The proprietor: Lyman Orton and the Vermont country store

The most sophisticated business in Vermont just may be that cracker-barrel bastion of old-timey Vermont goodness known as The Vermont Country Store.

At a time when most real country stores in Vermont are having a hard time staying open, look past the cheese, the crackers, and the barrel and you'll find a complex, multimillion dollar, family-owned retailing business.

But wasn't there a real, old-fashioned country store in the Orton family gene pool? Yes, back in 1897, when the Teachout Orton Store in North Calais was run by Gardner Lyman Orton. But The Vermont Country Store is something else again.

First and foremost, it's an ode to nostalgia – nostalgia for things from the start of the last century, on up to the 1970s.

Then, it's a catalog company producing five yearly catalogs – called "Voice of the Mountains" – offering over 5,000 products and operating out of a large call-and-shipping center in Rutland.

Then it's two large stores – the flagship in Weston and a second one in Rockingham opened in 1967 – that specialize in over-stimulating customers with vast displays of clothing, food, toys and sundries. The stores also serve as Vermont museums – a display of antique toasters here, a stereopticon there – giving tourists a Walt Disney version of Vermont but with higher-quality products. The credo of the store is, "We sell products that don't come back – to customers that do."

The Vermont Country Store is also a large office building in Manchester that is filled with light, cubicles, antiques and art.

And above all, it's a $100 million-a-year business employing about 400 Vermonters, some of them so content that they've been working for the Orton family for 30 years.

Seventh generation Vermonter Lyman Orton, 67, a fit and trim man with sandy-colored curly hair and a big smile, is the man who has overseen most of this remarkable growth. Frank, open and outspoken, in many ways he's the epitome of the old-fashioned Yankee.

"In my mind, Yankee is frugal, practical, common sense, make do, can do, honest, handshake means a lot," Orton told me recently. "That's what it means to me. Am I a Yankee? You bet!"

Can a person come from New York and still call herself a Vermonter, I asked him? After all, we all know the story about the cat giving birth to kittens in the oven, and why they're not muffins.

"Some people can become Vermonters in a few years," Orton said. "They get it. So maybe they're only technically not Vermonters. Some people can live in Vermont for years and years and never get it. It's the getting it that matters more than anything else. Maybe I left out the part if you're bored, you can always go pick up rocks out of the pasture. That's a Yankee recreation."

Did I mention his wicked sense of humor?

The Vermont Country Store was started in Weston by Orton's father and mother, Vrest and Mildred Ellen Wilcox Orton, back in 1946. It has become a tourist Mecca.

"There were 450 people in Weston when we started in 1946 and there are 600 people now," Orton said. "There are more second homes, of course, but it's still a little tiny town, and we've got a 10,000-square-foot store that does $6 million a year in business. And it ain't just people passing by the front door. I was up there two or three days ago and a woman was at her granddaughter's graduation in Dartmouth. She's from Alaska. She said, 'I've been getting the catalog for years, and I said that if I ever get close to there I'm coming. And here I am.' Almost every day I get that from somebody."

Orton is a down-to-earth Yankee merchant first, but he's also a visionary, one noted for finding ways to turn his visions into reality. One example is that he hasn't been the CEO of the company for quite a while, even though he and his sons take an active part in running it. Orton says they're "the proprietors."

"We have outside directors and they're the ones who make the decisions," Orton said. "Why? If I'm the CEO and the chairman of the board and I get out of bed one morning in an ugly mood and I make some stupid snap decision, there's no one there to say anything. It's dangerous."

The current CEO is Bill Shouldice, who was former Governor Howard Dean's Secretary of Commerce.

"By bringing in professional management, you get a double bang for the buck," Shouldice told me. "If you only rely on family engagement, what happens down the road? The Vermont Country Store has management complemented and supplemented by family owners. You have something quite sustainable and quite rare. The Orton family does not own the Vermont Country Store because it's a great way to make money. They own it because they can do things that they think are important for the state of Vermont. This is a family with great vision, that cares deeply about Vermont, and is committed not only to long term family ownership but to leaving the state in better shape than they found it."

