RE: The St. Joe Co. (JOE)
The following four links will help anyone interested in understanding The St. Joe Co. from a local (North Florida) point of view. I hope this information is useful.
From Florida Trend magazine, August 1998:
floridatrend.com
Speeches by CEO Peter Rummell from St. Joe's web site:
joe.com
Pensacola News Journal has an excellent series of articles from Jan. 31-Feb. 1, 1999:
pensacolanewsjournal.com
Panama City News Herald has many in-depth articles. Pick "site search" on the main page, then search for "St. Joe Co." or "Rummell":
newsherald.com
I have taken the liberty of copying the first three paragraphs of the Florida Trend article below. It's quite a tale, and it may pique someone's interest.
<From Florida Trend 8/1/98>
In an aging mansion on the outskirts of Tallahassee, in a dusty storage closet off an upstairs bathroom, sit a dozen or so cases of Old Forester whiskey, some bottles dating from the 1940s. Both mansion and whiskey are the property of The St. Joe Co.; the liquor was the personal cache of the late Ed Ball, the company's legendary tight-fisted chief executive who drank a toast every night to his enemies' demise - usually several. "I find four to six highballs very relaxing," said Ball, who spent 40 years buying up railroads, banks and huge swaths of north Florida pine forests, making the St. Joe Paper Co. the state's largest landowner in the process. It's no accident that Ball's whiskey sits untouched; the managers who ran the company after Ball died in 1981 didn't disturb much of anything about St. Joe. Both its massive north Florida land holdings - all 1.1 million acres - and its cash, now more than $500 million, languished over the years as other parts of the state and other companies boomed.
Ball's liquor still lies unopened, but his company has put on some new clothes and headed for the party, escorted by chairman and chief executive officer Peter S. Rummell, the former real estate chief for the Walt Disney Co. who cut his teeth developing high-profile Florida communities such as Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach and Celebration near Orlando. Since a group of activist shareholders and outside directors that included Jacksonville businessman Herbert Hill Peyton mounted a push that installed Rummell last year, the new CEO has frenetically set about reshaping Ball's creaky behemoth as a major regional - even national - real estate developer, and has set in motion a plan that could remake the whole northwest corner of the state.
Gone is the old St. Joe Paper Co. name, replaced by the St. Joe Co. with a new ticker symbol [NYSE-JOE] and a new logo, a stylized bird taking flight. Gone also are all but one of the company's previous seven top managers, replaced with high-priced new blood. More notable, the bespectacled Rummell has catapulted the company into a series of partnerships, acquisitions and real estate ventures, including three massive residential real estate developments in the Panhandle that the company will try to carry out simultaneously. Among the other deals: Rummell's $12 million purchase of Arvida, one of Florida's most storied residential community builders, and the $90 million pending acquisition of the Prudential Florida realty brokerage.
(see web link above for the rest of this article) |
