6 Tires, No Plan : The Impossible Journey of the Most Inspirational Leader That (Almost) Nobody Knows (9781608322589)

by Rosenbaum, Michael

  “I worked in traffic court one year, in City Hall another year, and one year I had to answer questions about the census,” Diane recalls. “I realized I loved working. I liked getting up and having something to do. Eddie gave me my work ethic. If I had nowhere to go for the rest of my life but have lunch with other women and play tennis or golf, I’d go nuts.”

  Diane pursued a degree in merchandising at Endicott College and worked summers at Saks Fifth Avenue in Chicago, both in merchandising and as a model. During one workday, a man tapped her on the shoulder and introduced himself as her birth father, a man she had not seen since she was four years old. The meeting was brief. He told her he had cashed in a life insurance policy, handed her the check and walked away. She never saw him again.

  Continuing the heritage and example of her grandmother, Diane became a committed Catholic. Eddie Meyers was Jewish, however, and the family’s social sphere began to gravitate toward successful Jewish families. In 1963, while Bruce Halle was establishing his partnership with Ted Von Voigtlander and considering a second store, Diane Meyers married Ivan Zuieback, whose father had founded a successful chain of women’s clothing stores in Detroit. She moved with Ivan to the Motor City, where she kept house and managed a career as a model for car advertisements.

  At about the time Bruce Halle was opening his third store less than sixty miles away in Flint, Michigan, Diane gave birth to her only child, Michael, in 1966. Three years later, as Bruce and Gerry were relocating to Arizona, the Zuiebacks were divorced, and Diane moved back to Chicago with her son.

  Back in Chicago, Diane met Herb Cummings, a widower and father of three grown children. Like Ivan Zuieback, Herbert Cummings was Jewish. His father, Nate, had founded Sara Lee Corporation. Diane and Herb married in 1973, with a rabbi officiating, and renewed their vows fifteen years later with a priest.

  Herb and Diane moved to Paradise Valley in 1980 and committed themselves to philanthropy in their newly adopted state. Diane became a trustee of the Phoenix Art Museum and Scottsdale Center for the Arts and, later, joined the New York–based Nathan Cummings Foundation, established in memory of Herb’s father.

  Philanthropy and civic boards were new territory for Diane, but she considered it a major educational opportunity. As she became more deeply involved with the Phoenix Art Museum, art appreciation turned into a passion, and her board commitment became a nearly full-time occupation.

  She and Herb were sought out by charities and other institutions. Black-tie events seemed to be a weekly occurrence. While Herb preferred that his wife not hold a paying job, Diane was applying the work ethic instilled in her by Eddie Meyers to build the success of her adopted institutions. By all visible standards of measurement, Diane Cummings was leading the life her mother had wished for her back in Chicago.

  That life came to an end in April, 1992, when Herb Cummings succumbed to pancreatic cancer. As had been the case for Bruce when Gerry was diagnosed with cancer, the year of Herb’s illness and his eventual death sent Diane into a tailspin. Following the example set by her grandmother, Diane set one year as the appropriate mourning period and stayed to herself for most of that time.

  As Bruce had done since Gerry’s passing in 1989, Diane sought the counsel of Father Ray Bucher, who had headed The Casa, the Franciscan Renewal Center in Paradise Valley, Arizona. Bruce’s and Diane’s lives were already intertwined on several levels through their involvement in the church and with Father Ray.

  Father Ray was on a sabbatical when Herb died. When he returned to Phoenix at the start of 1993, Diane was on the board of The Casa and put together a party for him at her home—her first social event since Herb’s passing. Father Ray invited Bruce Halle, who attended the party with a woman he was dating at the time. It was the first time Bruce and Diane would be formally introduced.

  Soon after the dinner, Bruce asked Diane out, but she declined. She had not completed her one-year mourning period. Her first venture back into black-tie society would come with the 1993 Crisis Nursery gala. Having recovered from his bike accident, Bruce Halle was attending with his daughter, Susan. Diane Cummings attended with friends.

  Several months later, after morning Mass, Bruce approached Diane again and invited her to have coffee with him. She was heading to a meeting with directors of the Phoenix Art Museum, however, and turned him down a second time.

