He liked to wander the factory floor, greeting workers by name and inquiring after their families. “I remember some mornings pulling up beside Mr. Whitaker in his little brown Studebaker,” a former employee recalled. “He’d give me a wave and I’d give him a wave back. We were going in to work together. We were all after the same thing.” (There was an unwritten rule that Reynolds executives didn’t drive anything bigger than a Buick. Even years later, when David Rockefeller came to Winston-Salem for a speech, an assistant asked that he be provided with a limousine. One couldn’t be found in the
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