You were a very successful young couple when you decided to give up your possessions and seek a more spiritually centered way of life. You eventually settled in a Christian community in Georgia. How did you find it? Millard, did your business experience play a role in your later work?
Millard Fuller: The experiences that I had had in business had a very definite impact on what we ended up doing later. We actually, on the way back from Florida, stopped in a little Southern town of Albany, Georgia, to have breakfast, and remembered a friend from Alabama who had moved to a small Christian community called Koinonia Farm, and we knew so little about it. We couldn't remember where it was. So I called on the telephone, and eventually was able to discover that it was in Americus, Georgia, a town about 40 miles north of Albany. We got our friend on the phone and told him that we were on our way back to Montgomery, and we would like to come by and visit for maybe a couple of hours. So we headed up there, and it was clear between the two of us that we would go visit our friends for two hours and then would go back to Montgomery. When we got there, we met the man who had founded Koinonia, Clarence Jordan, with his wife, Florence. Never heard of them in our lives, but as we were having lunch with them -- they insisted we stay for lunch -- and as we were having lunch with them, we were so totally captivated by this man, and by the other people we met there, that we felt very strongly that God had led us to that place. And we stayed a month. We had gone there for two hours and stayed a month.
Tell us more about Clarence Jordan. Would you consider him your mentor? Millard Fuller: He was definitely our spiritual mentor.
Somebody once said, "When the student is ready to learn, the teacher appears," and we were ready to learn and our teacher appeared. Clarence Jordan was a Greek scholar. He had been raised in Georgia. He came from a very prominent family. He'd gone to Southern Seminary, Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and while he had been in seminary, he became -- and I don't know any other way to put it, but he just became totally devoted to Jesus and decided to pattern his life after Jesus. And one of the things that he and a couple of fellow students decided to do was to find a farm somewhere in the rural South -- and he ended up finding it in Americus, Georgia -- and build a community and live like the early Christians. The early Christians in Acts 2 and 4, shared all things in common. There was nobody in need. They all lived together and shared things in common. Clarence Jordan was a person who, being totally devoted to Jesus, he wanted to know what Jesus' opinion would be, or the way he would see a particular subject. He cared nothing about culture, so he concluded that the Jesus way in the Deep South would be that whites and blacks should be working together and living together and sharing together. In 1942 that was revolutionary. So he began to bring in the local black people and have dinner with them and work with them and so forth, and that caused the white power structure to just come down on them like a ton of bricks. I mean, they started bombing them and dynamiting them and shooting them and beating them up in town, and they had a horrendous time there.
Was that still going on when you got there? Millard Fuller: It had diminished somewhat by the time we arrived there, but they had gone through a bath of fire, and most of the people that had lived at the community had been driven away by the violence, but there was a remnant left. And they weren't sure about their future. They didn't know what they were going to do. They had gone through such a terrible, terrible time. Living with Clarence Jordan, you began to think about this idea of "the economics of Jesus." If you're loaning money to poor people, you don't charge interest, but the people who receive the money are expected to repay through service to the community. Was this something you learned from Clarence Jordan?
Millard Fuller: Linda and I both gained so many new insights. Both of us were professing Christians, but we gained many, many new insights from talking to Clarence Jordan, and one of the insights was the insight about economics. You know, most Americans are religious people, but very few are really serious about trying to discover what the way of Jesus is and following it. It's sort of like we admire Jesus, but he's for church and Sunday school. But in the real world, we do things the way that the culture does it. And what we learned from Clarence Jordan was that if you are going to be serious in your faith, it's an all-the-time, every-day-of-the-week proposition, and that includes how you relate to your poor neighbors. You can't sit in affluence and live in a great big house and be driving around in big cars, and your neighbors are living in abject poverty, and you are going to church every Sunday saying, "I'm a good Christian," and these poor neighbors are of no concern to you. So what we gained from him was that true religion is involved in how you relate to your neighbors. Not just how you relate to the church you belong to, but how you relate to your neighbors. And he did give us the keen insight into how we ought to see our neighbors as people who are equally loved by God. And if they happened to be in a bad economic situation, then if you are able to be of help to them, you have a heaven-ordained mandate to do something.
Millard, you had a well-developed business acumen that you contributed to your work at Koinonia. Was this something you were able to do right away? Millard Fuller: Actually, we were there for a month and left, and we came back a couple of years later. We actually moved back in the summer of 1968, and I became the director of the farm. Clarence Jordan was a tremendous Bible scholar, but he was not much of a businessman. And I became the business leader of the farm, and put it back on a more sound economic footing. And then he and I began to work together, and Linda and others there, to do various things to be of help to our neighbors, one of which was housing for the poor. Was that a sudden realization, like a light bulb going off?
