By Anne W. Semmes
Sentinel Features
Donald Kendall, age 94, arrives at the door fresh from his exercise routine in his expansive gym. Kendall keeps active. He was a tennis player, but has lately taken up golf. He’s still a passionate fly fisherman with destinations like Alaska, Iceland, and his ranch in Pinedale, Wyoming. “The New Fork River runs through the ranch,” he says.
In his spacious home photographs documenting his life are displayed on every surface and level, of presidents, popes, and travels with his wife Bim –they’re celebrating their 50th anniversary – and their four children. One photo shows the Kendalls warmly dressed at the South Pole.
Sitting in his sunny living room overlooking Greenwich Harbor Kendall talks about growing up on his father’s dairy farm in Sequim, Washington, “right across from Canada,” 50 miles outside Seattle. It is there that he acquired his work ethic he so successfully exercised as progenitor of the Pepsi Generation, overtaking Coke under his reign, and cracking open the Iron Curtain with the arrival of the first American company to be planted and producing in the then Soviet Union.
Kendall describes that early work ethic of his youth. “I got up early in the morning to milk the cows, then took the bus to school. If I missed the bus I had to walk the two miles to school.” When school was out he was cutting and raking hay. “We had horses. We cut the hay with the horses and raked the hay with the horses.” With that work ethic firmly entrenched the new tractor arrived.
Kendall has left behind a tribute to his father Carroll Kendall having established in Sequim the Carroll C. Kendall Boys and Girls Club. “My father was English and my mother Charlotte was Scottish,” hence Kendall’s middle name of MacIntosh.
The Kendalls came to Greenwich in 1965, the year Kendall secured the 144 acres of wetlands and polo field in Purchase, N.Y. that in five years would become the prize winning Edward Durrell Stone designed PepsiCo world headquarters and the Donald M. Kendall (inspired) Sculpture Gardens.
The Kendalls spent many happy years on Porchuck Road before moving some 10 years ago to Field Point Circle. Contented with his hometown he says, “Greenwich is full of nice people – and beautiful views.”
Kendall had put that Sequim gained work ethic to good use building PepsiCo. “I had a work ethic – spending long hours – 12 hour days. I don’t think you get a job working eight hours. You keep going with 12 hour days. I frequently had customers out on weekends. You stay involved – you get to know your people and you get to know your customers.”
There’s a story told of Kendall’s early salesman days of working nights “selling Pepsi syrup to restaurants when the customers were available in the evening.” Success happens he says, “Whenever the love of what you’re doing is stronger than the fatigue of doing it.” He’s coined the phrase, “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.”
Surely his reputation for fortitude and relationship building was forged in the military. He was only in his second year of college when he and his two brothers all came home for that Christmas when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. “My two brothers and I then signed up for the Navy (We were living on the water all the time).” His father’s reaction? “Who’s going to milk the cows?”
Kendall and another brother were Navy pilots in the Pacific. “I flew a patrol seaplane carrying 500 pound bombs and torpedoes in New Guinea, the Admiralty Islands and the Philippines. I was shot down by a Japanese plane that I shot down. I landed in the water off the Philippines. Admiral Halsey was out there with his fleet. He sent some planes after me. My brother was located in the fleet and helped locate me.”
Kendall was rescued by a submarine and by war’s end had two Distinguished Flying Crosses and other medals.
“I got out of the Navy in 1947,” he says, with no intention of returning to college. “I wanted to go fly fishing – I was headed for Nova Scotia to do some fly fishing for Atlantic salmon.” But before he left he met up with an executive from the Pepsi Cola Company then located in Queens. “He offered me a job in sales for $400 a month,” says Kendall. “I told him I had already made my travel plans” Kendall was told, “Go do your fishing and start when you come back.”
By 1957 he was President of Pepsi-Cola International. By 1963 he was President and CEO of Pepsi-Cola, and by 1965 he was CEO of PepsiCo at the company’s creation – then moved to Park Avenue in New York. He retired as chairman and CEO in1986.
Kendall’s skill for cultivating relationships is shown in the photographs he points out, including one of then President Nixon in the Oval Room visiting with the Kendall family. “Nixon worked for me as a legal advisor in the 1960’s before he became President. We opened things up around the world. He traveled with me all over the world.” A fateful story found in a biography of Kendall tells how Kendall was asked early in Nixon’s presidency, to use his considerable skills “to solicit advice from the outgoing President Lyndon Johnson.” Johnson recommended to Nixon to use an audio taping system he installed “as a means to organize his memoirs.” Nixon’s recorded conversations would lead to his removal from office.
Before a photograph of Kendall and former President George H.W. Bush, he tells, “When he was Ambassador to China, he helped me in China, and then when he was out of office as President, we traveled for a week all over China.”
Before his years of traveling with presidents and Ambassadors, Kendall had some narrow escapes in his time as president of Pepsi-Cola International. In 1958, departing his hotel in Iraq the night before the king was overthrown, the next day rioters killed some of the hotel guests. In Lebanon, prior to the arrival of the Marines Kendall arrived at his hotel with a military escort, and promptly took a swim as low flying planes came shooting at him.
Today Kendall says he’s no longer involved in politics, domestic or international. “It’s the younger generation’s problem,” he says. Passing on his choice for the next presidential race, he demurs to that next generation, “Pick a good one, one that has a good work ethic, one who is interested in international as well as domestic affairs.” He does not want to see the next president “getting us into all these confrontational affairs unless it’s affecting us.” He believes, “What we’re involved in now doesn’t involve us.”
No doubt Kendall readily shares his take on politics with his good friend James “Jim” Baker, former Secretary of State. ”Jim’s a wonderful person,” he says. “We talk foreign affairs. He’s very knowledgeable on all those subjects. Jim is one of the best informed people on domestic and international affairs. He is highly qualified.”
“We met Jim and Susan when they were in Washington. We became very good friends and I had him out to our ranch in Wyoming.” The Bakers then acquired their own ranch there. “Susan is lovely lady. When you meet her you know Jim Baker is a grand salesman.”
The ranch affords ample space for the gathering of the Kendall clan, three sons, and a daughter, and 10 grandchildren. Donald Jr and family live in New Canaan, son Kent in California. Son Edward, from an earlier marriage, lives in South Carolina with sister Donna also in California.
Kendall saves his last words for the topic of cultivating a family, something very important to him. “It’s important to develop good relationships with your children, to spend time with them, talk to them – and get involved with them in sports.”