  A few weeks later, as president of the Phoenix Art Museum, she visited Halle with a mandate from her board to obtain a donation from “that cheap SOB.” In fact, he had not been approached prior to that time. The two met for lunch in Carefree, Arizona, north of Scottsdale, and Halle came up with a $10,000 pledge.

  As the months passed, Father Ray kept in touch with both Bruce and Diane, enlightening them with news of each other’s progress. Halle had asked Mrs. Cummings out twice, though, and had met with her as a donor once. He wasn’t quite ready to ask a third time.

  When the Phoenix Art Museum wanted Halle to renew his gift in June 1994, he refused to meet with anyone other than Diane. She selected a decidedly unromantic locale for the meeting: the Hearty Hen restaurant, a barbecue joint.

  “So I had to go out again and have lunch with him,” Diane recalls. “He gave me the $10,000 in the first two seconds and asked me if there was anything else he could do. I said he could bus inner-city children to the museum, and he asked how much that would be. I said $100,000, and he said he’d think about it.”

  Halle came up with the additional $100,000, but he was thinking about more than donations. Five years after Gerry’s death, Bruce Halle was tired of being alone, he was ready to get serious, and he was very attracted to Diane Cummings. As Bruce escorted Diane back to her car, he asked her out for a third time. She said yes, but both of them were going to be traveling over the next few weeks, and Diane was heading up to her home in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

  The two made a date to meet in Phoenix for dinner, but Halle decided to cut the waiting time by flying up to Jackson Hole. With no hotels available, Diane invited him to stay at the house with her and her mother. Halle arrived in time for dinner and spent the night talking with Diane and her mother and, later, dancing on the patio with Diane.

  Bruce Halle had never been on Diane’s radar in Arizona, though both were donors to some of the same institutions. Now, hosting him at her Wyoming retreat, she found him to be an entertaining conversation partner and a good storyteller. Likewise, Halle found her to be intelligent and easy to talk to, and he thought of her as a morally upright individual he could respect. Equally important, she was widowed, not divorced, which was important to Halle.

  Halle decided to enhance any positive impression he was making by inviting Diane to have lunch the next day at a restaurant he liked.

  Postrio.

  In San Francisco.

  Halle had learned the value of incentive flights when he sent three of his executives to California for dinner in 1979, and the flight to San Francisco had a similar effect on Diane Cummings.

  The next day, Diane’s mother received two dozen white lilies from Bruce, but no flowers arrived for Diane. The reason, she learned, was that “he heard I only like white roses, and there weren’t enough white roses in Jackson Hole. So they were flying them in, and I would get them later that afternoon.”

  Now that the ice had been broken in a big way, Bruce took firm control of the situation. He and Diane quickly became a couple, and Bruce was anxious to close the deal.

  “I think it was our sixth date, and he invited me to come out to Aspen,” Diane relates. “We were up there about two days and he said, ‘We’re going to fly to San Diego.’ I said, ‘We are? I didn’t pack to go to San Diego.’ He said, ‘Not a problem. I want you to meet my children. We’ll stay at my daughter Lisa’s house.’ I said, ‘Please, please let’s stay at a hotel. I beg you, please.’ He said, ‘It’s not a problem. We’ll just go there.’

  “Lisa wasn’t married, didn’t have children and I felt so sorry for her, I was devastated for her,” Diane says. �
�She put me in a downstairs guest bedroom. She put Bruce upstairs in a bedroom next to her.”

  Susan Halle, Bruce’s older daughter, lived about a mile away from Lisa’s home and had just returned from exercise class, in her leotard, sweating, when the doorbell rang the next day.

  “She opens the door and says, ‘Dad, it’s so good to see you,’” Diane relates. “Then he said, ‘I brought a friend of mine I want you to meet, Diane Cummings.’ Susan just says, ‘Ah, come on in. Would you like iced tea?’ They didn’t know what to do with me.”

  Beyond their difference in backgrounds, the speed of the courtship took family and friends by surprise.