Speaking of leaving the state, Orton now lives part of the time in Steamboat Springs, CO.

"When I'm in Colorado I'm able to look at Vermont, squint at it from afar, think about it differently, ponder things," Orton said. "And it got me out of The Vermont Country Store, where I'm kind of obsessed by it all."

Besides the store, Orton's passions are a volatile and unusual mix of Vermont, art and land use planning. I met him in his Manchester office, where part of his large and extraordinary collection of Vermont art is on display – paintings dating from the 1920s to the 1970s. Many of the works show typical Vermont scenes like ice fishing, haying, skiing, plowing with horses or oxen and quarrying slate.

While we were touring the collection, Orton stopped at a framed lithograph of an old Vermont country store. Men with hats and long beards were sitting around a potbelly stove; a dog was sleeping on the floor; in the background, a storekeeper was working behind a counter. It might have been an image painted from life, but like much about The Vermont Country Store, it wasn't. It was 1940s magazine advertisement for Chase & Sanborn Coffee.

"My father saw that ad when he was working in the Pentagon during the Second World War," Orton said. "It reminded him of his father – of my grandfather's store. He decided when the war was over to come back and start the store and the catalog. He was inspired by that picture. That was his story."

Orton started collecting Vermont art 35 years ago, when it was sold at auctions, fairs, flea markets and antique shops. He noticed that it was being bought by outsiders who were taking it out of the state and decided to do something about it. But there's more to the collection that just nostalgia. At its heart is "Changing Times" (1940-1950) by Vermont artist Kyra Markham, a large painting of two gray muscular and yet diaphanous oxen.

"The oxen are disappearing, and through them and under them are all these tracks of bulldozers and tractors and so on," Orton said. "The tracks of progress are overtaking the disappearing oxen from the older days."

This represents Orton's chief concern about Vermont – that the rural folkways and small communities he loves so much may be disappearing. It's why so much of his philanthropy centers on a combination of art and land use planning. His friend Wayne Granquist, the chairman of the board of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital, calls him "the Johnny Appleseed of philanthropy."

"He started the Orton Family Foundation to keep alive a vision of Vermont based on communities and the Vermont of the 1950s and 1960s, when he was growing up here," Granquist said. "He loves small towns and he works very hard to keep them as functional as possible. The foundation his done marvelous work in planning and small town governance. Smart Growth Vermont spun off from the Orton Family Foundation. He's a great supporter of the Weston Playhouse Theater Co. He plants seeds all over the place."

Orton recently scored a legislative success with his Vermont edition of the national "Right to Dry" movement – now Vermont condos, housing complexes and associations and the like can no longer ban clotheslines as unseemly. He's also the man behind the new "The Art of Action: Shaping Vermont's Future Through Art."

In this collaboration with the Vermont Arts Council, he has paid 10 artists about $25,000 each from his own pocket to create visions of potential Vermont futures, both the good and the bad.

"He's given all of us an extraordinary gift," said Alex Aldrich, the head of the Vermont Arts Council. "Anyone with money can hire an artist to create something they like. It's a very different thing to throw the dice at 10 artists and challenge them to create cause-oriented art. To say, 'I trust you to come up with something that's going to challenge the state of Vermont to examine its values and its politics and social mores and get people talking.'"

In fact, whether it's an innovative item for the stores, a new way to manage the company or a vision for preserving the state's values, Orton gets an idea and "hammers it home," said his old friend Barbara Melhado, a personal property appraiser and antiques and art dealer.

"Lyman's passion for the state and his capacity for making these dreams a reality makes him a very impressive guy," Melhado said. "He always seems to be ahead of the mark."

Family Store, Family Story

The story of The Vermont Country Store begins with Vrest Orton.