Millard Fuller: No. We called together a group of people, and we had sessions. And we prayed about it and we talked about it, and we came up with a program which was called Koinonia Partners. That was the name of our first ministry, "Partners," because we saw ourselves as in partnership with God, and in partnership with one another, partnership with the poor, and we had partnership industries, partnership housing, partnership farming. And the partnership industries, Linda got involved in that, making tie-dyed T-shirts and dashikis and all kinds of other clothing items. We started a little factory there to make women's pants, and we hired a bunch of local poor people to make those clothing items. And we started a worm farm, and we grew peanuts and cotton -- not cotton -- peanuts and corn and soybeans, and we bought cattle. And then we began to build houses. We actually began to build one house for one needy family. That was our partnership housing program, and while that house was under construction -- we had the walls up -- on October 29, 1969, Clarence Jordan died suddenly of a heart attack. He was in his study writing a sermon to be delivered at nearby Mercer University, and he just leaned his head against the wall and died very suddenly, just like my mother had died many years earlier. And there we were with this dream and this vision underway -- with partnership farming, partnership industries, partnership housing -- and Clarence Jordan was dead.
You carried on the work at Koinonia Farm after Clarence Jordan died. It sounds as though you had created a supportive infrastructure. Millard Fuller: Well, we did carry it on, and we stayed there and worked for the next five years almost, building houses, running these various other enterprises. And it was during that time that Linda and I decided that it was the housing which was really catching on. Linda, why do you think that was?
Linda Fuller: We got to know the families, and we would go visit them and see the horrible shacks they were living in. No place to cook, no place to go to the bathroom. You could see through the floor and could see through the roof. It was just deplorable how some people lived, and then to see the difference that it was making in their lives, especially the children. I helped organize a child development center because I saw that the kids really didn't have much to do, especially the preschoolers, during the day, and they really needed some social development. Some of the kids didn't even know what their name was, so it was just a real thrill to see the transformation in these families, and we thought, "Well, there's poverty housing in other parts of the world." So we wanted to see if the idea would work.
Could you see concrete results at first? Millard Fuller: Well, it was slow at first. In fact, we were ridiculed quite a bit in the beginning stages.
Clarence Jordan was a Bible scholar, and he pointed out to us that in the scriptures, it's taught very clearly that you should not charge interest to the poor. In fact, it's not only in the Christian scriptures, but the three great monotheistic religions of the world are Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and all three of the monotheistic religions of the world teach that you should not charge interest to the poor. And we were doing business with that concept of saying the poor can't afford anybody to be profiteering off of them. They need to be given a break, not become objects of charity, but we need to follow this ancient scriptural wisdom of taking the burden of interest away from them, and then they will be able to make it. Well, a lot of people in our area said, "Common sense will tell you that if you don't charge any interest, and you don't make any profit, it'll fail. This is a designed-to-fail program," and they said also, "It sounds communistic and un-American." And we said, "We got it out of the Bible," and they said, "But the Bible is for church and Sunday school. This is in the middle of the week. You can't expect to practice the Bible and what the Bible teaches in the middle of the week. This is the practical world."
Did you run into a lot of opposition from the surrounding community? Linda Fuller: Well, we were still living with the residue of what had happened 15, 20 years ago. When we would go into town, and people would ask us where we were from, and we'd say that we were living in Koinonia, that was like a curtain came down. We were still very much the enemy, so to speak, when we would go off the farm into the surrounding towns. So we had that to battle with, as well as the revolutionary ideas of what we were trying to do. How did you get beyond it? Millard Fuller: We got beyond it for two reasons. Number one, we felt very strongly that this was God's calling for us, that the idea was right. It squared up with the Bible, and the need was enormous. And secondly, we looked beyond the local area for support. The people in our local area were not going to support us, and they didn't. Years later -- and currently -- they are, but in the beginning, we got very little support, practically none from the immediate local area. Was that a tough decision to walk away from that area?
Millard Fuller: It was not that we physically walked away. We would do mailings. We would write letters to people in Illinois and Indiana and Pennsylvania. They had been supporting Koinonia during that difficult period when they were under attack by the Ku Klux Klans and the White Citizens Council. So we had a mailing list of people who were sympathetic, and when we told them we had this new program, we were building houses for the poor, they were inclined to be supportive. And that was the beginning of what we did. And as we saw it working, and as Linda said, as we saw the tremendous transformation within these families, we began to think, can we make this work somewhere else? And that's when we actually contacted the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, and asked them to sponsor us, and we moved to what was then Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. And we worked over there for three years, building houses, and it was during our time in Africa that we realized that this concept was indeed an idea that would have worldwide implications. And we came back to the United States in 1976 with the dream in our hearts of forming a worldwide work that would build houses for people all over the world and eventually eliminate all substandard housing.
Was it very different doing this kind of work in Africa? Were there challenges?
During this period of time, how did your partnership work? What kinds of things did you handle, Linda? Linda Fuller: We had four children by that time, ranging in ages from 13 down to a year-and-a-half. So there was just no way we could get around not having some household help. In fact, that was sort of expected of missionaries, because you can't go out and buy orange juice. You buy the oranges, and you have to have somebody to squeeze the orange juice. And then you have to buy your fresh foods at the market, and so you need somebody to go to the market. All we had was a manually operated washing machine and a clothes line, so we needed somebody to wash and do all the laundry. I had some help, and that freed me up to write letters, to do some fundraising and to keep in touch with people back in the States and Europe who were supporting us. Meanwhile, Millard was out seeing that the blocks were getting made, the houses going up. He dealt with the government, did all the things kind of outside the home. We'd like to hear about our own early years. What were your lives like when you were children? Linda, will you start?
