.

Thonda was determined to bring her husband to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, to get to the bottom of his illness. But, paralyzed, no commercial airline would carry Garry to Minnesota in that condition.

That’s when FedEx Founder Fred Smith learned of the dilemma and solved it as the longtime CEO sent word of his gift through Thonda’s manager: ” Mr. Smith sent word that you will, and Garry will be going to Mayo Clinic for that biopsy and his parents and y’all will be going on his plane with his favorite pilot," Thonda remembered.

That valiant effort remains a treasured memory for Thonda and her family. “My feelings for Mr. Smith are overwhelming gratitude, admiration, and hope because he is the best leader I have ever had in my whole career,” Thonda said.

Sadly, Garry died at age 30 on December 12, 1984. But she reinvented herself in time, earning a graduate degree in education at the University of Memphis specifically so she could return to FedEx and one day join the company’s internal Leadership Institute that schooled the cream of the crop FedEx managers and directors in striving for greater excellence.

“We had a thing called the Manager’s Guide,” Thonda recalled that Smith himself wrote and then was revised annually by the Leadership Institute team. “I would put it up against any best-selling leadership book today,” Thonda told me.

“Because he lived it and that’s where we were able to learn from him,” the retiree said of the late top executive. Smith died in Memphis on Saturday, June 21.

Reports say he suffered a heart attack but had recently gone to the Mayo Clinic himself after a cancer diagnosis. Thonda kept quiet about Smith’s generous flight for her husband and family all these years at the FedEx Founder’s request, but now the story can be told.

In her work at the FedEx Leadership Institute, Thonda got to see why the Memphis-based company became the leader in overnight delivery and logistics.

The company identified, promoted, and then constantly trained leaders to strive toward the FedEx “People, Service, Profits” mission every day. “You never stop developing as a leader,” Thonda shared. “Fred taught me that one, too,” she said.

Thonda says that while the FedEx Superhub team would be sorting millions of Christmas packages at peak season each year, Smith would gather the Leadership Institute team to update his FedEx focus for the coming year.

“We had a new set of strategic objectives each year, and Fred gave us the nuances of how to emphasize that,” Thonda said.

Thonda became a student of leadership and says an annual survey of thousands of people worldwide always identifies four admired characteristics of leaders across the world: Honesty, Vision, Inspiration, and Competency.

Fred Smith certainly personified all those attributes. Thonda’s late husband, Garry, certainly had another admirable quality the best leaders possess: effective communication.

Exhibit A is Garry’s aforementioned dresser drawer message that Thonda keeps on display at her home: “Thonda, someday you will see this and know that I love you.”

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