"My father was born in 1897 in Hardwick," Orton said. "He was married to my mother for 50 years, but before that he was married to another woman. So I have a half-brother who is 82. I wasn't born until 1941, when my father was 43 years old. Which isn't shocking these days, but in 1941 it was kind of odd."

Vrest Orton was a man of many accomplishments. A Harvard graduate, a writer and a publisher, he wrote 19 books, including one about his relationship with Robert Frost, as well as many newspaper and magazine articles. He was a founder and editor of Vermont Life magazine.

Vrest Orton served as a sergeant in the medical corps in France during World War I. Then he entered the New York publishing world. It was the Twenties – one of the country's most tumultuous and creative times.

"He worked with HL Mencken at The American Mercury," Orton said. "Then Henry Luce was starting Time Magazine, and he worked there. He was involved in all the energy of that period in New York. Then the stock market crashed and things were thrown into chaos. So he came back to Vermont, moved into the house in Weston and started the Countryman Press. (The current Countryman Press is not related, although it uses the name with permission.) Like everyone else in Vermont, my mother and father lived hand-to-mouth. He had a little print shop in the garage next to the house."

During World War II, Vrest Orton worked in the Pentagon as a general's speech writer. He could sense that the world was changing.

"He understood that after the war there was already a nostalgia," Orton said. "As a writer, he intuitively knew 'the good old days' was a great story. So he created The Vermont County Store catalog. Then people started saying, 'We're coming up to the store.' So he scurried around and opened the store in 1946. He wasn't a great businessman but he was an excellent writer and thinker. So he could put across his ideas, and the catalog business suited him great."

It was Orton's mother, now 98 and the oldest living graduate of Burr & Burton Academy, who handled the business end.

"Mother was the bookkeeper, thank goodness, because I don't know that my father could handle the money," Orton said. "She put the money in the bank and kept the books and made sure everything was straight in the back room. My father had this ability to do publicity. In 1952, The Saturday Evening Post did this story, 'The Happy Storekeeper of the Green Mountains,' full color, double spread, many pages, and who didn't read the Saturday Evening Post in 1952? So that sort of put them on the map."

Orton was working in the store from just about the time he could walk.

"I wrote an editorial a couple of years ago about child labor at the Vermont Country Store," Orton said. "But I liked it. One of my early jobs was with checks. People mailed in the orders with a check – and we still get more checks than probably any other mail order company in America. My first job was to stamp the backs with a rubber endorsement stamp. When I was five. It was fun."

Then his mother taught him how to use an adding machine.

"By the time I was seven or eight, I was adding the checks up," Orton said. "She taught me about having the checks on the left and the adding machine on the right. She put a piece of paper over the right side of my face so I couldn't see the machine. You have to learn to do it by touch. You got to look at the checks. If you're looking at the keys, you'll make mistakes. It was like I was on the road to becoming an accountant. It was a challenge."

And of course he worked in the store.

"I bagged up candy, waited on customers, cut cheese, bagged up whole grains, worked the register – stuff that kids could do," Orton said. "Before 1969, I think, when we put the sales tax in Vermont, we just had old 19th Century registers. We had money in a drawer, almost like a shoe box, but separated out. And we had a school slate on the counter. And so you'd come in and I'd write down $1.25 and .75 and then add them all up. By the time I was 10, I was a whiz at adding. So you'd get a long list on the slate. I could tell when a customer was thinking, 'This kid adding my stuff up? How do I know it's right?' So I'd turn the slate around and say, 'Want to check it out?' I don't think anyone could add any better than I could. So they'd say, 'OK. I guess it's OK.'"

The Factory Point Bank in Manchester was the nearest bank, so when Orton was old enough to drive a car, on his way to Burr & Burton Academy every morning he'd take the deposits with him.

"In the morning I'd come with the checks and money all wrapped up in brown paper with string and drop it into the outside deposit box," Orton said. "And on the way home I'd stop at the liquor store and pick up empty boxes to ship with. I'd fold them down and put them in the back of my station wagon. Once in a while we'd get a customer write, 'You shouldn't be drinking so much.'"

