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Sep 8, 2010
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Viewed 112 times -
Published on Oct 23, 2009
Texan Outlives 3 Hubbies, Builds Empire Mary Kathryn Wagner was born in 1918 in Hot Wells, Texas. I didn't know where that was, so I looked it up on the map on my office wall here at our world headquarters. Turns out that Texas is just south of Oklahoma, so I went back to writing this story. Mary's parents ran a hotel when she was a child, and she would later become a successful business owner herself. She married Ben Rogers when she was just 17 years old. They had three children together, each of whom would later work with her in her business. While still a teenager, with her husband serving in World War II, Kathryn took a job selling books door-to-door, selling $25,000 worth in only six months. When Ben returned home from the war, he divorced Mary. She then went to work for Stanley Home Products, becoming one of their top sales directors. Unfortunately, though, she saw many of the men who worked for her get promoted above her, often earning twice what she was making. Realizing that it was due to the fact that she was a woman, she retired after 25 years. This is when she wrote her first book. She wrote three books in all, and all three became best sellers. But it's not her success as an author that earned her the love and respect of everyone she knew. Her first book was actually a blueprint showing women how to succeed in business rather than enduring the same fate that she suffered in being passed over for promotions. The book became the foundation for the business that she would start with her 20-year-old son Richard. So Mary and Richard opened a storefront business in Dallas on Friday the 13th in September of 1963, the same year and city in which JFK was assassinated. But that has nothing to do with this story. The business did surprisingly well. In fact, it did even better when Mary appeared on 60 minutes. Her life story would later be made into a movie, in which Shirley MacLaine played her role. But it wasn't the movie that made her a household name that you know. It was her revolutionary business and the opportunities that she created for women. In business and in life, she was guided by her motto: "God first, family second, career third." This approach served her well in her personal life as well as in her career, because Mary lost her second husband, George Hallenbeck, to a heart attack just one month before she was to launch her business. She built her company into such a success that Fortune magazine named her company as one of the 100 best companies to work for in America. Along the way, she had to endure lawsuits by some of her former employees. The woman who helped so many women find their inner strength had enough strength herself to overcome each of the major struggles that she faced in her personal life. Three years after George died, Mary married her third husband, Mel Ash, in 1966. She outlived him, too. He died in 1980, and Mary lived another 21 years after that. There's a museum that was built in her honor in 1993, just three years before she established a non-profit foundation to conduct research into the various types of cancer that afflict women. This was the same year in which she suffered a stroke. She was an inspiration to her sales reps - all 800,000 of them by the time she was finished. The company that she founded with her son has sales reps spread out over 37 countries, ringing up annual sales of more than $2 billion. You see, Mary Kathryn Wagner was no average woman. Along with her son, she founded and ran the company that bears her name - Mary Kay Cosmetics. Paul Niemann's column is syndicated in more than 80 newspapers. He can be reached at niemann7@aol.com Comments:
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