Hank Meijer ’73
Man of Commerce, Man of Letters

By Mary Hunt

Meijer

"The cliché is absolutely true, 'Retail is detail,'" says Hendrik (Hank) Meijer, 51, who, as CEO of Michigan-based Meijer Stores, must do daily battle with the likes of Wal-Mart and other national big box competitors. But unlike his counterparts in the industry, he balances the details of retailing with a passion for writing and the arts.

Since graduating from U-M as an English major in 1973, Meijer has taken courses in history and film-writing, collaborated on a film script about the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and written a thousand-page “not quite yet publishable” manuscript on the life and political career of Arthur H. Vandenberg, Michigan’s influential but largely forgotten Republican senator.

Meijer’s schedule is full of civic and familial duties as well (he’s a divorced father of three teenagers), but his work habits follow the example of his grandfather, Hendrik, and father, Frederik (Fred). Grandfather Hendrik came to the United States in 1907 as a 23-year-old factory worker, socialist and atheist. He immigrated to Holland, Michigan, because he could speak Dutch there. He disliked the prevailing religiosity of his predominantly Calvinist fellow Dutch Americans, however, and in 1912 he took up barbering in Greenville, a Danish-American community 35 miles from Grand Rapids.

In 1934, Hendrik, then 50, and son Fred founded the first Meijer store, the Meijer Grocery in Greenville, with $338.76 worth of merchandise obtained on credit. The Thrift Market, their Depression-born enterprise, grew into Meijer’s Thrifty Acres, the nation’s pioneer one-stop-shopping, 24/7 supercenter that combined groceries—including exceptionally high quality fruit and vegetables—with discounted soft and hard goods. Hendrik and Fred moved to Grand Rapids in the 1950s to expand their grocery chain. The company soon adopted a Dutch boy in wooden shoes for its logo, a quick way to appeal to the area’s price-conscious consumers. They bought comfortable ranch houses (Fred still lives in his today) on Grand Rapids’ northeast side, and that’s where Hank grew up and went to Creston High.

From Hamilton to Michigan

When Hank left Grand Rapids for Hamilton College in upstate New York, he never expected that he’d come back home to join the family business, or chronicle Michigan history or become so charmed by his home town. Neither of his parents had gone to college. Fred Meijer, ever-curious, a natural historian and storyteller, had been immersed in the grocery business since the age of 14, when he started out as a bagger.

Hank’s mother, Lena Rader Meijer, was a German farm girl with a head for numbers. She had worked at the original Meijer Thrift Market in Greenville. But Hank’s Aunt Johanna, an excellent student, had graduated from the University of Michigan in 1939.

Fred and Lena loved taking Hank and their two younger sons to grocery conventions that offered possibilities for educational side trips like the Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg or William Randolph Hearst’s estate, San Simeon. “Those are the kind of things that get you hooked on history,” Hank says.

Grand Rapids Community College and Central Michigan University were typical college choices of Hank’s classmates at Creston High School. But Hank was an all-around good student (“student council, Boys’ State, that kind of junk”). He was part of “a small coterie of pseudo-hippies” with artistic and intellectual aspirations who read Solzhenitsyn’s novels. Skiing and cross country were his athletic passions.

Hank wanted to go East to college and chose Hamilton over several others because of its picture-pretty hilltop campus, small size and excellent track and cross-country program. Fred hoped that the Eastern mystique would not lead his eldest child away from Michigan and the family business. He hoped all three sons would stay with the company but never tried to steer their careers. (Doug, the middle son, joined Meijer soon after earning his BA in business at U-M in 1976. He is co-chairman of the board now that Fred, 83, has retired. Mark, the youngest, started his own ambulance company and is past resident of the American Ambulance Association.)

Fate worked in Fred’s favor. “I had spent so much effort searching out colleges that no place could live up to it,” Hank recalls. A knee injury early freshman year forced him to quit the track team. and, having come from a large high school where everybody said hi, he was alienated by Hamilton’s Eastern reserve and its dominant fraternity system. By Thanksgiving, he was ready to transfer. He visited Michigan and Michigan State.