Linda Fuller: I grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and that's a university town. We lived on the outskirts, in a little place called Alberta City, and we had just sort of a typical life, except for the fact that my father and my mother owned an electrical appliance store right in downtown Tuscaloosa. And I can always remember, when it was time for inventory, they had me down there counting nuts and bolts and things like that. We just had sort of a typical middle-class family life. My mother made a lot of clothes for my sister and me, and was a wonderful homemaker, as well as being support for my dad working in the store. So it was pretty calm. I mean, we went to Florida maybe one week out of the year, a family vacation, and I walked to school. Just kind of a typical upbringing.
Millard, you were the oldest child in your family, is that right?
Millard Fuller: I was actually an only child. My mother died suddenly at age 27, and I was three years old. And if my mother had lived, I would have had a sister. She was pregnant with a little girl, and she died, was sick in the afternoon, dead by midnight. It was a devastating thing for my father, and it took him a long time to get over it. I went and lived with an aunt for a while until he recovered, because her death was totally unexpected, and my dad was very much in love with my mother. It was just a very devastating thing for him, but he eventually recovered. And then the year I was six years old, he remarried, and then he and his second wife had two sons. So I had two stepbrothers, and they are ten and 12 years younger than me, so in a lot of ways, it was like another family. But I grew up at the edge of a small cotton mill town. My father, at an earlier time in his life, had been what is called a second hand, which is a leadership role in the dye works, where they dyed the cotton fabrics. But then he bought a store, some time after my mother's death. He bought a little country grocery store at the edge of town, and so I grew up in a grocery store, stocking shelves and taking orders and had a bicycle and had a route. And then my father bought a 400-acre farm a few miles out of town, and my dad and I went in the cattle business together. One of my fond memories as a child was going to the cattle sales and bidding on cattle and raising them, and I was very much in business, even as a youngster. When I was six years old, I bought a pig, and I fattened him up and sold him at market. And then I got into buying chickens and then got into buying hundreds of rabbits, and was engaged in other business enterprises as a teenager.
You say your mother's death was devastating for your father. What about for you?
So how did you deal with that? Millard Fuller: Maybe in some ways not so good. It was just open warfare until I left home at age 18. Were you close to the half-brothers? Millard Fuller: Later on, we became close, especially the younger one. He came and lived with Linda and me. By that time, I had gotten out of school and we were living in Montgomery, Alabama. I was practicing law and I was in business. He was a very bright youngster, so we invited him to come and live with us for his last two years so he could go to a better high school. So he became like a son to us, and I feel close to both of my brothers, my half-brothers, but this youngest one, we are very close to him. What about you, Linda? Do you get along with your sibling? Linda Fuller: Very well now. When we were at home growing up, we had pillow fights, book fights. We were so different, but it's amazing how much alike we are. Do you think those experiences of early childhood had an impact on your later life? Linda Fuller: I know my relationship with my sister had a big impact on me, because my sister was a bookworm, and I was sort of the tomboy type. I wanted to be outside playing ball. I didn't care anything about reading. She read all the time. And there was all this big thing about, "Oh, my sister is so smart," so I concluded that I must be dumb, I must be stupid. So I had this inferiority complex to deal with in my adulthood, but I think it's made me stronger, because I had to kind of fight for my own self-esteem, and it's been quite a journey. I'm still on it really.
Millard Fuller: I think one of the things that I came out of this childhood with -- with a lot of conflict -- was a great desire to have my own family be a harmonious family. I wanted to have a loving wife and children where there would be harmony in the home. And with some exceptions, relatively minor exceptions, that's what we've had. We feel very blessed with our four children. We have excellent relations with all of them. We love them and they love us, and they're all well-established and stable young people. That part of my dream has been realized. Linda Fuller: It's made a big demand on me though, because any time there is any conflict, "Oh, that's just like my stepmother," you know. It's made it harder on me, I think. What do you do? What's your response? Linda Fuller: I say, "That was 30 years ago. This is now, and I'm me and I'm not your stepmother." Millard, you mentioned that your father bought farmland, that you were raising animals and were intrigued with business. But when you were ten, your father did something in housing that had an impact on you, didn't he?
Millard Fuller: My father had this farm, and there were some tenant farmers living on the land in very poor housing. And my dad decided to renovate those houses, and I participated in that. I helped to fix those houses up, and I remember it. As a young person that was very meaningful to me. I could see how happy those people were to get a good house, to get out of bad living conditions and get into a decent place to live, and over the years, I've just -- it's a very vivid memory to me. Of course, one of the exciting things was that we had to make a well for them, which included digging the hole in the ground, and going down with dynamite, and bringing the wires up, and attaching them to the battery of the automobile, and making a big explosion and then going back down in the hole and getting the rocks up. It was exciting.
