Posted 3:18 am Sunday, November 22, 2009
Business Briefcase: Director Of Junior Achievement Works To Build Kids' Futures
Spending most of his childhood working on a dairy farm, Jim Guay decided at an early age he needed career options only a college education could provide.
Today, Guay serves as executive director of the Junior Achievement chapter in Tyler. Junior Achievement this school year is sending volunteers to 181 classrooms to teach children of all grade levels about their community and the working world.
Guay grew up on a rural homestead outside Poolville, a town of about 400 residents northwest of Fort Worth.
"Everybody knew everybody else's business," Guay said. "That was pretty much the big thing. There were hardly any secrets."
He and his family lived and worked on a dairy farm until he turned 12.
"It was hard work," he said. "Most of what I had to do was go herd the cattle in for milking, feeding them, hauling hay, working in the fields and that kind of stuff."
After the family left farming behind, Guay went to work for neighboring farms, hauling hay, watermelons and cantaloupes.
He graduated No. 3 -- in his class of six -- from Poolville High School in 1966.
"I wanted to get an education and not be forced to do hard manual labor, although there's nothing wrong with hard, manual labor," said Guay, who grew up with three brothers and a sister.
He studied business at Weatherford Junior College for two years before enrolling in The University of Texas at Arlington, where he earned a degree in business administration in 1971. He joined the ROTC there, expecting to be sent to Vietnam after college graduation.
"I was prepared to go off and fight in Vietnam," he said. "Luckily by the time I graduated, Vietnam was winding down enough to where I didn't have to go."
Guay took a job with an architecture and engineering company in Arlington, doing surveying work and managing construction of a complex of town homes.
Eighteen months later, he joined Junior Achievement in Dallas. Over the next 30 years, he worked for that organization in Dallas, South Carolina, Baton Rouge, La., and eventually, Tyler.
He came in as executive director of Tyler's fledgling program in 1988. He took early retirement in 2003 and briefly moved back to Baton Rouge before returning the next year.
Back in Tyler, he worked for the East Texas Crisis Center until the Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005 siphoned away the center's financial resources. He rejoined Junior Achievement as executive director the next year.
Today, Guay, 61, serves the organization by raising money and recruiting and training volunteers. Contributions from businesses and two fundraising events -- a bowling event in February and an event honoring a local business person in the spring -- fund Junior Achievement.
"Some volunteers will do more than one class, which we love," Guay said. "They come from all walks of life in the business world, from a lot of companies throughout the community. We also have a lot of parents who get involved in their kids' classes. Some of them are stay-at-home moms, and some of them are stay-at-home dads. We use some college students. We use some high school students."
Junior Achievement has 384,925 volunteers worldwide teaching 367,305 classes to 9.4 million students annually, according to its Web site.
It bills itself as a partnership between the business, schools and volunteers working to inspire students to reach their professional potential.
Guay said it's the program's impact on children that inspires him.
"We help them gain skills that will help them throughout life, not only through business but throughout their lives," he said. "Some already are employees of companies. A lot of them are going to be employers at some point in their lives."
Guay has two grown sons and has been married to his wife, Karen, who works for the state's blind-services division, for almost five years.
"I fish a lot," he said about what he does in his spare time. "We go to garage sales. She shops a lot."
Sources for this column come from business cards randomly drawn from a briefcase. Send cards to Business Editor Brian Pearson at P.O. Box 2030, Tyler, Texas, 75710.