His parents paid him.

"I didn't get paid when I was little," he said. "Then wages were about 75 cents an hour. When I got ready to go to Middlebury College, they paid me a little more. I had a checkbook and I paid Middlebury for my education. I entered in 1959, and tuition was $650 a semester, guaranteed for four years. But you could buy a Volkswagen for $1,500."

Orton took a degree in political science, graduated, got in his car, drove home and put on his cheese-cutting apron.

"It was seamless," he said. "My roommate went to the Peace Corps. I came back and ran the country store. I focused on building up the mail order end of the business."

Vrest Orton, who died in 1986 at the age of 89, never officially retired. He just gradually handed more and more responsibility over to his son.

"I became president somewhere around 1977, although I'm not sure of the exact date," Orton said. "It's probably typical of family businesses that things just evolve. Vrest loved pasting up the catalog and helped with that into early '80's. He kept his office on the second floor over the store, and in later years he spent time greeting customers down on the floor, something he and they both enjoyed. I still have customers come in and tell me about meeting him years ago."

Growth and Restraining Growth

The trick to making money at The Vermont Country Store is inventory control.

"Our goal, and we succeed at it, is to fill over 90 percent of orders complete without backorders," Orton said. "That's high for this industry. Our other goal, also successfully met, is to turn our inventory five times a year. Those two goals are in conflict but that's why we have them both; fill orders to serve customers, keep inventory low to create cash flow. To achieve both is indeed rocket science, and we have very smart people in our materials management department."

Orton turned out to have a talent for business, too. For example, in the gas crisis of the early Seventies, he saw an opportunity and grabbed it.

"When the price of gasoline went up, and there were lines at the gas pumps, people weren't driving so much," Orton said. "So mail order was a good way to shop, rather than driving. Then we put a lot of things in the catalogs about saving energy – wood stoves and all that hullabaloo. And we did great."

In the 1980s, the exploding popularity of credit cards turned the catalog business into a "gold mine," Orton said.

"Everyone went crazy," he said. "So in 1984, we moved over to our Manchester office. We could have grown a lot more, but I kept a lid on the amount we would grow each year. I had two concerns. One that we would get more orders than we could put out to the satisfaction of the customers. And two, more importantly, that growth rate wasn't sustainable. I didn't know how to manage a company that was on a rising trajectory and then would level off or drop. Why have a business that's three times as big and making less money? If I wanted to sell it, I would have done that. But I wanted to keep it, so I always managed it for the long term."

The Country Store has always been a bellwether of what's happening in the nation, Orton said.

"Our phone people know when something's going on in the world," he said. "The phones are ringing and the phones are ringing and then they're quiet. Sometimes it's as dramatic as 9/11. Something has happened that takes people away. Or last fall, when the recession started. It wasn't so instant, but orders dropped off."

Orton and Shouldice spotted the current recession coming early and made some important moves to curb the store's growth in preparation.

"It's been a tough economic time," Shouldice said. "We decided 18 months ago to focus on our customers and service and making sure we didn't put growth ahead of service. When we saw the economy soften and the Web become a bigger influence, we decided to close the Bennington call center. We got on it early. No one knew this recession would be what it was. It meant making the business a bit smaller, so our sales are down not by a function of the economy, but by an engineered process to make the business smaller and more efficient."

One way to control growth is to cut back on the number of catalogs the company sends out, Orton said.

"We cut back quite a bit to people who have never ordered from us before," Orton said. "That's called 'prospecting,' because the best customer is one who's recently ordered. But they die or move on and you have to replace those. Prospecting gets more marginal as to how many people order. So we cut off the 'marginal tail' so we didn't have to pay for all those catalogs. We're having a recession. Are people who've never heard of us likely to order? Probably not. So let's not waste our money sending them catalogs. But we'll plan that so we regain profitability. That's what we're doing now."

The adjustments caused a drop in revenue.

