Carnauba – A Son’s Memoir
Jamie Durand `02
Issue date: 5/14/01 Section: Features
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Carnauba – A Son’s Memoir is ostensibly the story of the recreation of the original 1935 Carnauba expedition. In that year, H.F. Johnson, Jr., Chairman of S.C. Johnson & Son, flew a small twin-engine amphibian plane 15,500 miles, traveling from Racine, Wisconsin, up the mouth of the Amazon River and into Fortaleza, Brazil. He sought to understand the origins of the carnauba palm, a tree whose wax-covered leaves provided raw materials for the products his company produced. Knowing that Fortaleza and its indigenous trees could sustain S.C. Johnson & Son, he planted two palms on the site of the company’s local processing facility. As these trees grew, he said, so would the company. Sixty-three years later, Sam Johnson re-traced his father’s steps from Racine to Fortaleza in a hand-constructed re-creation of the Sikorsky S-38 amphibian aircraft. Averaging 90 miles per hour, Sam and his two sons, Curt and Fisk, flew the same route to the same place.
What Sam Johnson found at the end were the same two palm trees, as healthy and strong as the company itself, but what he found on the journey was more enduring still. Carnauba is not just the story of a vintage plane flown across the hemispheres, and it is not just the story of how one family’s company grew strong. It is instead an intimate look inside a single man and an examination of how he has worked to grow his own family strong.
Samuel C. Johnson is the Chairman Emeritus of S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc. and President of the Advisory Council for the Johnson Graduate School of Management. He has chaired the board of the Mayo Clinic, he is a Regent for the Smithsonian Institute, and he is a member of the Board of Governors for the Nature Conservancy. He is one of the wealthiest men in America, ranking number 52 on the Forbes 400 list, and yet as he showed viewers at Cornell, he is all too human. Sam Johnson is the recovering alcoholic son of an alcoholic mother. He has wondered whether his father cared more about him or about the multinational business he ran, and he listened every month for twelve years as his semi-retired father told him, “I don’t like the way you’re running this company, and I don’t like you.” Sam Johnson has worked hard to understand where he came from and what he will leave behind, and Carnauba – A Son’s Memoir is that story. In the end its message was simple: Success is valuable only relative to the manner and motivations by which it was achieved. Quoting Sam Johnson, “We should not worry about whether we have lived up to the expectations of our fathers…but whether we, as fathers, live up to the expectations of our children.”