The MSU admissions officer, however, said Hank was bailing out of Hamilton too soon. So Hank reluctantly resorted to family connections to transfer to Michigan. A high school friend had touted the Honors College as a “cool atmosphere” within the U-M’s multifaceted LS&A college. Honors Director Otto Graf, remembering how smart Hank’s Aunt Johanna had been in the 1930s, let him in even before the required transcript arrived.

The newspaper business attracted Hank, but he found his journalism class’s use of a computerized punch-card system to analyze sentence length and verb use “horrible.” On the other hand he loved his English courses. He was closest to Medievalist and Irish studies specialist Leo F. McNamara, whom he regards as “a marvelous, marvelous teacher.” A Harvard classmate of John Updike, McNamara, now a professor emeritus, was the rare professor who had not gone to graduate school. He oversaw Hank’s senior dissertation on Updike and “turned me into a tea-drinker,” Hank says.

Hank had decided to graduate in three years. He won third place for his Hopwood essays, joining a distinguished company of Hopwood winners in his era, including Lawrence Kasdan, Jane Kenyon, Sven Birkerts, Lawrence Joseph and fellow Grand Rapids native Max Apple. Hank’s essay subjects were telling; they included the father-son relationship in Odysseus, the origins of a Grand Rapids television station and the lone-wolf tradition in American popular culture as suggested in TV heroes like Paladin in Have Gun, Will Travel and Tod and Buz in the On the Road knock-off Route 66.

From Newsman to Biographer

Upon graduating, Hank took his own road trip west on Route 66 in search of a newspaper job, but to no avail. He settled for a job back in Michigan on the Observer newspapers, a suburban chain published by U-M alumnus and former regent Philip H. Power ’60. Hank and the Observer editor soon left the paper to start a competing publication, the Plymouth Community Crier. Being in Plymouth meant Hank could take U-M creative writing courses, which, he says, “showed me that I clearly had no future in writing fiction.” When the publisher returned from a leave to resume editing duties, Hank decided to leave—right, as it happened, when his father wanted to entice him back to Grand Rapids to write a company history.

Hendrik and Gezina Meijer’s Dutch dining room furniture highlights the Dutch heritage board room at Meijer Inc. Hank and Fred Meijer stand with Pam Kleibusch, their administrative assistant for 45 years, in front of the portrait of Gezina’s mother, an influential matriarch with zealous utopian socialist convictions.

The result was Thrifty Years: The Life of Hendrik Meijer (1984, Eerdmans Publishing), a book now in its second printing and available at every fourth counter of a Meijer store and in many bookstores. Thrifty Years (a “fascinating piece of Americana” in the judgment of fellow biographer Leonard Mosley) tells not only Hendrik’s story but also documents the working-class Dutch anarchist-socialist milieu he arose from and provides insight into American retailing, too. From 1907 to their marriage in 1912, the ebullient, naturally entrepreneurial Hendrik exchanged almost daily letters with his quietly idealistic socialist fiancée, Gezina Mantel. While he worked to save money for their marriage, she remained in Holland in the dreary textile mill town of Hengelo, where workers toiled long hours only to live in poverty.

Thrifty Years proved a turning point for Hank. It showed him that biography, with its ready-made characters and implied narrative, was an ideal match for his literary and intellectual interests. To learn the historian’s craft for writing the book, he took history courses at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo.

Writing about the ebullient grandfather for whom he was named caught Hank up in the drama of the Meijer story. Hank says Hendrik, who died in 1964 when Hank was 12, “is so vivid it’s as if he’s still here today.” Hank saw the distinctive father-son relationship, ideals and management principles behind the company. Both Hendrik and Fred were willing to try lots of ideas, quick to acknowledge their mistakes, ever ready to delegate responsibilities and always on the lookout for talent within their ranks to train for leadership. Hank saw how the firm had constantly sought loans to expand, and almost went public in 1978. The canceled public offering was a blessing in retrospect, because it permitted the firm to grow without interference from stockholders and Wall Street.