"Revenues were about $100 million in 2008," Orton said. "Now they're about $90 million in 2009."

Product Evolution

The store defines itself as "purveyors of the practical and hard-to-find."

According to Orton, "Most merchandising is mistakes. For example, a year ago we tried introducing too many new products and 20 percent were successful; 80 percent failed. This year we introduced fewer new products, working harder on each one, and 30 percent succeeded and 70 percent failed. So here we are, celebrating a 70 percent failure rate. However, at The Vermont Country Store we are not selling fashion or planning for obsolescence, so we are happy to run successful products year after year – as long as our customers still want them."

The mantra is "listen to our customers."

"And do we ever!" Orton said. "We get 60,000 suggestions from customers each year for products. And I love that, many times we would never think up the things they suggest. Last year we had suggestions for short sleeve sweat shirts. Now, I thought one wore sweat shirts to stay warm and why offer short sleeves? Bill Shouldice put it in the catalog and bingo! Selling like crazy.

One big mistake that comes to mind is bottle cutters.

"A couple of years ago, we reintroduced bottle cutters – those devices we used in the 1960s to make tumblers out of empty wine bottles," Orton said. "I figured the nostalgia of those days would make them great sellers but I was wrong. Maybe the cheap red wine back then erased too many nostalgia cells."

Finding new products is fun "if you are a passionate, obsessive, compulsive with a drive like a pit bull jaw," Orton said.

For example, about 15 years ago customers started requesting Evening in Paris perfume.

"It was made in France and very popular in the five-and-dimes in the '50s," Orton said. "Somewhere along the way, the French decided they were not going to export it to America any longer. I have no idea why, but you know the French. Probably something Dwight Eisenhower said that offended them. It took us five years to pry it out of their hands. But our persistence paid off and it still sells great."

It's all about nostalgia – the scent and the memory of it. Orton gets letters saying, "I wore Evening of Paris on my wedding day." And, "I remember how wonderful my mother smelled."

"Scent is powerful and you never forget it," Orton said. "Years ago, I was showing a cake of soap to a customer in the store. She held it to her nose and said, "Oh my god, I had a boyfriend who used that soap and I could never get him out of my mind.'"

The most frequent question Orton's asked is this: "How do you find all these things?"

"That is what we do, what we are," Orton said. "My grandfather, Gardner Lyman Orton, found products for his customers in 1897 that they could not make or grow themselves. When a lady needed silk fabric, he somehow got it to North Calais. My father thought pepper in a shaker was no better than floor sweepings and brought over pepper mills from Europe. We have products today that were in our catalogs 35 years ago. I just flipped through our 1973 book and found the following which we still carry: Pears soap, Florida Water Cologne, badger shave brushes, clam chowder and black raspberry preserves. Times do change; one item we featured then but not now is our own blend of pipe tobacco with the motto that my dad made up in the 1940s: 'Won't bite a baby's tongue.'"

Detaching

In 1991, Orton started detaching himself from the store's day-to-day operations.

"It was like, 'OK, it's time for my Peace Corps,'" he said. "And I landed in Steamboat Springs, an old ranching and coal mining community way up in northwest Colorado. People there reminded me of Vermonters."

Orton now "shuttles" back and forth between Colorado and Vermont.

"I didn't retire in 1991," he said. "I was still CEO. In 1995, I promoted Bob Allen as executive vice president. Colorado forced me to think better about having a professional managing team."

Shouldice is the second non-Orton CEO. He started working for the Ortons when he left the Dean Administration, first at the Orton Family Foundation, then at the store, where he trained under Allen. When Allen retired four years ago, Shouldice took over.

Planning

Land use planning has always been important to Orton, who joined the Weston planning commission shortly after leaving Middlebury.

"I didn't know anything about planning, but we thought it was time to upgrade the plan and re-look at our zoning," Orton said. "We went through hearings and held meetings and more meetings and more hearings, and made decisions because it got to be midnight and we had to decide something so we could go to bed."

