In May 1987, in the single largest gift ever made to a Kansas university at the time, W. Frank Barton (1917-2000), chairman emeritus of Rent-A-Center Inc.,
and his wife, Patsy (Cain), gave
$12 million to endow Wichita
State University’s college of business administration.
The gift was something of a surprise.
First off, Barton wasn’t an alumnus of Wichita State. He didn’t go to college. Wichita wasn’t his home town.
Born in Prague, Okla., he grew up on a farm with two brothers, two sisters and an adopted cousin. Of college age during the Dust Bowl days of the Great Depression, the future businessman and entrepreneur graduated from high school and entered the work force at 18. He pumped gas and worked on cars for $1 a 12-hour day.
“In the midst of the Depression, a dollar was as big as a wagon wheel,” he recalled for an alumni association article on the occasion of his receiving the 1991 WSU Alumni Recognition Award. “I wanted to be a doctor, a surgeon. But that wasn’t to be.”
In 1940, he took a job as a salesman at the Montgomery Ward store in Shawnee, Okla.
After relocating eight times in eight years, he settled in Wichita in 1949 as regional sales manager for Western Auto. He was doing well in his career in business, but he had an itch to start his own concern. Three years later, he was head of Barton Distributing Co., which grew to serve more than 300 Kansas dealers of appliances, electronic equipment and consumer durables. He served as president for 27 years, and his firm was recognized as one of the nation’s leading distributors for companies such as Gibson, Motorola and Coleman Heating and Air Conditioning.
In 1973, Barton backed the idea of a young family friend, Tom Devlin, thus helping write the first chapter in one of the most successful entrepreneurial stories ever told.
A former WSU student, Devlin fs ’70 had worked for J. Ernest Talley, who in the 1960s began the rent-to-own business by telling customers of his Wichita store, Mr. T’s Rental, that they had rented an appliance for long enough to have paid for it and now owned it. Devlin saw the potential behind renting to own big-ticket, name-brand items.
He sought out investors and found a business-savvy risk-taker to partner with him in founding Rent-A-Center. About entrepreneurs in general, Barton once said, “How do you define entrepreneurs? They’re gamblers, that’s all.”
Barton’s and Devlin’s gamble paid off in spades. In 1985, some six years after Barton sold his distributing company to focus on Rent-A-Center, Forbes magazine rated the company 11th in return-on-equity out of 200 small public companies. In the fall of 1987, Rent-A-Center was sold to Thorn EMI, a British firm, for $594 million. It was pay-off day for Barton and Devlin and those who had wagered on Rent-A-Center with them.
“I probably get greater satisfaction from that than from my own personal gain,” Barton said in a 1991 interview. “We had the happiest group of people you ever saw.”
Just months before the July 30, 1987, sale of Rent-A-Center, on April 8, Devlin and his wife, Myra, pledged $5 million to Wichita State. Barton and his wife, Patsy, a liberal arts and sciences student at the University of Wichita from fall 1945 through spring 1947, made their $12 million gift to WSU on May 11.
Barton explained the motivation behind their contribution this way: “Wichita is Patsy’s home and my home,” he said. “It’s been very, very good to us and to our family. We believe in supporting a community where you’ve been fortunate to be successful.”
Barton’s business success is today known worldwide, but his deeper story contains great personal sorrow and loss – most especially the deaths of Shera and Clay, two of his five children. His three living children are Steve of Las Vegas, Craig of Wichita and Linda Wiens of Enid, Okla.
Barton rarely spoke of the tragedies in his life; he once stoically commented, “You never know what you can handle until you have to, when you have no choices.”
The challenge of new business ventures, the importance of business education – something he considered a sure bet – these were the topics of choice for Barton, who often said, “A premier business college has the potential of being a great, great asset not only to the city of Wichita, but also to the state.”
Back in 1926, the year Wichita voters approved making Fairmount College the municipal University of Wichita, a College of Business Administration and Industry was included. Frank A. Neff, who held degrees from Lafayette College and Harvard, served as dean.
The 1927 Parnassus reports that Neff “established in the university the co-operation plan of education, which is a step ahead of other colleges of our class. He is also head of the summer school.”
