Those who knew Bronson Ingram are quick to say that he was one of the most private, not to mention the most wealthy, people they knew. Ingram, who died of cancer in 1995, turned a medium-sized oil and barge company that he inherited from his father into one of the largest wholesale distributors in the world, becoming the wealthiest man ever to live in Nashville in the process. He did so with the least amount of publicity. Although he was tempted to raise money through an initial public offering, Bronson Ingram would have none of it. The idea of dealing with meddling analysts and nosy reporters was anathema to him.
Given his fiercely private nature, the recent publication of a Bronson Ingram biography—written by his widow Martha Ingram, no less—is somewhat surprising. The book, E. Bronson Ingram: Complete These Unfinished Tasks of Mine, was just released by Hillsboro Press in Franklin. It has sold more copies than any other nonfiction book at Nashville’s Davis-Kidd Booksellers during the last two weeks.
So why did Martha Ingram (with the help of ghostwriter D.B. Kellogg and family friend Keel Hunt) write the book? She offers several explanations, including wanting her 12 grandchildren to know more about their grandfather. “After Bronson’s death, I asked Keel [Hunt] to interview many of the people who were closest to Bronson so that we would have those on tape,” says Ingram, who heads the board of Ingram Industries and the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust. “For a while, I didn’t know what to do with the tapes once we got them. But after a while, I decided that I would write the book as a tribute to the man I was married to for 37 years, because there was something I wanted to share.”
Like most authorized biographies, Complete These Unfinished Tasks of Mine contains few juicy or controversial details. Rather than tell the complicated aspects of Ingram’s many business ventures, it frequently uses Nashville Banner and Tennessean business stories verbatim, an inadequate storytelling device—to put it charitably—for Ingram’s involvement in the oil pipeline and refinery businesses in the 1970s, for example.
But the book does offer insight and exposes the human side of Bronson Ingram—a hardworking and intelligent man with amazing business skills who could be so gruff as to be rude. “Many things were guaranteed to make him explode, and I always worried that he might die of a heart attack because of his temper,” Martha Ingram writes in the book. In one anecdote, offered by Bronson Ingram’s longtime friend Jake Wallace, Martha Ingram tells her husband that he needs to branch out and make some new friends. “Martha, I’ve made all the goddamn friends I want to make in my life,” he snaps.
Unfortunately, the book provides almost no details about the 1977 federal racketeering case that sent Bronson’s brother Fritz to prison. (Ingram Corp. officials were accused of bribery in connection with a contract with the city of Chicago to haul sludge.) But Martha Ingram writes about the effect the trial had on her family—and about visiting her brother-in-law during his 16 months in prison. “We went in, we signed in, we were frisked before we saw him, and then we went into a dusty little fenced-in courtyard and sat on concrete benches,” she recalls in the book. “It was all so degrading, so horrible.”
Martha Ingram is as aware as anyone that her husband might not have liked his life to be an open book. “I think he would have felt quite ambivalent about it,” she says. “On the one hand, he would have been pleased that I wanted to share his life and his successes with others. But on the other hand, I can imagine him being quite cross, because he never wanted us to talk much about ourselves.”
Other than an event for friends at Vanderbilt and a few book signings for Ingram Industries’ employees, Martha Ingram says she doesn’t plan to spend much time promoting her book. But she says she has gotten enough satisfaction from the experience that she is thinking seriously about writing, or helping to write, a book about the history of the arts in Nashville. “I think there is a wonderful story to be told,” says Ingram, who has pledged $30 million in Ingram foundation money toward the construction of a new symphony hall. “It would be a great story to be told at a time like this.”