The commission ended up with what they thought was a good Town Plan.

"In hindsight, it turned out to be pretty general," Orton said. "A little bit of mom and apple pie, idealized. We thought that as long as we keep the town pretty much the way it is and attracted clean industry – this was in the 1960s, and the chances of a town of 500 people attracting a lot of industry wasn't that great. We weren't even thinking about entrepreneurs."

The ink was hardly dry on the plan, Orton said, when a proposal for Wildlife Wonderland, an African game preserve, was presented to the board. It involved importing African animals and building a game farm and tourist attraction 2,500-feet up on Mount Holly. The planning commissioners were aghast. The proposal split the town in half.

"On one side were people who said this is the greatest thing to come along, and we'll all have great jobs," Orton said. "And on the other side were people who said, 'This doesn't seem to fit. It's not what we think the town should be about, and we question the environmental wisdom of it.'"

Orton opposed the plan. The Act 250 hearings alone took about two years. After the project was denied, the entrepreneurs came back with a model that featured domestic animals. Animal Farm opened in May of 1973 and went bankrupt that same year.

"That experience of neighbor against neighbor, of having just completed the planning, and fully believing we had done a terrific job, and here we were at war, and with people who wouldn't speak to each other for years over this thing, it troubled me," Orton said. "And as I went about my business building up the country store, and I watched, during the 1980s, the big expansion with the ski areas, as I observed the changes in Vermont and the growth, it struck me that citizens seemed to be surprised at the way things unfolded. They seemed to hold something in their heads that wasn't what Vermont was turning out to be."

Planning Vermont's Future

Orton isn't a fan of nimbyism, but he started thinking about how Vermont could be developed in ways that creates jobs but still maintains the small-town community atmosphere.

In 1995, he got together with Weston resident Noel Fritzinger. Fritzinger was a retired New York State assistant commissioner of education who had run the New York State Museum; he was then working on conservation and Vermont Land Trust issues. Orton was a donor.

"Lyman came to me and said, 'I want to set up a foundation,'" Fritzinger said. "I'll put in $2 million a year. You think about what it might do."

Eventually they focused on planning.

"Not necessarily conservation, but planning," Fritzinger said. "That has expanded over time. The focus is on what makes communities vital. People, land, employment, who the new people are moving in."

According to the foundation's Web site (orton.org), "Every town has authenticity, character, spirit- its own heart and soul. One-size-fits-all development means that many towns in America are losing what makes them unique, those special qualities and distinctive characteristics that keep a place from becoming Anywhere, USA... The Orton Family Foundation works with people in small cities and towns to counter such consequences, first, by asking citizens what they value most about their communities and, second, by placing those shared values at the center of the planning process."

The foundation has current projects all over the United States. It has funded an artist who is spending part of his time in Starksboro, learning about the people and the place and making art there. In Golden, CO, it is engaging "a broad spectrum of the community to more deeply explore the city's character, strengths and opportunities for change. That process will help residents develop a vision for the city's future." Similar projects are ongoing in Routt Country, CO, Biddeford, Standish and Damariscotta, ME, Killingly, CT, Exeter, RI, and Victor, ID.

Controversy

Orton doesn't court controversy, but he doesn't shy away from it, either. Earlier this year, for example, he started selling sex aids. He put it in a section of the catalog called "Aging Well."

"I sensed our mature customers might use a little help in bed," Orton said. "Yes, Virginia, people over 50 still have sex. And I brought in, um, you know, marital aids. And no, we don't display them near the penny candy in the stores."

By February, The Vermont Country Store was national news. About 600 red-faced, outraged, condemning letters arrived at the store, plus many more in newspapers. Bloggers had a field day.

"You'd think I suggested that we sell nuclear devices to terrorists," Orton told The Boston Globe.

Orton took to the newspapers to mount a defense that reached way back into his Yankee roots.