The early business college was based on cooperative education, with students alternating between classes and jobs. At this early stage of its development, engineering was the “and industry” part of the college’s name. Offices for the college were on the third floor of Jardine Hall.
It was 1950 when Neff stepped down as dean; Kenneth Razak took up the position. A year later, the college was moved into Neff Hall, the first post-war building at the university. William Nielander became dean in 1953, and two years later engineering split off to become a separate college. In 1957, Jack Heysinger was named dean.
The 1958 Parnassus offers this snapshot of the college: “One of the largest colleges is the College of Business Administration and Industry. Formerly composed of six departments, the college is now made up of four: accounting, administration, economics and secretarial training. In these four departments 250 courses are taught. The business building, Neff Hall, is a two-story modern structure with air-conditioning throughout.”
In 1964 the university made the transition from municipal to state university, and Fran Jabara was named dean at a time of robust student and faculty expansion. The business college achieved accreditation in 1968 by the top national business accreditation agency, the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, and, to deal with heavy increases in business enrollment, the college moved into the newly built R.P. Clinton Hall in 1970.
The next series of business deans, not including those who served in interim positions, starts with Lawrence McKibbin (1972-1976) and runs through Douglas Sharp (1976-1990), Malcolm Richards (1991-1993), Gerald Graham (1993-2000), John Beehler (2000-2007) to Douglas Hensler, who took up the position in 2008.
It was during Sharp’s tenure as dean that, in 1981, the college’s School of Accountancy was established. And four years earlier, in 1977, Jabara, who at this point had been a member of the business faculty for 28 years, founded the Center for Entrepreneurship. He first sponsored a workshop, assuming the initial cost of the undertaking himself. “Entrepreneurship: Your Future in Business” drew in some 300 students the first year and generated some $30,000 as seed capital for other center activities.
As founder and first director of WSU’s Center for Entrepreneurship, Jabara inspired a national movement to include entrepreneurship as a key component of business education. A decade after establishing the center, he was pleased when his former student, Tom Devlin, offered to make a substantial donation for the construction of a building for the center.
At the time, Jabara said, “Our dream is to build a world class center.” On Nov. 4, 1988, ground was broken at the Devlin Hall site on campus. With the ribbon-cutting on March 30, 1990, WSU became one of the first universities in the world to dedicate a building solely to entrepreneurship education. Since its founding, the center has consistently ranked among the top programs in the nation for its programming and its ongoing preservation and promotion of entrepreneurial activities.
The year after Frank Barton’s death – Sept. 28, 2000, in Wichita at the age of 83 – brought the 75th anniversary of the Barton School of Business. Jabara was recognized with the Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award as the most influential professor in the history of the school, and Dan Carney ’53/04, cofounder of Pizza Hut, was honored with the Distinguished Alumnus Award. (For more on Carney and the business he and his brother Frank ’00 built, read “Private Enterprise” and “No Humble Pie.”)
Today, the Barton School features six centers of business excellence. Joining the Center for Entrepreneurship are the Center for Economic Development and Business Research, the Center for Economic Education, the Center for International Business Advancement, and the Center for Management Development.
The school boasts so many distinguished faculty and alumni that it would require the pages of this magazine to identify them. Suffice it to say, the list of Barton School graduates reads like a Who’s Who in Business and Entrepreneurship. To list just a few: Larry Jones ’53, Jim Mann ’56, Steve Clark ’65, Dan Taylor ’67, Bob White ’71/76, Steve Feilmeier ’85, Ann Konecny ’91, Brian Heinrichs ’96 – and W. Frank Barton ’87, upon whom WSU conferred the Doctor of Humane Letters, Honoris Causa.
James Rhatigan, Wichita State dean emeritus of student affairs and a longtime Barton friend, says, “Frank Barton’s story should acknowledge his lifelong personal humility and honesty in everyday relationships, an ethic of caring stemming from difficult life circumstances. He had a spirit of generosity that motivated him and inspired others, and this resulted in the largest single gift WSU has ever received.”
And a name to live up to.