It sounds like a ten-year-old's dream. Millard Fuller: Right.
Millard Fuller: Well, my father and I were very close, after my mother's death especially. I was a part of my mother, whom he loved so dearly, and in fact, I think I was part of the problem with the conflict with his second wife, because he always showered love on me, and I think even though my stepmother was a very stoic person, she would never express her disappointment or anything. I could tell it was hurting her, because sometimes at the meal table, he would sit there and get dreamy-eyed and talk about my mother in her presence, which didn't exactly make things nicer. But my father and I were just always very close. He was a loving man. He was always very active in the church, and he was a dedicated Christian man. He was concerned about the community. Linda Fuller: He was active in the Boy Scouts. Millard Fuller: He was active in the Boy Scouts. He was a leader in the Boy Scouts, and he just was an encourager. He was an encourager always to me. He was a man that had a big heart, and that made an impact on me. Linda, was your household a religious one? Linda Fuller: It was in the sense that we went to church every Sunday. As I look back now, I can see that a lot of the values in our family didn't exactly line up with the Bible, but that wasn't so unusual. You know, that happens quite often. But it was a very loving kind of environment, based more on physical needs. I felt like I was deprived emotionally sometimes, but the stress was on being a good person, doing right, telling the truth. A lot of good values were taught there. The emotional deprivation, was that the rivalry with your sister, or was there other stuff going on? Linda Fuller: I think it mostly stemmed from the background that my mother and dad come from, which is pretty typical of that generation. You know, coming out of the Depression and having so much emphasis on the material and physical needs. And then there was this Victorian hangover where you didn't really touch and feel and hug and say, "I love you" and all of that. That was just not a part of my life, but as far as being physically well taken care of, and being taught how to survive, even if another depression came along, I very much appreciate my parents. Millard, you decided on a business career early on. Did you stay with that idea right through college?
Millard Fuller: I did. My dad -- as I said, he was a very successful small businessman -- but he always emphasized making it and being responsible and creating wealth by your activities. He's the one that bought my little pig, and bought my sacks of feed, and showed me how to keep books, and at the end add up the expenses and then see what you sell the pig for and then you see you got a profit. That was exciting to me, and as time went along, I got into more and more business ventures. But then, when I went off to university, I met a fellow student, and the two of us went into business in a more serious way, and we started making a lot of money. We sold all kinds of products at the University of Alabama -- and Tuscaloosa, where (Linda) was. We ran Christmas tree lots. We ran a birthday cake service. We sold trashcan holders, doormats. We took our profits and began to buy land and houses, and we rented the houses out to students, and we started a mobile home park. By the time we graduated, we were making $50,000 a year as students.
That was big money back then. Millard Fuller: Oh, it was a lot of money! And then after graduation, Linda and I moved with my partner to Montgomery, Alabama, the capital city, and went in and opened a law practice, but continued our business activities, and those business activities continued to flourish and generate a lot of money. That partner that you met in law school was Morris Dees, who is quite a significant figure in his own right. Can you tell us how that friendship came about? What was the partnership like?
Millard Fuller: Morris Dees came out of a similar background. He was from a small town near Montgomery called Mount Meigs, raised up in a Christian home, went to church. His father was a successful farmer, and he had gotten involved in some business ventures as a teenager and had been pretty successful at it. He also was interested in politics, and at that time, in Alabama, there was no such thing as Republican politics. Everybody was a Democrat. So he was involved in Democratic politics. I was at another university, getting my undergraduate degree at Auburn University. I had formed a political party, had gotten involved in Democratic politics, was a delegate as a 21-year-old to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and then went to law school at the University of Alabama. And the first week that I was there, I saw a notice that there was a Young Democrats meeting, and I went to the Young Democrats meeting, held at the Student Union Building, and the first person to greet me at the door was Morris Dees. And of course, I didn't know him, didn't know a thing about him, but we just went together. We just went together, just like that, sat together at the meeting, and at the end of it, he asked me where I lived. And I told him I was a few blocks away. So he gave me a ride. I had walked over. And we sat in his car in front of the house. I was renting a basement underneath the house of a family, and we sat down until 3:00 in the morning, talking about the things that we had been doing with our lives up to that point. And we saw that we had so many mutual interests, and we went in business that night, and we decided to go in business. We were in business eight years.
Were there ever any disagreements between the two of you? Millard Fuller: Never. We were just amazingly like two peas in a pod, and the only worry that I ever had was that he was outworking me, and he always felt the same way about me. We just worked hard, and we were dedicated to making our various business enterprises a success, and we had a huge success, but what happened, and what eventually caused the change in my life, was it became obsessive. Being in business and making money was just everything, and everything else in my life got subordinated to that. How did that play out, Linda, since you probably were the one who felt it the most?