  “When Gerry died it was a huge, huge blow to Bruce,” recalls Shel Diller, Halle’s longtime friend and business associate. “He suffered in silence, although we knew he was really, really hurting. He went off to Aspen a lot and brooded a bit and, being Jewish like I am, I felt I had to fix him up, but he wasn’t interested in any of them.

  “One day, I’m at our home in La Quinta and the telephone rings, and it’s Bruce. He says, ‘I want you to meet someone.’ So he flew over with this woman who knocked our socks off. It was Diane.”

  Shel and Marty Diller went to Morton’s restaurant with Bruce and Diane that evening, and Bruce announced that they would be getting married. It was October, just four months after their first date in Jackson Hole.

  Diane was concerned about the response from Bruce’s children, but he told her the children had no vote. He hadn’t told his children whom to marry, and he wasn’t going to ask them to make the decision for him. Still, when Bruce and Diane called Michael to announce their plans, Bruce came on the line first to ask Michael’s permission.

  Michael Zuieback was absolutely not a lost boy like Bruce Halle and the men who’d helped him build the country’s largest tire chain. With an MBA from Thunderbird and a management position at Johnson Controls in Milwaukee, Zuieback was targeting a career that included larger corporations and global business opportunities. Tire retailing, and Discount Tire in particular, were nowhere on his radar. Roughly five years later, he would join Discount Tire as its first corporate strategy chief.

  With the engagement announcements completed, Bruce and Diane considered the terms of their prenuptial agreement. With both entering the marriage with substantial assets, each was prepared to put some terms on paper.

  “We went down to the K Club down in the Caribbean, and we took all of three hours to get it done,” Diane recalls. “That is when I first realized that I was really going to be a partner, because he had a great partnership with Gerry, and then he said, ‘I can do that again.’”

  Bruce T. Halle and Diane Meyers Cummings were married on February 11, 1995, at St. Mary’s Basilica in Phoenix. Bruce had taken little care of his own home since Gerry had died, so the couple decided to live in Diane’s home. It was a major adjustment.

  “Bruce moved into my house with his dog, Bo. I was very fastidious about my house, and the dog terrified my staff,” Diane says. “So, how did Bruce solve the problem? He thought about it for twenty seconds and went out and bought me this cute little dog that we still have today. Everybody just melted over this little dog. So, Bruce’s dog stayed, and our new dog stayed, and everybody in the household was happy. He solved the problem.”

  Of course, he hadn’t solved all of the problem, because Bo was not quite as fastidious as his new mistress. “His dog chewed up seven sofas,” Diane says. “Bruce didn’t care. But when the dog chewed up the seventh sofa, I had had it, so I invisible-fenced all the rooms that had sofas. That time, I found the solution.”

  Bruce and Diane’s children, all adults, adapted quickly to the new family dynamic. Michael and Sheila Zuieback became fast friends with Lisa and Chris Pedersen, and the two couples began traveling together with their children. Sheila Zuieback introduced Bruce Jr. to her friend, Nikki, who married Bruce Jr. in 2005.

  “Diane really does a good job with the family,” Bruce says. “She talks to Susan and Sheila and Nikki and Lisa. She talks to all the girls on a regular basis. And, of course, because of her planning and her foresight, we can take the kids and the grandkids on family trips.”

  As Diane Halle settled into her new life with the tire king of Arizona, she considered some of the ways she could design a shared life for the two of them as a couple. Each brought ample experience to their marriage, but she was determined to find something new that would be theirs alone.

  THE WORLD ACCORDING TO BRUCE

  Shortly after Bruce Halle and his family moved to Arizona in 1969, the family was heading home from an evening out in Scottsdale. Gerry remembered that they were out of milk, and the nearest convenience store was about eight miles up Scottsdale Road.

  Halle decided to make a run for it on the dark boulevard. With no stoplights between him and the nearest Circle K store, he just might make it before the store closed for the night. Racing north at twice the speed limit, Halle saw a set of flashing lights in his rearview mirror. As the constable gave chase, Halle rolled down his window and waved his arm in a circular motion, which the cop interpreted, correctly, to mean “follow me.”

