Although his business success has taken him to every corner of the United States and beyond, Roy Drinkard’s home has always been in North Alabama.

Born in Falkville, schooled at St. Bernard, and trained in his Cullman-based family business, his leadership has straddled both sides of World War II, and Cullman County has always been the chief beneficiary of his efforts.

Drinkard remains one of the last living participants in the postwar economic transformation that helped diversify Cullman away from an agriculture-only economy to one that now offers a myriad of skilled jobs and professional services.

In many ways, he’s a living embodiment of all the changes that have led the Cullman area to its present position as a vital economic engine for a community its size – and he’s not done pushing our area forward.

For his lifetime dedication to Cullman’s economy, civic and community leadership, Drinkard is being recognized as The Cullman Times Distinguished Citizen of the Century – it’s the first time in annually honoring local distinguished citizens the newspaper has recognized a recipient who has contributed to the community’s betterment and prosperity for nearly a century.

As recently as this month, Drinkard donated a valuable piece of property to the Cullman County Board of Education; a piece of land on Cullman’s northern fringe that is slated to be home to a new, state-of-the-art multipurpose complex for county school students’ athletic and fine arts training and events.

For Drinkard, donating the land wasn’t a case of playing favorites. Rather, it was a case of recognizing an opportunity to do some good, and acting decisively on it.

“It was very easy to realize that it was a good project,” he says. “It’s true that the county schools have historically had to do more with less, and that the city schools seem to have more of the things that help make a well-rounded K-12. But I can tell you that I don’t regard it – I never have regarded it – as a city-versus-county thing. I regard opportunities like this as being for the whole Cullman community.”

Education is near the top of Drinkard’s list when it comes to identifying what the Cullman area must get right if it wants its future to look as bright as its past decades of postwar success.

“I’ll go back to the 1940s, when I had been in Guntersville operating one of our funeral homes,” he says. “We sold that business, and my daddy called me to come back to Cullman to work at the Pontiac-GMC place.

“Well, people would come to me and say, ‘Mister Roy, help me get a job for my son – he’s in Illinois; he’s off in some other state: he has a job, making tires; making cars – but we want to bring him home.’ And I’d look around and realize that there wasn’t much that I could do, because we didn’t have those kinds of jobs, and we didn’t have a way to train people to do those kinds of jobs. In a different way today, we still face that.”

Back then, Drinkard and others in the now-fabled “Flying Fifty” group of local business leaders flew to Florida to recruit one of the area’s first postwar factories – a King Edward Cigar plant. It began a “synergy,” as Drinkard calls it, that saw new industries and local training initiatives leapfrog each other to keep up with the pace of the Cullman area’s growth.

But with success comes change and new challenges. Drinkard, who for 28 years chaired the Industrial Development Board of the City of Cullman, has long observed how a growing and diversifying local economy has created fresh problems that Cullman County hasn’t yet fully solved. Housing is one; recruiting industries that specialize in high-end technological and professional fields – fields that could enrich the area’s economic diversity still further – is another.

“One of the most expensive things to ‘own’ is a child: We bring them up, we educate them – and then they leave,” he says. “That’s true not just of Cullman, but throughout most of Alabama. When we invest in a child like that, and then they move away to find high-value work, we’re not getting the value; the commercial value, of that education back. We need to do everything we can, on both the business and the education side of things, to change that.

“We’ve found that not everybody wants to go to college. They may want to acquire some technical skills – and this is really a challenge, not only with our present educators, but with employers all around. We need the jobs that will make people want to move here, but you’ve got to build housing for them. And as much as we need new people to move here, we also need people not to move away.”

Drinkard has a good feeling about it all. Although he’s closing in on his 100th birthday, he’s not despairing of the idea that only the older generation is preoccupied with offering vital local leadership.

“I’m an optimist,” he says. “You can see that we have leaders here. I don’t want to start naming them and leave anyone out, but yeah: I can name people who already are leaders, going all the way back to 21 years of age. The cream rises to the top.”

For all the jobs; for all the education; and for all the measurable opportunities that he hopes Cullman will continue to create, Drinkard says it’s Cullman County’s immeasurable gifts that will keep this area special through all the change.

“I was coming out of a restaurant; out of Jack’s at Holly Pond the other day,” he says. “And a man and his wife, they came over and helped lift me and get me into the car. We didn’t know them. In fact, we don’t often know the people who come up and offer us a hand like that, and it happens a lot, wherever I happen to be if I’m out that day in Cullman County. There are a lot of good people here – and they’re everywhere you look.”