Hendrick Meijer at 28, in 1912

By 1984, when the biography came out, Hank had become active in the Grand Rapids cultural scene. He reviewed books for the Grand Rapids Press, whose book review editor, sensing a kinship, introduced him to Larry TenHarmsel, an English professor and now a dean at Western Michigan, who is the author of Dutch in Michigan, a perceptive and witty short book about a subculture in which “moderation was, in their minds, like intolerance: a sure sign of impurity.”

Thrifty Years underscored Hendrik and Fred’s generosity and lack of pretense. Now those attributes help Hank lead the company as it continues to reinvent one-stop shopping. “With 73,000 employees, it would be easy for the CEO to feel like a ruler,” a Meijer grocery department manager told Michigan Today. “Meijer family members preach and teach humility. They haven’t forgotten where they come from.” On occasional store visits Hank likes to fill in, if needed, as bagger, his and his father’s original Meijer job.

‘Make Mine Tea, Bartender’

To avoid being consumed by his public role and its round of regular management meetings, civic obligations and frequent trips, Hank connects with his local world in behind-the-scenes, ordinary ways. He not only plays the expected role of arts supporter but shows up at independent films and poetry readings of the grassroots Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids’ alternative arts organization. “Hank likes going into any old place, sitting down at the bar and taking an interest in local people,” says his long-time pal Bob VanderMolen, a housepainter-poet with an international reputation. Schedules permitting, Hank, VanderMolen and TenHarmsel like to meet at the Cottage Bar, Grand Rapids’ oldest watering hole—where Hank drinks tea.

The Meijer store in Greenville, Michigan

Conversations with Gordon Olson, the Grand Rapids city historian, inspired Hank to follow Thrifty Years with an article for the Michigan Historical Review on Senator Vandenberg. Hank saw Vandenberg as the forerunner of the Republican moderates whom he saw rise to ascendancy in 1966—George Romney, Charles Percy, Nelson Rockefeller and Grand Rapids’ own Gerald Ford. Hank admired them “for their ability to strike a balance between competing social interests in a thoughtful, honorable way.”

Drawing some inspiration from Lytton-Strachey’s sardonic, completely unscholarly character portraits of Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning and other “Eminent Victorians,” Meijer burrowed into Vandenberg’s papers in U-M’s Bentley Historical Library. Soon he learned that some years back a U-M doctoral student had published the first volume of a projected two-part Vandenberg biography that would say all the world needed to know about Arthur Vandenberg.

Shortly after lecturing on Vandenberg to the Historical Society of Michigan, Meijer heard from the daughter of the biographer, who had suddenly died: would he be interested in the boxes of research her father left? “There was a sense, if I don’t pick up this project, who’s going to?” Meijer recalls. The gift jump-started him on the “most fun part of biography, pure thrill—interviewing people—so I wrote the necessary letters to set up interviews.”

Soon Meijer was meeting with Gerald Ford, Dean Rusk, Clark Clifford and Herbert Brownell (campaign manager for Thomas E. Dewey ’23 when Dewey and Vandenberg were rivals and allies); with “great talkers among old newsmen who had schmoozed with Vandenberg”; and with the author Gore Vidal. As a boy, Vidal had assisted his blind grandfather, a US senator, and met and observed Vandenberg.

“I tend to relate pretty well to elderly people on the track of their youth and their memories,” says Hank, a natural listener. After 10 years, he had produced a thousand-page manuscript—too long, he knew—and sent it off to be critiqued. Humber College in Toronto offers a program that connects aspiring writers with established authors in their fields who critique their work. If deemed worthy, their work is passed along to an agent and marketed. D.M. Thomas, a biographer of Solzhenitsyn better known for novels like The White Hotel, felt that the Vandenberg manuscript, when shortened and improved, “has the potential to be a superb political biography. I can’t help but wonder at your industry in setting out so clearly the internal struggle of American politics. Your account of Vandenberg growing up in Grand Rapids is vivid and informative. You build up a convincing portrait of him—ambitious, conscientious, a bit pompous and idealistic.”