  Halle pulled into the parking lot of the Circle K with the police car close behind. The cop jumped out to ask Halle about his emergency.

  “I said, ‘There’s no emergency,’” Halle relates, “‘but I just needed to get here before they closed and I figured you were going to give me a ticket anyway, so at least I’d get the milk.’ And he said, ‘You’re right. I am going to give you a ticket.’ And he did.

  “He was a really nice guy.”

  Bruce Halle finishes stories and descriptions with “He was a nice guy” the way other people punctuate their statements with “ya know.” Sometimes he says nice guy, and other times a person was cool or a neat lady. Whichever word he chooses, though, Halle makes it clear that he finds something to like in everyone.

  As a boy in Berlin, New Hampshire, Halle learned to be grateful for the bounty he received from friends and family. The men at the firehouse made skis and a springboard for the Halle boys. Grandpa McKelvey took the Halles into his home. In turn, Molly and Fred shared what they had with their neighbors. Bruce Halle began to internalize the connections of the community and the dependence of each person on everyone else. He couldn’t explain it at the time, but it became part of his understanding of how the world around him worked.

  The lessons were all deceptively simple, the kind that people pay lip service to but do not follow as resolutely as common sense dictates. “Do unto others …”; “It is better to give than to receive”; “Cast your bread upon the waters …”; “As we forgive those who trespass against us …” The basics of Catholic teaching and parental guidance had been etched permanently in Bruce Halle’s mind.

  One of the most important lessons he learned was gratitude—a true appreciation of each kindness received. When Ray Walk loaned him the money to pay for his wedding, “I thought that was terrific.” When a farmer picked up a hitchhiking Halle on a tractor and then switched to a truck to get him to his wedding faster, “I’ll always remember him. That was super.” Bill DiDonato, who took Halle’s investment and, along with Halle, lost it all in just a few years, was “one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet.”

  In the years after his family left Berlin, Halle would be rewarded by many people and disappointed by others. When a store manager or other contact would steal from him, the negative experience wouldn’t change his hopes and trust for the next person he met. Bruce Halle gives everyone he meets the benefit of the doubt, which leads most people to work hard to justify his trust. There was no calculus to his willingness to trust everyone; it was simply a variation of the Golden Rule.

  Halle would receive praise for his own kindnesses, but he learned early to recognize and note those traits in others, not himself. In the close-knit community of Halles, McKelveys and their neighbors, he learned the responsibility each person has to support his extended family. From the punishments he earn
ed by climbing Mount Forist with his brothers, he learned to take his punishment and move on—strictly business.

  The world according to Bruce is one in which negative thoughts are a waste of time, he is still the rough-edged guy who couldn’t sell insurance, and tires are pretty much irrelevant to the success of Discount Tire.

  If pride goeth before a fall, Bruce Thomas Halle is determined to stay on two feet. Although he is clearly and unabashedly happy with his success, he takes pains to deflect most of the praise that people send his way and quickly notes the multitude of mentors and supporters who have played critical roles in his rise. He sees himself as hardworking, but also lucky, as both a reverent man and a sinner. Most likely, he is measurably holier than thou, but he will be the last person to suggest that possibility.

  In fact, Halle’s greatest discipline might not be the development of tire stores but a passion for humility. Arriving in Arizona in 1969, buying a comparatively large home, adding horses to the nuclear family, vacationing in Aspen and buying jets could add a bit of arrogance to most personalities. Halle found the balance, almost always, by seeing himself as lucky, and possibly a little bit blessed, but never chosen.

  “Bruce is the most completely integrated human being I know,” says Lattie F. Coor, Ph.D., past president of Arizona State University and the University of Vermont and now chairman and CEO of the Center for the Future of Arizona. “Who he is and how he expresses it, what he does with it, is absolutely a manifestation of someone who knows who he is, knows what he wants, knows what he wants to do, and doesn’t need to show off.

  “Bruce and his company are one. His philosophy is focused—not exclusively, but focused—on what is good for his people in his company. He demonstrates that you can live a successful life without abandoning your personal beliefs or stretching or altering what you do or who you are. You can also be immensely successful without lording it over other people, being obnoxious about it.”