"Industry 'experts' were contacted and a chorus of 'They should stick to their brand image' poured forth," he wrote. "Brand image? Hell, I'm running a store, trying to meet the needs of my customers, not worrying about what corporate types think I should do. My shopkeepers' intuition told me there was a need for these products by our customers, and it turned out I was right. This, along with my willingness to talk about sex by 'older folks,' certainly got the old party lines humming."

Orton pointed out that his customers are getting older.

"'Aging Well,' as I see it, is about promoting a cultural shift on two fronts," he wrote. "One is to challenge Ageism the negative image of older folks held by younger ones – and to demonstrate the tremendous mutual benefit to both groups of changing that outlook... (And) to move away from the image of narrowing-down life as we age to one of expanding life. The old ideal of growing up, working, retiring and dying is itself dying. When I read that retirement communities in Arizona – minimum age 55 and no kids allowed – blame their increasing vacancy rates on the economy, I say they have their heads in the sand. It's not just the economy – it's also a sign of a changing culture that I hope will see the benefits of multigenerational communities."

Pre-boomers and Boomers are leading the way into "a new culture of aging," Orton wrote, and if some customers don't like it, "I have to ask them to rip that page out of the catalog... the culture around aging needs to change and we aim to help do something about it. If, along the way, we bump into taboo subjects that make some uncomfortable, we will take them on in our characteristic no-nonsense, practical Vermont way."

Art in Action

In 2006, the Weston Antiques Show exhibited some work from Orton's art collection. Speaking at the opening, he had an epiphany.

"I said, 'My next collection will be art that's not yet painted. It will be art that speaks not to the past of Vermont, but art that speaks as life as it can be, could be, should be, maybe we don't like it, whatever, but that gets us thinking more about the future.'"

Where did that idea come from?

"When you climb up to 10,000 or 12,000 feet on your bicycle in Colorado, the air is thin and your mind works different," he said. "But I don't really know. Rocky mountain high?"

Orton and Aldrich of the Vermont Arts Council hatched the plan now known as "The Art of Action: Shaping Vermont's Future Through Art."

"The primary reason for Art of Action is that artists can depict in a way that the written word can't convey, or the spoken word can't convey, a message about the future of Vermont," Orton said. "The state of affairs, the opportunities, the challenges, the threats. They can get across to people with a visual interpretation. Unlike a photograph, the artist can create a message. So the Art of Action is really about engaging Vermonters through the medium of art and bringing them into a discussion of the future of Vermont, what Vermont faces now in 2009 and looking forward. Also, artists will have a place at the table, as it were, the next time we sit down to discuss the future of Vermont. Artists can bring a lot to that discussion and bring in people who may not be brought in in any other way."

The exhibit will open in Manchester on September 1 and travel around Vermont for 10 months. The auction will be at the Main Street Landing Performing Art Center in Burlington on Saturday, July 17, 2010. Ten percent of the sale will go to the artists. The rest will go into a fund to start the project all over again.

"It's a huge leap of faith on Lyman's part, and one deserving of an enormous amount of respect," Aldrich said. "What needs to be said is that it's a very rare thing to work with someone who has such a clear vision and the money to make something substantial happen."

Orton is hoping the project attracts back some of the many young people who have left the state. Also, that it gives a shot in the arm to Vermont's creative economy.

"Maybe the collectors will want to come in, because where else is this happening?" he said. "This is unique. Vermont needs a buzz that will speak to people anywhere in America. We've got it going on here in Vermont. Isn't it interesting what we're doing here in Vermont? I'm just funding the first round to kick it off. It's our little stimulus package."

The Future

Detaching himself from his day-to-day obsessions at the Vermont Country Store was one thing. Passing it down to the next generation was another.

With characteristic frankness, Orton puts it this way: "So I've spent the last 15 years talking about my impending death."

Orton has three sons, Eliot, Gardner and Cabot Orton. All of them are involved in the store, but none have day-to-day responsibilities there.

