Loyce Del Boyette

At 36 he became the state’s youngest economic development director. Now he is lending his vision to Tabriz, the Arkansas Arts Center fundraiser, which he says will be elegant as usual, but not in the

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JOHN SYKES JR. - HP Cover - Del Boyette
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JOHN SYKES JR. - HP Cover - Del Boyette

A snowy evening last month helped cast the vacant dining room at Terry’s Finer Foods in a honey lamplight, and there sat Del Boyette, a regular, rolling the wet wax of a tabletop candle around its glass perimeter the way Don Draper might wet rocks ’round a drained tumbler.

“Neither of my parents were college educated,” he says, by way of explaining his spectacular Now.

Boyette is the erstwhile director of the Arkansas Economic Development Commission (then the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission) and principal and founder of Boyette Strategic Advisors, an economic planning consultancy. Its clients include the Tennessee Valley Authority, the commonwealth of Kentucky, the Little Rock Port Authority. On Saturday, he’ll host the biggest party of his life — the biennial Tabriz fundraiser for the Arkansas Arts Center.

Boyette looks like someone, someone famous, and so I asked him. Anthony Hopkins, yes! But Merchant-Ivory produced Hopkins of Remains of the Day or fava-beans-and-chianti Hopkins? The retiring butler or the charismatic cannibal?

Sadly, that’s the only Hopkins anyone seems to conjure or ape anymore — Hannibal Lecter — and that’s not the Hopkins who would most likely chair Tabriz, which last time around, in 2013, raised the stakes for fundraisers everywhere in town when it hiked admission to $750 a person (60 percent over the previous ticket price). It is, once again, the truly elite fundraiser, not just the oldest fundraiser.

Last time around, the table settings were exquisite, with intricately detailed china and gold-rimmed glasses. The chairman then was Kaki Hockersmith, the Clintons’ preferred interior designer. This year it’s the economic development adviser, and he says, “we have our budget, we’re staying within budget, we’re coming in under budget.”

“It’s going to be a very elegant evening, but yes, I would agree, it may not have that tony quality,” adjutant co-chairman Millie Ward said later.

“A fresh approach to Tabriz,” Boyette says this night. “Simple, and perfect.”

“Equally elegant and equally enjoyable for the patrons who attend,” Ward said, “but it’s going to be a different kind of elegant. It’s just — different.”

The thing one must know about the principal of Boyette Strategic Advisors is that he was named successor to Arkansas Industrial Development Commission Director Dave Harrington at 36. In 1993 Gov. Jim Guy Tucker picked Boyette to head a state agency charged with home-growing companies, enticing others here, and creating jobs in the state. He was paid roughly $80,000 to start, which, if that sounds like a lot for a 36-year-old state employee, is downright risible by any market valuation of an agency chief with 130 employees. (Today, he’s the boss of seven and presumably making a whole lot more.)

It was the turning point of his life.

“I was 36 for God’s sakes! I worked hard. It was rewarding, and the governor placed confidence in me. I’d dreamed of being director of AEDC. What do I want to do when I grow up? I want to be director of AEDC. And then, all of a sudden, I was.”

Back at the restaurant, the waitress says the special this cold night is a center-cut Wagyu rib-eye with celeriac gratin and haricots vert. Boyette is a bit of a foodie, which is why he’s a regular at Terry’s. A good example of this is that guests of Tabriz will have their own Riedel wine glasses by which to sip Mira pinot noir. That — the Mira wine — suggests he’s also a synergist and a locavore: Mira is the vintage of former Republican National Committee lieutenant and Arkansan Jim “Bear” Dyke.

Speaking of politicos, into Terry’s walks state Sen. Keith Ingram and Rep. Deborah Ferguson, both of West Memphis, and the senator stops at the former AEDC director’s table to chat.

“Do you have that football?” Boyette says.

“Oh, Lord, because of Tabriz,” Ingram says to Ferguson.

“See, it’s all about Tabriz,” Boyette says to me. “Keith is friends with Archie Manning, and we have a sports” memorabilia element to the auction, “and Keith is getting a football signed by Peyton, Eli and Archie.”

TOM THUMB WEDDING

Boyette was born the only boy of Frances and Delma Boyette in Magnolia 58 years ago. One of his earliest memories, he says, is of shelling purple hull peas on his grandmother’s wide front porch, but he also says he vividly remembers being the minister at a Tom Thumb wedding in kindergarten. It was the first time he was encouraged, not for doing something correctly, but for having presence — “being” somebody.

“I guess I was always one, growing up, to be in a leadership role … always one who’s taken responsibility,” he says, then pivots. “Wow, you’re really interested in, you know, this kind of reminds me of conversations I had with my therapist years ago.”

If he has learned one thing in his life, he says, it’s the certainty of karma. Of Newton’s third law of motion. Of what comes around, goes around. And, then, separately, this line from Hebrews 11 about faith — “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.”

If you’d asked the eighth-grade Del Boyette what he’d do for a living he would have said small-town lawyer. “I was pretty good at making a case, and telling a story.” But in 1984, with a business degree from the University of Central Arkansas, he went to work for the congressional campaign of Judy Petty. Petty, who gave Wilbur Mills a bruising in a losing race 10 years earlier, this time lost to another scandalized Arkansas pol, Tommy Robinson.

Anyway, Boyette campaigned for Petty alongside Harrington’s wife, and the AIDC director took a shine to Boyette enough that, the morning after the returns came in, the young campaigner was in Harrington’s office talking about a job.

“He said, ‘Ever thought about working in economic development?’ I said, ‘You know, honestly, I have, but how do people get those jobs?’”

