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From dot-com darling to disaster: The spectacular flameout of Andrew Gladney, Part 1

Continued from page 2

Two days before the stock market crashed in October 1929, Howdy rolled out its newfangled product, Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda. Clunky moniker notwithstanding, the drink found a thirsty niche, and not long afterward the company rechristened the beverage 7-Up. The origins of the new name are unknown, but the product proved so successful that Howdy reincorporated in 1936 as the Seven-Up Company, and by the 1940s, 7-Up was the third best-selling soft drink in the world.

Born on a farm in Auburn, about 25 miles north of Wentzville, Franklin Gladney was a self-made man in the purest sense. He went to high school in his own home, studying for state exams in the hope of earning a scholarship to the University of Missouri. Later, while working toward a law degree at Columbia University in New York, he toiled weekends as a trolley conductor on Coney Island. He didn't retire until 1960, when he was 83, and he died a year later a very wealthy man. Family legend has it that Gladney even had the foresight to leave behind a surprise: 1 million dollars in cash, plus some securities, tucked in a safe-deposit box to cover the estate tax tab.

Franklin Gladney's three children would go on to leave their own mark on St. Louis.

Before she died in 2003, Katherine Gladney Wells, known as "Katch," was a devoted benefactor of the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra. A composer, too — nearly every year during the '70s, '80s and much of the '90s, she'd take up the baton and conduct the full orchestra through a piece she'd written for the occasion. Her husband, Ben Wells, went to work for 7-Up in 1938 and rose from advertising copywriter to CEO, a post he held from 1974 until his retirement in 1979.

Lucianna Gladney Ross, meanwhile, is best known as the benefactress of Kimmswick, where she owns numerous acres and since the late 1960s has fought to preserve the town's heritage. Her husband, Walter Ross, was a longtime newsman for the Post-Dispatch.

Franklin Gladney's only son, Graves Gladney, was no less colorful. An illustrator for the 1930s pulp series The Shadow, Gladney was better known around St. Louis as a war hero. He parachuted onto the Normandy beaches with the 82nd Airborne Division on June 6, 1944. He was nationally ranked in trapshooting and reveled in big-game hunting expeditions in Africa. Twice married, Gladney fathered six children by three different women.

"My father was discreet in his associations," recalls Frank Gladney, who didn't meet one of his half-brothers until the boy was in his mid-teens. "But I guess you can't deny that he saw other women."

Gladney says that after trying unsuccessfully to divorce his mother in the late 1950s, his father established residency in Nevada, where it was permissible to extract oneself from a marriage without a spouse's consent. Graves Gladney then married Nancy Meeks, a 26-year-old secretary at the Washington University School of Fine Arts (where he was an instructor until 1961). The couple had two children. Nancy Hope Gladney was born in 1960, Andrew Graves Gladney in 1962.

"Was it a happy family? Well, there were tensions, I suppose," recalls Frank Gladney, who was 26 when Andrew was born. "My father, being a senior person already in his fifties, pushing sixty, maybe left much of the childcare to the mother. Because, you know, he was busy playing golf, shooting guns, playing bridge — things like that. I would not call that a special, tranquil family as far as I knew."

A natural linguist and skilled golfer, articulate and charismatic, Andrew Gladney took after his dad in many ways. But the two didn't have long to get to know one another. On March 24, 1976, at the age of 68, Graves Gladney died during heart surgery. Andrew, his youngest child, was thirteen.

Still, by most standards, Andrew led a charmed youth, highlighted by ski trips to Steamboat Springs and boating vacations in Naples, Florida. As a high school student at John Burroughs, he was the kid who got dropped off each morning in the family Rolls-Royce, won the lead role in several school plays and was a National Merit Semifinalist.

Upon graduation, Andrew left a hint of longing for his late father, concluding his yearbook page with a paraphrase from Mark Twain:

"When I was sixteen, I thought my father was the most stupid person in the world, and when I was twenty-one I thought back and said to myself, 'How could the old man have learned so much in five years?'"

Andrew Gladney's Burroughs classmates predicted that by age 28 he'd be "Chairman of the Board of the Coca-Cola Company." The joke notwithstanding, the Grigg, Ridgway and Gladney families had sold Coke's rival to Philip Morris in 1978 for a reported $500 million.

Graves Gladney, meanwhile, had left behind a trust that furnished a regular income to his wife, children and grandchildren. In the late 1980s, Andrew acquired partial control of his share from his half-brother, who was one of his trustees.

"He was very much into business investing and I was wrapped up in Slavic linguistics and not very active as his trustee," Frank Gladney says today. "So he made the case: Why should I be the do-nothing of his trust, and why can't he play a role?"

The access gave Andrew Gladney some professional freedom, which he used to trade in the stock market during his early working years in New York and Chicago, fresh out of school. (He'd earned a bachelor's degree in English and history at Yale in 1984 and a master's in business administration four years later at New York University.) In 1993 Gladney and his new bride, the former Cindy Lee, resettled in St. Louis.

One autumn day in 1994, from his office in the "7777" building on Bonhomme Avenue in Clayton, Gladney dialed a computer store asking for a techie who could come over and get his Apple and PC computers talking to each other. The store dispatched a 24-year-old college dropout named Tim Roberts.

Roberts got to work building Gladney a network, and the pair realized they had a few things in common. Roberts' sister had gone to Burroughs with Gladney, and his dad was a Yalie. It wasn't long before Roberts felt himself idolizing everything about Gladney, from his photographic memory to his erudite vocabulary to his wealth. "I think the thing that amazed me most," Roberts says in retrospect, "was that Andrew had drawers and drawers full of stock certificates."

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