Facing The Fire: Blank endured a deep loss as a child but learned from his mother’s indomitable will
BEFORE ARTHUR M. BLANK ever had The Home Depot, he had a home in an apartment building. He wasn’t born into money; he was born into a flat in Queens, N.Y., with a single bathroom, a single bedroom he shared with his older brother, Michael, and a foyer for his parents.
Max and Molly Blank slept on a divan, which they’d pull out and press against the wall, but it must have made an impression because Arthur remembers it like it was last Tuesday. He also remembers the day his father, Max, died of a heart attack at the age of 44 — because that home was never the same.
At the time, Arthur was 15 with a wandering mind, not sure of his future or his next meal. But when Max passed away in 1957, Arthur’s career path accelerated not out of monotony but out of need. His mother inherited Max’s pharmaceutical company, and his 12-hour workdays. The family was in shambles.
“My mother was 37 when he died,” Blank said. “She didn’t have a background in business, but she said, ‘I want to try to keep the business going for my sons and my late husband.’ So she put in a bazillion hours. I mean, she tried to learn it and understand it and do the best you could to help manage it.
“She wasn’t going to give up, wasn’t going to say no. She was going to find a way to keep it, keep it growing. … My mother worked. She would come in like mid-morning, late morning. She’d work until 10, 11 o’clock at night, but she had no life when her husband was gone, even though she was young.”
Blank’s escape, at first, was sports. Wirey and sneaky tough, he said he played football with “no regard” for his well-being. He played both ways: quarterback and receiver on offense, defensive back and edge rusher on defense. He was so rail thin, he looked as if he’d tip over if the wind blew, but something was in him, something irrepressible.
“I know it sounds ridiculous for a skinny Jewish kid, but I didn’t give a shit about my body,” he said. “So I would throw my body at anything and everybody. We had a really good team. I went to Stuyvesant High, which I was not sure how I got into it. It’s very elite science and math that takes tests to get into.”
The equation Blank figured out on the football field was simple: the harder you hit them, the louder they groan. He said he liked “being in the thick of it.” His high school coach, Murl Thrush, doubled as the wrestling coach and appreciated someone like Arthur weighing a buck-40 and still sticking his nose into every play. One of Arthur’s thrills was playing in a televised game at Downing Stadium on Randall’s Island during his junior year. He was injured for the game there his senior year, but still wanted in on the action. So he volunteered to be a spotter for the game’s broadcaster — none other than the legendary Marty Glickman.
Maybe he was just a glutton for punishment because, come baseball season, he walked straight behind home plate. “I preferred to be in the middle of where the action was as opposed to [the opposite],” he said. “And looking back, I played a lot of baseball when I was younger and they said, ‘Well, what position do you play?’ [I said] ‘Well, my best position was catcher.’
I got to be in every play.”
If jammed thumbs and sore knees were preparing him for a life in business, so be it. His mother still was putting in long hours to pay for her sons’ college tuitions. In return, they felt obligated to study diligently and join the family business upon graduation. That is, if Molly could earn enough cash to keep them in school.
“I mean, I didn’t have any money,’’ Blank said. “She was providing all the tuition and everything else. There were no scholarships or anything. I’m sure there were scholarships, I just didn’t qualify for anything.”
Michael, who was close to three years older, enrolled
“My childhood really helped formulate who I am and what drives me.”
at Michigan to “pursue the pharmaceutical end of the business,” while Arthur eventually went to Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., a renowned entrepreneurial school, to “pursue the business side of the business.” That way, his brother could handle the meds, and Arthur could handle the cold hard cash. As in, profits.
Whether he knew it, his time at Babson was his window into the real world. Why wait until graduation? He needed money, so he started his own business, pronto. He noticed Babson was full of affluent South American students who weren’t familiar with laundromats or what to do with their dirty clothes. So he opened a home laundry business, where he said he would go door-to-door on campus and “pick up laundry and dry clean it and wash it … and bring it back.” He also started a landscaping business. Whatever it took to take the load off Molly.
“It was successful,” Blank said of his makeshift businesses. “I had to help with my expenses on campus, so that was one of the ways I helped do it.”
That wasn’t the only way Blank got an education at Babson, of course.
He enrolled in the school’s three-year entrepreneurial curriculum, and — even with an unmistakable stutter — became a force around campus. “I was president of everything in college,” he said. “I mean, I was fortunate because I picked a small school. It gave me a chance to fully explore opportunities to grow socially and professionally. But because the campus was small, I could get involved in everything politically on campus and leadership-wise on campus and fraternity and all that stuff.”
His three-year Babson whirlwind led to his first job in 1963. Unsure about the dynamic of working with his mother and brother, he joined the public accounting firm Arthur Young & Co. At least his paycheck could help out his family. But it was the old catcher in him that made him uncomfortable rather quickly in the accounting world. “I kind of realized how much I preferred to be on the doing side of the desk as opposed to the recording side of the desk,” he said.
That’s when he went home — not to their matchbox apartment in Flushing, but to his mother’s pharmaceutical business. It was 1968 by then, and she’d not only kept the business afloat, she’d grown it exponentially. Only about three months after Blank joined the company, she sold it to Daylin Corporation for a significant profit.
“Her will and her commitments to just not give up and keep putting one foot in front of another, finding a way, build a business — she got paid,” Blank said. “I don’t know what they sold it for, but it was in the millions. It was a lot of money and secured her really for the rest of her life financially.
“A lot of my values — caring for the world, making the world a better place, giving back — [came from] my mother because we didn’t have any money. My mother was always a person of tremendous principle, whether you agreed with her always or not, but she had very strong convictions about things. And even though [she] didn’t [have] money, she would give her time and effort or attention and she’d be a vocal activist on things that she felt strongly about.
“And I think all of that helped carve my own personality about seeking the fire on things. It’s like when [former civil rights activist and U.S. Congressman] John Lewis was alive, he was a good friend, and said when he would get up every day and was asked, ‘Well, how do you figure you can spend your day, John?’ He said, ‘Well, every day I spend my day wherever the fire was the hottest.’
“So I generally kind of function that way in my life. Today, I spend my time, whether it be business-wise or even philanthropy, where’s the need the greatest? Where’s the fire the brightest? But a lot of that came out of my early [life].”
In the end, a heart attack, a small budget and 18-hour workdays had morphed into a sustainable life for the Blanks.
“The other thing I think I got because of my father and my mother was perseverance,” he said. “My childhood really helped formulate who I am and what drives me.”
Even the tragedy Blank endured at a formative age eventually became a source of perspective and strength.
“The older you get, the more you realize everybody in life has trauma,” he said. “You don’t go through life without trauma; personal, professional, whatever it may be. It’s part of having a blessing of having a life. So you have trauma. Do you learn from it? Do you move past it? You put it in a different part of your vein where it doesn’t get triggered every day, but when it does get triggered, because it will occasionally, how do you respond?”
Blank responded, in 1970, by becoming chief financial officer of Elliott’s Drug Stores/Stripe Discount Stores, a Daylin subsidiary, and — at the recommendation of Bernard Marcus — he eventually relocated to Griffin, Ga., to be president and CEO of the overall division. He later ascended to become controller of Daylin’s home improvement company, Handy Dan, in Los Angeles. But when he and Marcus were fired, they together pooled their resources in Atlanta to launch a household name.
So it was The Home Depot for Arthur … and a home with more than just a foyer for Molly.