Every disagreement they had came down to the same two lines.
“I want you to show me,” Liz would say.
“No,” her dad would answer. “You just need to do it.”
That’s how Liz Morris remembers the years when her dad was handing the company over to her. On the newest episode of Tales of American Spirit, the two of them sit down with Bill LuMaye to talk about how that handoff really went. Liz calls it “bumpy as hell.” Dwight admits that most of what he knew lived in his head, and Liz couldn’t just pull it out of him. Neither of them had ever done a handoff before. How they fought at work and still stayed close is the best part of the episode, and you should hear it from them.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.
Dwight has told his story on this show before. He was the guest on the very first episode. This conversation is different because Liz is in the room, and the two of them don’t remember everything the same way.
The story starts in Oak Park, Illinois. Dwight wanted a flag for his house and had a hard time finding one. There were a few little shops in Chicago selling them, and that was about it. So he started selling flags through a catalog, which nobody in the industry was doing, and in his first year he took 34 orders. His wife, Lynn, was working full time as a librarian while he built it, and he says the company wouldn’t have survived those early years without her. From there they get into the early days, like the company’s first two employees, who had the same first name and the same middle name. Both were named Wanda Gail. They weren’t related.
From there, the conversation turns to the handoff. Liz explains why she left after college to get a job somewhere nobody knew her dad, and what brought her back. At one point, Dwight tells her something that had never occurred to him before. Bill asks him how he felt when Liz changed the company’s name. Carrot-Top was named after him. There’s a piece of news about where Freedom and Glory stands in the industry today. And Liz repeats the advice her mom gave her about working with her dad, which might be the funniest moment in the episode.
Right at the end, Dwight talks about the role he has now that the business is hers.
Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube.