Few knew that when William R. Lovett separated from the Davises and Winn Dixie, he went on to own/control Piggly Wiggly. The mutual affiliation is noted on the building signage below. Due to a likely noncompete agreement, Piggly Wiggly never had stores in Jacksonville even though, for many years, we were its corporate HQ's, as I recall.
At some point, the Jaxson should do a story on Lovett who was a partner/major shareholder in Merrill* Lynch and owned Jacksonville Shipyards, a cruise line and many other business ventures. His 3 sons also went on to gain prominence in their own right. So notable was he that the NY Times did an article on him upon his death in 1978:
JACKSONVILLE. Fla., March 16-William R. Lovett, who turned a $10,000 investment into a $100 million supermaret and snipping empire, died at St. Vinewes Medical Center yesterday. He was 87 years old and lived in Jacksonville.
At his death Mr. Lovett was president and chairman of the Board of the Piggly Wiggly Corporation, a chain of about 1,000 franchised supermarkets with some $2 billion a year in sales. He owned full or part interest in about 200 of the stores.
Mr. Lovett had traveled extensively on business in recent years and was in good health until about five weeks ago when he contracted pneumonia.
He was once a partner in the stock brokerage firm of Merrill Lynch Pierce Fenner & Smith, in which he later remained a major stockholder.
Mr. .Lovett began, his business career with the North Carolina and St. Louis Railroad. He served from 1911 to 1917 as secretary to the freight traffic manager of what was then the Seaboard Airline Railroad.
He later was employed as secretary to Edward W. Lane Sr., founder of the Atlantic banking chain, one of Florida's biggest banking concerns.
In 1920, with $1,000 in savings and $9,000 in loans, Mr. Lovett bought the Tyler Grocery Company. That company became part of the Winn‐Lovett Grocery Company, which grew to 75 stores.
In 1939, Mr. Lovett sold his 51 percent interest in Winn‐Lovett to the James E. Davis family. After the sale, Mr. Lovett bought control of the Piggly Wiggly Corporation and expanded it to its present size.
In the 1960's, he merged two Jacksonville shipyards into what is now Jacksonville Shipyards Inc., and sold the operation to the Fruehauf Corporation in 1969.
Mr. Lovett, who did not like publicity, managed to stay out of the public eye over most of his business career, which spanned more than 50 years. However, he inadvertently got into the news when a company leasing one of his ships used the vessel, without his knowledge, in the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
His son, William D. Lovett, president of the Commodore's Point Terminal Company here, said that the vessel, the Rio Escondito, was leased then under. “a bare‐bones charter to the Ward Garcia lines.”
“That was an arrangement under which the charterer supplies the crew and we would not necessarily know the itinerary,” the younger Lovett explained today. “It was only later that we found out about it. One of our employees said later that he knew about it at the time but I didn't know anything about it. I was told that the ship was used as a command ship. I don't know if that's true.”
The Lovett business interests also gained public attention when a Lovett passenger liner, the Bahamas Star, rescued survivors from a competing liner, the Yarmouth Castle, when that ship burned at sea off the Bahama Islands.
Mr. Lovett is also survived by two other sons, Laurence D. Lovett of New York, who is chairman of the executive committee of the Metropolitan Opera Association and a member of the board of directors of, the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, and Bradford D. Lovett of summit, N.J., who is president of the investment banking division of Merrill Lynch, and six grandchildren.
https://www.nytimes.com/1978/03/17/archives/william-r-lovett-grocery-chain-chief-was-head-of-piggly-wiggly-and.html
*Another area story: Charles Merrill, the founder of Merrill Lynch, was a native of Green Cove Springs and lived in Jacksonville for awhile:
Charles E. Merrill, the son of physician Dr. Charles Morton Merrill and Octavia (Wilson) Merrill,[2] was born in Green Cove Springs, Florida, where he spent his early childhood. In 1898 the family briefly moved to Knoxville, Tennessee but within the year returned to Florida to settle in Jacksonville. After the school had been damaged in the Great Fire of 1901, his parents decided to send him to the college preparatory academy operated by John B. Stetson University (now known as Stetson University). Merrill studied there from 1901 until 1903 and then in 1903 for the final year of high school was transferred to Worcester Academy. After two years at Amherst College, Merrill spent time at the University of Michigan Law School from 1906 to 1907; worked at Patchogue-Plymouth Mills from 1907 to 1909; at George H. Burr & Co., New York City, from 1909 to 1913; then established Charles E. Merrill & Co....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_E._Merrill
While we are at it, Williams of Williams-Sonoma was also from Jacksonville:
...Born in 1915 in Jacksonville, Florida, Williams learned to cook from his maternal grandmother, who had owned a restaurant in Lima, Ohio. When the Great Depression hit, his father's auto repair business failed, and the family moved to southern California. His father fared no better there and soon abandoned his wife, son, and daughter. Eventually, Williams found work on a date farm near Palm Springs, Sniff's Date Gardens in Indio. The couple who owned it, Dana and Abagail Sniff, took him in and drove him to high school in the mornings while he spent the afternoons working at the date shop and grounds. Williams lived with the Sniffs for seven years until just after his graduation from high school. His sister died in 1933 from a brain injury, after being hit in the head with a baseball. His mother returned to Florida, and Williams finished school and moved to Los Angeles.
During World War II, he spent four years overseas as an airplane mechanic for Lockheed International, working on aircraft in India and East Africa. After the war, Williams returned to Los Angeles and one weekend, joined friends for golf in Sonoma. He fell in love with the town and moved there in 1947, starting a successful business as a building contractor.
Williams bought the Ralph Morse Hardware Store in Sonoma, California, in 1953.[5] Over the next few years, he gradually converted its stock from hardware to French cookware, filling a niche in the market as European cookware was difficult to find for purchase in America at the time.[6] The concept was successful, and he moved his operations to San Francisco in 1958. More than a decade later, in 1971, Williams-Sonoma introduced its first mail-order cookware catalog.[7] Soon after, the business began expanding to more locations and grew to over 600 stores nationwide by 2015.[8] Chuck Williams sold Williams-Sonoma to Howard Lester and Jay McMahan in 1978 for $800,000 ($100,000 in cash and the assumption of $700,000 of debt.) He served as chairman of the company until 1986, and he remained extensively involved with the company, overseeing merchandise selection, conducting public appearances, and writing cookbooks, for the remainder of his life.[9] The company went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 1983....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Williams_(author)