Linda Fuller: I met Millard when he was still in law school and had just gone in business with Morris. And in the afternoons -- I was a senior in high school, while he was in law school, a big age difference. My mother didn't like that so much, but, you know, that was okay. And so in the afternoon sometimes, I would go over and I would help paint these student apartments that -- they had bought the houses -- and were fixing up to rent. At night, we would deliver birthday cakes, because one of the things was a birthday cake service. And so I would deliver in the girls' dorms and he would deliver in the boys' dorm. And so he got me involved in these business ventures, even before we married.
Is it true that it was through a mistake that he got to know you, and that you started dating? Linda Fuller: Oh, not a mistake, but it was an unusual circumstance.
He called me up one night, this was during the summertime. And you know, he was looking for another girl that he had met when he was selling desk blotter ads at a movie theater. She was selling tickets, and after he finished his business with the theater owner, she was gone. And they would not give her phone number. So he was very persistent, and very determined whenever he wants to meet somebody or talk to somebody. He got the Tuscaloosa phone directory and started calling all the Caldwells, and I think I was about the third one that answered. And I knew this person he was looking for. And so, in the course of me looking through the directory, trying to help him find the telephone number for this other girl, we struck up a conversation. I myself was looking for a tall guy to date, and so one of my first questions to him was, "How tall are you?" and when he said six-four, well, you know, I fumbled around. I didn't give him this other girl's phone number. And he came over that night. We went out and had a Coca-Cola at the Student Building at the university, and dated my whole senior year of high school.
So you became a team, both in your personal life and helping in the business? Millard Fuller: But that changed after we moved to Montgomery, and that created part of the problem. How do you mean?
Millard Fuller: She started to college, went back to college, and eventually got her degree while having two children at the same time, but we went separate ways. My life was over here running this business, law practice. Eventually, we closed down the law practice and devoted full time to business. We started publishing cookbooks, selling tractor seats and candy and toothbrushes, and developed a big business, a multi-million-dollar business with hundreds of employees, and I never saw her anymore. I mean, it was like I abandoned her. That's the story of a lot of people in America, particularly at that time. Millard Fuller: Right, but a lot of it had devastating consequences on the families, too. A lot of people in politics, their personal life falls apart, and a lot of people who are in a head-long rush to make success in business ventures, their family life falls apart. And ours almost fell apart. She ended up leaving me and going to New York City, and we were almost divorced. And that's what precipitated a change in our lives. Linda, what was it that finally made you decide to leave your husband when you were having these problems?
Linda Fuller: I was still in my 20s, my early 20s, and after I finished my courses at the college, which was just a couple of blocks down the street, I didn't need to work. I got my degree in elementary education. I basically wanted to stay home with the two kids that we had had during the course of me getting a college education, and didn't need to work, had all the money, you know. I had my own bank account, my own Lincoln Continental, we had a cabin on the lake. So what more could a woman want, right? I was probably one of the most miserable human beings in Montgomery, Alabama, but I didn't know what to do. Here, everybody was just gloating over these two young men that were making themselves millionaires, basically overnight, and I was just miserable, and I was miserable for my kids -- our kids -- too, because they saw their father at suppertime, and that was about it. I didn't want to live the rest of my life like this. So not knowing what to do -- we had lived in New York City for short periods of time, I knew a pastor up there -- and I just told Millard, I said, "I've got to go away for a while and think and get some counseling and pray and figure out what we can do." I think it was a bit of a shock to him.
Millard Fuller: It was not a bit of a shock. It was a total shock. I mean, since a very early age, I have always been in charge of whatever I was doing. I was the person that was making the decisions, and here she was sitting on the edge of our king-size bed telling me she didn't love me. And she was deciding what was going to happen next, and I couldn't believe it. I mean, I was thinking to myself, you've got 2,000 acres of land, and you can go out and choose any one of 30 horses to ride, and you've got two speedboats, and you've got a cabin on a lake and you've got a maid and you've got so many clothes you can't get them in the closet, and you've got a Lincoln Continental, and you've got everything, but I could see in her face and in her voice that she was totally unhappy, and she was thinking about leaving me. And that brought back this flood of my mother dying suddenly, and the dream that I had had all my life of having a loving family, and here it was falling apart. It's difficult to communicate what a devastating effect it had on me, and nothing seemed to be important anymore, just nothing. And she left and I was just -- it was probably the most miserable time of my life while she was in New York, and I didn't know what was going to happen next. It was out of my control.
But ultimately, you decided to do something.
Millard Fuller: Eventually. She wouldn't see me for quite a while, and eventually, I became so torn up that I couldn't sit at home. And what I did was take the children to grandparents and rented an airplane and a pilot. Our company had a pilot, and we just got in the airplane and flew to Niagara Falls, just because I was just totally torn up. And we just went up there, just riding around in this airplane and flying over Niagara Falls and got a hotel room. And I was calling Linda every couple of hours saying, you know, "Will you please see me?" So eventually, she agreed to, and we flew then from Niagara Falls to New York, and the pilot went on back home. He didn't know, I was ashamed of what was going on, and I didn't tell anybody. The pilot had no idea what was going on, but I just went into the hotel and saw her, and that's when the reconciliation started.
