Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Today was a day to celebrate the values of a small community. Our featured speaker at Tuesday’s weekly Mount Airy Rotary Club meeting was Ken Lowe, a native of the Westfield community in Surry County. Ken is your classic Horatio Alger hero—a hometown boy who is good and who made good, really good—and is delighted to share that success with his community.

In case you don’t know his name, Ken Lowe is the president and CEO of the E.W. Scripps Company and the person who founded and launched the HGTV network back in 1994. His company manages Food Network, and, with Ken at the helm, Scripps oversaw the launch of the DIY (Do It Yourself) Network in 1999, the Fine Living network in 2002 and acquisition of Great American Country in 2004.

Ken’s list of honors and accolades is impressive (this past February, he was the recipient of the 2007 Broadcasters Foundation of America Golden Mike Award). But what impresses most is Ken himself, a caring and generous human being who credits his small town roots and humble origins (his dad was a tobacco farmer) with guiding his values and informing his vision. Not surprisingly much of his family attended the club today, including his parents Wayne and Barbara and his sister-in-law Teresa Lowe. (And I added to the crowd of fans by inviting two of his colleagues who before their retirement were top executives at Lowe’s Home Improvement, Dale Pond and Bill Warden.)

During his presentation to Rotary, Ken outlined six traits associated with leaders: intelligence; common sense; compassion; courage; adaptability; and integrity. He went on to make a case for each of these traits, lacing in stirring quotes from recognizable national and world leaders. Taking me back to my roots as a newspaper reporter, I jotted them down, such as Winston Churchill’s: “Success if not final; failure is not fatal.” (I’ll have to add it to that other favorite Churchill quote of mine: “Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”)

My dear friend Ann Vaughn—who serves on Simple Living’s National Advisory Board—had the inspiration to invite Ken to speak at Rotary, and he readily and graciously accepted her invitation. Ken returns to the area six times a year and was in our neck of the woods for a family reunion and to celebrate his father’s birthday over the weekend.

After Rotary, we invited him to the home of our friend Betty Wright to do a sit-down interview for season #4 of Simple Living about the wisdom he gleaned from small town life. Once again, he did not disappoint. He talked about the values of community and caring, and his desire in creating HGTV to help people connect with the earth, with their own talents to build and create.

The start of the interview was delayed for predictable issues like the adjustment of lights and audio, and when a phone call interrupted one of Ken’s answers, he was good-humored about having to do a retake, never once giving the impression that he was in a hurry or had better things to do. In fact, in a classic display of small town compassion, when the phone rang (our crew had failed to disconnect it before rolling tape), Ken volunteered that the same thing had happened for his crew the day before when they were shooting his family. Three cheers for small town roots! Three cheers for a leader like Ken Lowe!