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F I R S T 5 0 Y EAR S
coming in. When economic developers went out, they would
get the references of companies that had moved in. We all got
glowing reports about how well the people of South Carolina
were trained.”
SPECIAL SCHOOLS STEMS THE TIDE
Special Schools had a lot to do with South Carolina’s repu-
tation as a great place to do business. Rather than adopt a shot-
gun approach to education, Special Schools fired a rifle bullet.
Instead of training people for careers, as vocational programs
did, it trained them for new careers in new industries. Dr. Tom
Barton, Greenville Tech president from 1962 to 2008, remem-
bers that Special Schools was Hollings’ idea. “He would say to
companies, ‘What do you need to go into production? We have
the best training programs in the United States, and we can fill
your needs regardless of what they are. And not only that, we’re
going to take these people who have never worked in a factory
and put them into training programs, and they’re going to go
right into your plant and make products you’ll be happy with.’”
Industry people asked, “How can you do that?”
The answer was threefold: great teachers, great equipment,
and well-crafted methods. Tom Barton kept a rubber stamp in
his desk drawer. “I’d stamp ‘Quality’ on everything going out. I
put ‘Leadership’ on one. I’d stamp it diagonally. I wanted them to
see it. I’d put it on anything that was moving. We were fanatics.”
It hadn’t always been this way as Dr. Lex Walters well remem-
bers. “We’ve really never had the skills for what we were recruit-
ing to the state. We’ve never had a base that was prepared to do
exactly what the company needed them to do. But through the
short-term training programs, those needs can be addressed.
You say to that employer, ‘We’ve got this. We’re going to take care
of it. Tell us what you need. You tell us what you need, and we
will have the people with the skills that you need at the time that
you need them.’ So they would lay out the training. We would
have curriculum developers and others work with them to lay
The 1970s
A M O D E L F O R T H E N A T I O N E M E R G E S