How did you come to that reconciliation? What agreement did you come to?
Linda Fuller: See, I used to beg him to stay home some with me and the two children in the evenings. And I can remember one time actually going out to the car and just physically trying to keep him from going to the office, and I would even go down to the office a couple of times and just tell him, "I'm miserable. Please stay home some," and he would then, for a while, and then he'd fall right back in the same patterns. But this time you came to a very radical decision. Millard Fuller: I don't want to overdramatize it.
We really had an emotional reconciliation, standing on a street just off of Fifth Avenue in New York, and holding each other and crying. And so it was really when we got in a taxi and started back to the hotel -- and there was a sensation of light in the taxi, and it was not anything spooky or mystical. It was just a sensation of light is all I can -- the only way I can express it. And at that moment, there was a revelation that came to me, and that was, "You should give everything you got away and start over." And I just turned to Linda and I said I just felt very strongly a presence that -- and "I just feel like we should give everything we got away and seek God in our lives." We both came from Christian homes, but we had gotten so far away from it, and she didn't hesitate a minute. She said, "I think that's what you should do."
Linda Fuller: We were so much in love when we were married, and it was so sad, you know, to have seen that just dissipate over those five or six years, and so I saw the money, and all the houses and material possessions as what had caused us to drift apart, and that struck a real chord with me, just to get rid of all that stuff that had caused us to drift apart.
What did you give away? Linda Fuller: Everything. We sold the house, and then we gave that money away.
Millard Fuller: Morris Dees and I had had a business agreement where if either one of us wanted to leave, we'd give the other one the opportunity to buy us out. So I contacted him, and we made arrangements, and every penny of the sale we gave away from the company. We didn't save one single penny. We gave all of it away. And like she said, over a period of time, we just got rid of all of our other assets, and we went on a pilgrimage. We didn't know what we would do. We had no earthly idea. She was like 24 years old. I was 29, and we just decided to seek for God's path for us. We didn't know what that would be.
What did your kids think when you gave up all your posessions and embarked on this quest? Millard Fuller: They were real small. Linda Fuller: Yeah. They were five and three. So the only thing they knew was they were glad Daddy was home and that we were together and doing things together. We took our first family vacation after we made that decision. Millard Fuller: The first thing we did was get in the car and go to Florida and spend two weeks just going around. Linda Fuller: They were having a ball. Millard Fuller: The kids had never had so much fun in their lives. Did you ever wonder if you'd made the right decision? Did you ever miss the speedboats and the Lincoln Continental? Linda Fuller: I'm asked that quite often. "How in the world could you give all that up?" It was just such a relief. I've never regretted it, getting rid of all that stuff, and it freed us up to really have an enriching kind of life.
Millard Fuller: Prior to leaving business, our lives had gone in separate ways, and we really became strangers to each other. After we left business and decided that we would seek a common path, and let that path be God's path for our lives, we worked together, and we've always worked together from that point until this day. And the children were involved in it. We were together. We did things together, and it was exciting. And even though, instead of driving a Lincoln Continental she was riding a motor bike, she was riding a motor bike as a happy woman, not a frustrated woman. She was a fulfilled woman, and she had her child on the back of the motor bike, and they were having an adventure. For a kid, it's more fun to be on the back of a motor bike than it is in the back seat of a Lincoln. And we were taking trips down to the Zaire River in a river boat, and we would go out and get sand out of -- I mean, it was -- in fact, one of our kids said to us recently -- she said, "Daddy, how could we ever thank you for how you raised us?" It was a thrilling moment, because our kids had a storybook childhood. We went to see the gorillas together in the forest. We floated down the Zaire River. We went and had picnics at the Botanical Garden. We dug out ant hills, and made blocks, and painted houses, and the kids had an adventure. We all had an adventure. We climbed a volcanic mountain together and camped out on the rim of the volcano. It was a marvelous experience that we had as a couple, and that we had together with our kids.
When you came back to the United States, and this was now a full-fledged operation, did you still run up against conventional business resistance?
And you get to work with Jimmy Carter. MIllard Fuller: He gets to work with us. He gets to work with you. I understand your first attempt to involve President Carter with Habitat was not successful. Can you tell us about that?
Millard Fuller: I had a friend who was working for the old Washington Star newspaper, and I called him up one day and asked him about what he was doing and so forth. He's a man that had been with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. And he had gotten a new job with The New York Times, and so he said to me right over the phone, "I've been wanting to talk with you, because I want to do something about Habitat for Humanity, but I need an angle." I said, "Well, I've got an angle for you." I said, "I've been trying to get Jimmy Carter involved, and I have not been successful." That was at that particular point, I had not been successful. So what I did was write President Reagan a letter and asked him to come build houses in Plains, and maybe that would get Jimmy Carter involved. And he put that in The New York Times, and that irritated Jimmy Carter big time. And he didn't communicate directly to me, but he began to tell other people that he didn't appreciate me making such a comment.
