James Presley:  

Attending St. Annes for the school year starting September 1956, pressure from my father resulted in my attendence and eventual graduation at Fort Smith Senior High in the school year beginning September 1957. After graduating in ‘60 I played football for the Razorbacks on a full scholarship in 1960 after rejecting the same offer from Notre Dame (Coach Kuharich). That summer I attended the U of A on a National Science Grant, and after returning to Fort Smith upon my father’s death, assumed management of his business at age twenty. Selling the business after five years I attended UofA for a year then transferred to Harvard, graduating in 1969. This was a difficult transition as there were twenty three openings for transfer and eight hundred twenty applicants. Stanford Business School was next with a Masters. Hundreds of companies vie for graduates there and I selected the largest U.S. Industrial real estate developer, Cabot, Cabot and Forbes, Boston, as a vice-president. As was typical this was the beginning of a nomadic lifestyle as an officer in large companies in the industrial real estate field. After that became a succession of my own real estate development firms, the most notable was my organizing a development company as general partner with three Mitsui companies i...Expand for more