Harrington hired him, and when he himself left the director’s seat after another monumental election — the one that put Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton in the White House — Boyette was heir apparent, and new governor Jim Guy Tucker made it so.

“I remember I went to Jim Guy and Betty Tucker’s house when they lived in Robinwood on Glenridge,” he says. “He was lieutenant governor, and it was a reception for a company that was locating in Arkadelphia.”

“I remember commenting to Betty Tucker, ‘I love your art collection.’ It was sculpture from abstract to whimsical to clever — a great collection. She said, ‘The art collection’s Jim Guy’s, the antiques,’ or maybe it was the furniture, ‘are mine.’

“I had a conversation with him that night, and he said, ‘Yeah, you of all people need to be collecting art,’ and I said, ‘But how would I know what to buy?’ And he said, ‘Buy what you like. Period.’”

TABRIZ

Boyette’s earliest memory of seeing high art comes from fourth grade, in Nashville, where his parents owned a dairy bar and pool hall. The Arts Center’s Artmobile came through town. “I was always interested in politics, and I remember very distinctly that we always referred to it as the Rockefeller mobile” — this was before Winthrop Rockefeller became the 37th governor and first Republican chief since Reconstruction — “And I’m thinking that’s the first time that I ever saw art.”

“People don’t think of the Artmobile and where it is each and every week. I think about it. I think about why I give the time I do to the Arts Center, and it’s probably because of the exposure that people [here] have to art through the Arkansas Arts Center.”

It’s not easy, giving that time. Boyette Strategic Advisors turns 10 this month. The morning after Terry’s he flew to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., where his firm is making a major economic development blueprint for the Greater Fort Lauderdale Alliance. Just this Thursday it was to kick off its strategic planning process for the Little Rock Port Authority with a three-hour “visioning session.’’ (It was canceled because of the winter storm.) The $73,600 contract is for a strategic growth plan that supposes this nexus should be the nation’s “most efficient inland port,” the authority’s chairman, Chris Mathews, said last month.

“Del loves this community; he comes home here every night,” port Executive Director Bryan Day said Tuesday.

Yes, Day’s staff is familiar with the port authority’s assets and potential clients, but Boyette’s “the prophet.” Bringing investment into the area’s biggest industrial park is more than logistics and communication. It’s forecasting and networking, marketing, luring investment that may be on the fence.

The firm is on the hook for a plan, and “a plan that’s gonna be dog-eared and marked up, pages dirty because we look at it every day, and we fold it up and put it in our back pocket when we hop on a plane to go to Washington, D.C., to talk to our congressman, or to Atlanta to talk to site selectors,” Day says.

And Boyette’s vested. Because “Del is not going to get on a plane and go home to South Carolina at the end of the day.”

Some time ago the Tennessee Valley Authority, the federal government’s largest corporation by geography and scale, contracted with Boyette Strategic Advisors twice, first to develop and administer the Valley Targeted and Prepared Community Program, and more recently, the Valley Sustainable Communities Program.

The firm inventories location assets — railroads and shipping lanes and interstates — and available workforce; it builds a market strategy based on “cluster analyses” and “shift-share analyses.” It’s profiling, like what I’m doing here, only arcane. Very, very arcane.

“You know what, I could never explain to my mother what I do,” Boyette says.

Back at Terry’s, Boyette’s calling at Ingram from across the empty dining room. Tabriz, he says, is the same weekend as the SEC basketball tournament. Ingram hints he may have to miss Tabriz because he’ll be in Nashville, Tenn., for the games, and Boyette — who has not missed a tournament in recent memory — thinks not.

“You have not gone to the SEC tournament in six years — why are you being cocky with me?” he says. “The last time you went to the SEC tournament you had dinner with me, in Atlanta, that was eight years ago. You and Betty and I ate at the Horseradish Grill. Y’all stayed at the Ritz Carlton.”

Ingram says that must be right.

“But, do you, now, are you seriously gonna come [to Tabriz]?”

“If I’m here, I’ll come.”

“Well, you need to go ahead and buy your ticket. There’s only 350 of them.”

“Let me try to talk to —,” he trails off.

OUT IN THE WORLD

I steer Boyette back to his formative years. I ask him if in college he pledged a fraternity or started a food club. “Food club, ugh. Lord,” he says. Then he shrugs and admits that in high school he may have been student body president and representative to Boy’s State, and, “why would you … ? You don’t need to put that in there.”

Boyette doesn’t appear interested in acclaim or high regard, or even the past. In November he lost his oldest sister, Delagene Byers. I found this out from his old high school chum, Dr. Russ Smith, whose high school sweetheart-turned-wife, Susie, first met Del when he moved to Nashville as a second-grader.

The Smiths were both representatives on the student council of which Boyette was president. They’re close. The kind of close that, when one is in town, the other’s door is always open.

“Del’s very intelligent,” the veterinarian says. He combines a sharp memory with “a real keen sense about people.”

Five years ago Boyette stayed at the Smiths’ the weekend of their 35th class reunion. They reminisced about the pedagogical preference at the time of having students memorize long passages of literature, and the most grueling for these three was the prologue of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Boyette then sprang up and recited the whole passage, and in the original “auld” English.

“Of the 80 people we graduated high school with, probably a handful have really gotten out in the world and succeeded beyond Howard County,” Russ Smith says. “Those of us that are still here where he grew up, we’re proud he’s got out in the world and been really successful.”

The real accomplishment Boyette wants to emphasize is chairing Tabriz. “An accomplishment is a successful Tabriz!”

And then he says something for which there’s no value add, no market mechanism. It’s just human. He says, “I’m a pretty tough guy, but I have a pretty sensitive people-side, too. I truly care about what people think. I guess that’s why Tabriz is intimidating.”

“I do care” what people will think.

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