Did you ever regret that? Millard Fuller: No, not regret, because I wanted to get everybody that I could get involved. And sometimes you have to do something to get their attention, even if it's in a negative way. But President Carter is a wonderful man, and he doesn't hold that against me in the slightest degree, to my knowledge. He never has indicated it. President Carter did eventually become very inolved with Habitat. How did that finally come about? He lives near Americus, was that just serendipity?
Millard Fuller: It was not serendipity. He actually lives in Plains, which is about nine miles from Americus. It's the same county. It's the same locale. But when he came back from the White House, for years he has taught Sunday school, and he was teaching Sunday school at his Little Maranatha Baptist Church. And he began to say things to people in the Sunday school class, that he was interested in what we were doing in Habitat for Humanity. It was a very small program at that time, and I began to hear these things. So we had a meeting in Americus, Georgia, of our board of directors, and we invited him to come and speak to our board. He agreed to come, and he came and he said nice things. I really didn't know President Carter except by reputation, and Linda and I didn't know either one of them, but he did some other things. Then in 1983, Linda and I led a big walk. We've done several marathon walks, and '83, we did our first one from Americus, Georgia to Indianapolis, Indiana. It was a 700-mile walk. And just without any personal invitation, but just by general announcements, Rosalynn Carter came that morning and we started to walk with Amy, and walked with us to the edge of town. And we walked side by side with her. She was saying nice things about what we were doing, and very affirming and supportive. And then at Christmas of that year, they made a modest contribution. If my memory serves me correctly, it was like $500. I told Linda one day, I said, "You know, President Carter, in several ways, he's expressed interest in what we're doing. I think I'm going to try to go talk to him."
So I got an appointment and went out to his house in Plains, and I just sat down in his office. And this story incidentally is in one of my books entitled No More Shacks. But I said, "President Carter, I'm out here as a neighbor," and I said, "You and Mrs. Carter have expressed interest in Habitat for Humanity in various ways, but I'm out here to ask you a simple question. Are you interested in Habitat for Humanity, or are you very interested?" Well, he was amused at how I posed the question. He said -- he looked at Rosalynn and he said, "Well, I guess we're very interested." I said, "Well, what do we do with that?" He said, "I'll tell you what, you go back to your office and write me a letter, and in that letter suggest ways in which you think we can be helpful," and he said, "And don't be bashful." So I went back and I called up everybody I thought -- Linda and I talked it over -- and I called up everybody I thought who had had any wisdom. I said, "A former President has asked for a list. What should I put in it?" I took two weeks to write the letter, and I eventually sent him back a letter and asked him for 15 things, things like join our board of directors, help us write letters to do fund-raising, come out and build on the building site, and so forth. I mailed it to him. Within two days, I got a phone call. "Millard, I want you to come back. I want to talk to you about your letter." So I went to his house. He had the letter on his coffee table. He said, "You wrote a good letter." Well, I was hoping he'd agree to do two or three things. He went over the list and agreed to do all 15, and from that point forward, he's been with us now 15 years. That was 15 years ago, and one of the things he agreed to do was -- every year -- a building blitz, where he would go somewhere and build houses for a week, and he's been faithful every year for 15 years. They've gone out and built in a different place, a bunch of Habitat houses.
Do you think that President Carter's presence -- the high profile he has brought to the project -- was significant in taking it to the next level?
There's a wonderful quote from President Carter saying, "Millard has the vision. The rest of us have the headaches." Millard Fuller: Linda has said that, too. Linda Fuller: Millard is very creative. He has a new idea every minute, and it takes quite a work force to make them reality. So that's why we say, "He has the dreams, we have the nightmares," figuring out how we are going to do all of these ideas. Sometimes he sets a little bit unrealistic goals, and it's a real stretch to fulfill those goals. That could be anybody in business! CEOs are known to do the very same thing. Things can go awry in that situation. How do you keep it from collapsing? Millard Fuller: The board of directors of Habitat for Humanity International is a very responsible group of people from around the world who guide the policy of Habitat for Humanity. We now are in 60 countries. We're building in 2,200 cities. We've built 65,000 houses as of mid-1998. We're continuing to build a house every 45 minutes, but I'm never satisfied. The reason I am not satisfied is because I know how big the problem is, and I realize that unless we accelerate the pace, we are not eliminating poverty housing. The problem is getting bigger, so we've got to constantly search for better ways to do what I think God has called us to do in a faster way. It's like the space exploration program. You've got to figure out how to do it better, faster, cheaper.
