Henry B. Tippie*

Henry Tippie was born in 1927 on a dairy farm near Belle Plaine, Iowa. From the time he was a toddler, he was expected to help with the business, including milking the cows and helping his father with deliveries. As a preschooler, he scrambled in and out of the family's old pickup truck carrying milk to houses. The cows had to be milked twice a day, seven days a week, which made it impossible for the family to ever leave the farm. For all their labor, they earned 5 to 10 cents on each quart of milk.

By the time Tippie was 11, milk had to be pasteurized before it could be sold commercially. Because the equipment to do that process was too expensive, his family began raising pigs and cattle. At the time, prices for those commodities were low, and they barely earned a living. Often, Tippie and his father hired themselves out to neighbors to earn extra money. Still, Tippie believed he wanted to be a farmer when he grew up. His mother, on the other hand, had different plans. She wanted more for him, beginning with an education.

Tippie attended the same one-room schoolhouse that his father attended through the eighth grade, which was as far as his father got with his education. After graduating from high school, Tippie joined the U.S. Army Air Forces. He served as a staff sergeant with the 20th Air Force in the South Pacific during World War II.

Upon his release, Tippie entered the University of Iowa in Iowa City with the help of the GI bill. The University of Iowa College of Business has since been renamed the Henry B. Tippie College of Business. He earned a bachelor's degree with a major in accounting, but he had a difficult time finding a job. At one point, he was earning $175 a month and living in a shared room at the YMCA in Des Moines. Finally, he ran an ad in the Journal of Accounting and received a reply from John W. Rollins and Associates in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

At the time, the Rollins operation had four small auto agencies and three small radio stations, and it was launching its leasing operation. Tippie soon became an integral part of the business, working first as a controller and then running the daily activities of the leasing division. In 1964, he played a major role in acquiring Orkin Exterminating Company. The deal became a Harvard Business School case study because it represented one of the first leveraged buyouts of a major corporation by a small company.

Tippie spent more than 50 years with Rollins. He served as chairman of its executive committee and as chairman of the board of Rollins Truck Leasing Corp. He later became chairman of the board for Dover Motorsports, Inc. and Dover Downs Gaming & Entertainment, Inc. and the presiding director of Rollins, Inc.