Full-Time CEO and Amateur Scholar

How could a non-academic without staff support produce a thousand-page manuscript? Of course, the deceased biographer’s research was a huge help, and until he became CEO in 2002, Hank’s schedule at Meijer—in advertising, marketing and then as corporate vice-president—had been flexible enough for him to make research trips and take off up to two mornings a week for writing. Also, he points out, “I don’t play golf or watch TV sports.” Although his social life is quiet, he tries to make time for readings at universities in his region.

Meijer went to a reading in Kalamazoo that included Central Michigan University English professor Liesel Litzenburger ’89. Litzenburger read from her recently published Now You Love Me, funny stories told by a perceptive girl of 10 about life with her single mother in a northern Michigan resort town. Meijer, whose first marriage ended in divorce, read it, liked it and wrote her a letter. Now, more than a year later, they are engaged to be married.
Meijer and his writer friends critique and sometimes edit each other’s work. He edited Lorca: A Dream of Life, a biography by his friend Leslie Stainton, editor at the U-M School of Public Health (see “An Author’s Dream,” Spring 1999 Michigan Today).

At their regular Cottage Bar get-togethers, Meijer (center) and TenHarmsel (left) listen while poet-housepainter VanderMolen (right) holds forth. The trio often finishes and amplifies each other’s sentences.

Being Meijer CEO isn’t too bad a fit for a guy who wanted to be a reporter and occasionally still dreams of getting a master’s degree in writing “in a program that doesn’t require a residency.” As in journalism, the subject matter in his type of retailing is richly varied and constantly changing.

One day Meijer might look at signage in the flagship Knapp Corners Meijer store in Grand Rapids, where new ideas are often tried out, or fly to Dayton, whose Meijer stores were the first to add name-brand fashions in a superstore setting. Hank and Chief Operating Officer Paul Boyer (who coined the firm’s “Think big, move fast, have fun” motto) exchange visits with cooperating supermarket chains in Texas and upstate New York that sometimes buy together with Meijer Stores to offset the scale advantages of Wal-Mart and Kroger. A glamorous current task is working with New York interior and restaurant designer David Rockwell (Comerica Park) on a new look and feel for future stores and pending remodeling projects. “The design of the shopping experience is increasingly important as the company tries to distinguish its stores from those of its competitors,” Meijer says.

An essential but less pleasant duty is reviewing employee benefits to stay competitive with Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart’s overwhelming economies of scale pressure its competitors to adjust their benefits. For Meijer, the strains of competition are offset by the reward of sometimes being able to support institutions he appreciates. He has a special fondness for the U-M Bentley Historical Library and the Theodore Roethke House in Saginaw, and enjoys serving on the architect-selection committee for a new Grand Rapids Museum of Art.

Best of all is the pleasure of traveling with buyers to suppliers around the world. He loves his real-world, completely un-touristy interactions with other cultures in places like Singapore, Romania, India and China. “Hank’s always hoping he’ll be someplace when trouble breaks out and he can become an on-the-scene reporter,” says friend Bob VanderMolen, an internationally published (house)painter-poet.

“Maybe the worst place I ever saw was a drop forge in the Punjab, with 12- and 14-year-old boys running around in sandals. It clearly wasn’t up to OSHA standards,” says Hank, whose company refuses to carry products known to have been made by child labor. “But those boys did get a few hours of schooling a day, and brought home money for their families. To me they’re clearly much better off than the beggar kids who swarm around cars at every corner!”

In Ho-Chi-Minh City (formerly Saigon), he drove by the soon-to-be-demolished US Embassy and spotted the ladder that throngs of Vietnamese used to climb to the roof and escape via helicopter as the Americans were pulling out of Vietnam in defeat. Back home, he suggested to his father, who sits on the board of the Gerald Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, that the ladder could become a museum exhibit. Fred loved the idea—to him the ladder symbolized man’s desire for freedom—but fellow board member Henry Kissinger hated it. The ladder reminded him of US humiliation and failure. Gerald Ford took Fred’s side, and the ladder is at the museum today.