In 1990, there were some questions about your leadership specifically. There were some charges of harassment. What was that all about, and what have you done about it? Millard Fuller: Well, Linda alluded to this earlier. Her family was more Victorian, not touchy-feely. My family -- my father especially was a very touching, loving man. What happened with me was I always saw myself as a country boy from East Alabama, and that's the way I behaved, as a country boy from East Alabama. But Habitat sort of grew up so fast that I did not realize what was happening, and it just really sneaked up on me. And all of a sudden, I had some people saying how I was behaving towards them was not appropriate. I was totally shocked. I couldn't believe it, but that's what was being said. And Linda was really shocked. She always stood by me 100 percent during that whole time, but it was a very difficult era. But you have to understand that that situation really got blown out of proportion, because there was a person in our organization who was trying to leak the story to the press, and the press kept saying, "What is the story?," and he said, "Well, Millard Fuller is acting inappropriately." "With whom?" "Well, we can't tell you that. It's an in-house thing." They said there's no story. Well, what happened, President Carter learned about this person's attempts to put it in the press, and he wrote a private handwritten note to this person saying, "Do me a favor. Do Habitat a favor. This is getting worked out. You are not helping the process." So after President Carter sent this note, was there a change in the organization? Were other people put in charge of the day-to-day operations?
That dovetails with the experience of a lot of founding CEOs. Over a period of time, the business just gets so big that you need to specialize. Millard Fuller: Right. I know how to manage. My degree from college is in economics. I managed the Koinonia Farm. I managed Habitat for Humanity in a more hands-on way for the first 14 years, but no person can do everything. If you stay at home and run the shop, you can't be in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, doing an interview. You can't be going to California to have meetings, in Springfield, Illinois and all around the world -- which Linda and I do now on a regular basis -- with work in 2,200 locations. All of them would like to have us visit, and we go as much as we can, but doing so puts you out of touch with the headquarters more than you would be if you spent half or three-quarters of your time there. What's going to be the next step for Habitat? More and more houses until you reach the ultimate goal? Millard Fuller: Linda is involved in a lot of the new stuff that we're doing, some very exciting things in more creative construction methods, and in women's involvement in Habitat.
Linda Fuller: Getting the Carters involved, and Rosalynn was in a big way -- she had actually not done much hammering or worked on a construction site before -- but she pitched right in there and she learns quickly. She can now case out a window and do most anything, and it's beautiful to see that partnership, because on a building site, they are working side by side. But she sort of gave women permission to come out and help in the construction. Since that time in 1984, we have had more and more women on the construction site, to the point where we have done probably about 200 houses built by all women, and now I'm helping to start an actual specific program in Habitat for Humanity International we are calling Women Build. And this will be announced actually this summer, to encourage women to participate, learn construction skills, whether they are working on a house with all women or whether it's co-ed builds. We've got all these houses that need to be built, you know. Men are going to need some more help, and we get students involved, retired people. All ages come out and help us.
Do you think you'll see that in your lifetime? Millard Fuller: It won't happen in my lifetime, no, no matter how long I live. Does it matter? Millard Fuller: It doesn't matter, because the idea has been launched.
I think it is a modern-day religious and social movement that has been birthed, and the young people are picking it up. The young people are out there now by the thousands, and they are embracing this idea that people who get sleepy at night ought to have a place in which to sleep, that human beings ought not have to live under a bridge. Human beings shouldn't live on a grate. Human beings shouldn't live in houses that are not suitable for human habitation. They are embracing that idea, and I am very hopeful that we are going to be able to accomplish what we have set out to do.
Is that the Fullers' American Dream? Millard Fuller: It is much more than the American Dream. It is God's dream, and it transcends national boundaries. It's a part of the American Dream, but it is a dream that is so much bigger than the American Dream. God is not an American citizen. Jesus never had an American passport. This is a worldwide vision, and our vision is for everybody -- of whatever nationality -- who gets sleepy at night, they ought to have a place to sleep. There's another question we'd like to ask you both before we finish here. Were there any books that you read as a child, or even as an adult, that have been pivotal for you?
Millard Fuller: Without a doubt, the book that has impacted me the most has been the Bible. I carry a Bible with me almost all the time and read it, try to read it regularly, and it's just such a profound book that has survived the ages. And I think it's unfortunate that a lot of young people who read all kinds of books never read the Bible, that the most important book to me in the world is not read by a lot of our most intelligent young people. It's just like, you don't read the Bible, you've got to read other books, but the Bible has been very important to me for years and years and years, and continues to be. And then Thomas Kelly wrote a book that impacted me very positively, and that's A Testament of Devotion, very powerful book. He talks about the concept of "the eternal now" -- that so many people are worried about what happened in the past, and are thinking about what is going to happen in the future, and they always miss what's going on right now. So that is an important concept. And then Linda's mentioned all the writings of Clarence Jordan, who exposed us to the idea of relevant religion. A lot of people relegate religion to a distant past, to another part of the world. They love the good Samaritan doing his good deed between Jerusalem and Jericho, but they don't relate it to who they are and where they are. So all of that, and the concept of making your life count, and realizing that the thrust of Jesus' message was from heaven to earth, and not from earth to heaven. That was a tremendous revelation to me, and that God's love extends to everyone. God doesn't have special people that he loves more than other people, but God loves everyone, and if that is the case, and we are trying to live our lives like we envision God wanting us to live our lives, we too should have a love that extends to everyone.
Thank you so much for speaking with us today. We really appreciate it.
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