"When I started thinking about this, I went to conferences and gatherings of family business owners," Orton said. "All I heard was war stories and tragedies. The business somehow wrecks the family. The shares get dispersed. The more people who own shares, the more problems you have with different agendas. Somebody is in the business managing, and somebody isn't. You have siblings mad at each other, or children who won't speak to their fathers – all we hear is war stories. I decided we had to look for a better model than the right of birth making you vice president or president or marketing manager, when that may be not what you're qualified for at all."

Hiring professional managers was his creative solution.

"With professional management, with the engagement of the family, emotion and connection is sustained," Orton said. "It's not the model of a venture capitalist where we want to build it up and sell it. It's not the model of a public company with dispersed unknown shareholders owning the business. It's a family business with family owners that aren't necessarily managers. Our stock in the company store is held by a multigenerational trust, so it doesn't disperse. It doesn't have different ownership, where some want to cash out and other don't. We'll have to wait 10, 20 or 30 years see if this format works – with a lot of work from the family and engagement with the management team and the board of directors."

All three of Orton's sons have an interest in merchandising, but they also take on personal projects at the store.

"My youngest son, Elliot, took over the company philanthropy – giving back to the communities in southern Vermont where our employees all live," Orton said. "Gardner started a wellness program about nutrition and health and eating well and has pursued that in his life. He has determined that The Vermont Country Store can have the healthiest population of any company in Vermont. My oldest son, Cabot, he and his girlfriend narrated slideshows of different parts of the store. Internet, videos, YouTube – marketing stuff. He wrote a book on community videos."

And what's next for Orton? Trying to change the world, as usual.

"I intend to focus on how to leverage the resources of The Vermont Country Store and the Orton Family Foundation – along with my sons Cabot, Gardner, and Eliot and my soulmate, Janice Izzi – to help Vermonters shape the future of our state," Orton said.

The way Orton sees it, Vermont underwent a renaissance in the 1960s, beginning with the back-to-the-land movement.

"It evolved into the newcomers becoming Vermonters through their embracing the values, the heart and soul, of what Vermont is all about," he said. "We emerged the leader in America on defining our future as being one with the working landscape, environment, and our communities."

Next year, 2010, begins the decade of the 50th anniversary of that renaissance. Orton wants those early back-to-the-landers and others who cherish Vermont to "jump start" another renaissance, this time one that will bring home Vermont's "far-flung younger generation" and have them become the core of a new creative economy.

"I believe we should send our youth off to experience the world," Orton said. "But we should get them to return in their 30s and make their mark here. We have the technology to keep in touch with them, but what we need is to develop the dual messages to them that say, 'We value you, come home and bring your energy with you,' and 'There are opportunities here for you by applying your creative intellect.' We should develop policies that support creative community building while discouraging exploitation and extraction of our natural and human resources."

As an example, he mentioned the current battles over wind energy.

"It's easy for my generation, who are retired and have the money and time to stop proposed wind projects," Orton said. "And in truth, they probably should be stopped because they are exploitative and extractive. They come from the mindset of outside interests seeing opportunity and acting on it only in their own interest, not especially in the interest of the community – except in the typical hollow words of developers. In the 1930s, Governor George Aiken warned Vermonters of the exploitation occurring by outside interests who were the companies who built and owned our hydropower plants. He was right; today we are at the mercy of the successors to those interests."

Vermont's young people, if they can be lured back, can come up with innovative solutions to the state's problems.

"Those who say we first need to create jobs for our youth to return to have the cart in front of the horse," Orton said. "I want to figure out how to get that first wave of bright, innovative young Vermonters to return and ply their minds. We need a short bridge, a small safety net, to get them through their first few years. Not too long, not forever, but the hands of all of us who are here now to give them a leg up. I give myself and other Vermonters 10 years to jump-start this next renaissance."

Joyce Marcel is a freelance writer and author from Dummerston. Her new book, a collection of her columns called, "A Thousand Words or Less," is now available. Learn more about her and how to order the book at her Web site: www.joycemarcel.com.