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The DON of ELAN
Always on the go, entrepreneur Donald Panoz has sped from pharmaceuticals to resorts to motor sports, leaving an expanding global empire in his wake.
When Becky Mayberry went to work at Chateau Elan, she heard all sorts of stories about her new boss, the stout redhead who looks confidently down from an oil painting in the lobby.
Donald Panoz - "Dr. P" to employees - has a resume with more turns than a Grand Prix road race. First he made a fortune in pharmaceuticals, where he pioneered the nicotine patch. Next he started developing hotels, wineries and golf courses. Then he "retired" and roared into motor sports, building fast cars and racing them on four continents, sometimes on tracks he bought and spent millions to improve.
Wine, wealth and speed - no wonder people talk about him.
"We heard there was an underground city over here," says Mayberry, now Panoz's assistant. "We heard that big trucks would roll up in the middle of the night and unload cars. Some people said there was a secret subway, and Dr. P could step into it and go anywhere in the world."
There has always been an air of mystery about Panoz, the 66-year-old businessman best known locally as owner of the Chateau Elan winery and resort and the Road Atlanta racetrack in Braselton. Since he came to Georgia two decades ago, he has slipped easily from pharmaceuticals to luxury hotels to auto racing as if they were weekend hobbies instead of multimillion-dollar enterprises. He owns more than 30 companies -- the latest a venture to put electric cars on the streets of Atlanta -- and employs 1,200 Georgians. He travels so widely and incessantly to keep track of it all that his own children often can't answer the question: Where's your father?
"I used to think Daddy was a spy," says Panoz's daughter Donna Sparks, remembering the days when he crisscrossed Europe, Asia and Africa on pharmaceutical business. "He wore this black leather coat, and he flew in and out of exotic countries where the governments sometimes fell after he had been there. I just knew he was a spy."
He wasn't, of course. Don and Nancy Panoz, his wife of 47 years, are simply two of the damnedest serial capitalists Georgia has ever seen. Motorists who drive by the faux-French chateau on I-85 are glimpsing only a fraction of the Panozes' far-flung domain - the tip of the cork. From their latest resort in Scotland to their upcoming race in Malaysia, their interests hopscotch the globe like the bank of clocks in the Chateau Elan conference center, the ones that give the times in world capitals: Paris, Tokyo, Los Angeles, Braselton.
"There hasn't been a day since 1962 that we haven't had something under construction somewhere," says Nancy Panoz.
The journey began modestly in the mountains of West Virginia.
There's no sign marking Don Panoz's headquarters in a nondescript two-story building across the interstate from Chateau Elan. The items on the coffee table outside his office attest to his eclectic pursuits: books about racing, bottles of wine and Georgia mountain water, even a couple of stuffed animals - each of them representative of a family enterprise. In a corner suite, Dr. P sits at his desk in a blazer and knotted tie firing up one Silk Cut cigarette after another. The man who developed the transdermal patch that has helped millions stop smoking is allergic to it.
"It gives me welts," he says, flicking his gold lighter. "But it's easy to stop smoking. I've done it dozens of times."
He drums his fingers and turns to a laptop computer to check his e-mail. Everything about him radiates Type A energy, from his quietly intense manner to his short, powerful frame, which, despite some paunchiness, still recalls his days as a semipro football player. His ruddy complexion and strawberry hair only underscore the sense that some mixture of ambition and competitive juice is simmering inside.
It was that energy that first attracted Nancy. "He's totally focused," she says. "If he's working on something, he'll almost run you over."
They met in the early '50s in Lewisburg, W.Va., where Don was attending Greenbrier Military Academy. He was the middle-class son of a Moose club manager, Irish on his mother's side, Italian on his father's. (Panoz -- pronounced PAY-nose - is an Americanized version of Panunzi.) Nancy, on the other hand, was poor, the daughter of a well-digger who died in an accident when she was in diapers. She grew up working, taking care of other people's children to help support the family.
They married as teenagers after Don enlisted in the Army. His entrepreneurial instincts first showed when he was posted to Japan. He noticed that the military would pick up the cost of shipping autos to Asia with arriving servicemen but wouldn't pay the return freight. Nobody wanted Japanese cars back then - not even the Japanese - so Panoz bought the used American cars in Japan, sold them at a mark-up and had less-expensive new models waiting in the States for the returning GIs.
After he was discharged, Panoz used his car-trading profits to buy a drug store in Pittsburgh. He enrolled in the Duquesne University pharmacy school but got so busy running the store and starting a family that he quit when one of his credits was disallowed.
"I said to hell with it, I'll just hire a pharmacist," he says.
Panoz never finished college, although he continued to study pharmacy on his own. Not having a degree didn't seem to hamper him. In 1960, he talked several members of the Pittsburgh Pirates into investing their World Series bonus checks in a pharmaceutical company he wanted to launch in West Virginia. His partner was an old Army buddy, Milan Puskar, who's still chairman of the firm they began, Mylan Laboratories.
"There's nothing college could have taught him," Puskar says. "Don has vision, and you can't teach vision. He's not a technical person, but he's a master salesman. He always wanted to know: Why not?"
Mylan prospered in the growing field of gelatin-capsule drugs. But the board balked in the late '60s when Panoz pressed it to get into the time-release technology that led to the nicotine patch. Frustrated, he took the biggest gamble of his life, cashing out of the company and moving his family - including five young children -- to Ireland, where there was less government red tape. He had $60,000 to support them and start a new pharmaceutical firm, Elan Corp.
The move was hard on the children, who initially found Ireland cold and alienating. But they warmed up to the place and occasionally pitched in at Elan, labeling envelopes and packing prescriptions as their father traveled the world building the business. Their mother stayed behind to run the home office and tend to the family; as she puts it, he was the finder and she was the minder.
Nancy never questioned why they had to relocate - not after Don suggested that she read his favorite author, Ayn Rand.
"I read her and all of a sudden I understood," Nancy says.
Rand's philosophy of individual responsibility and minimal government interference struck a chord with the libertarian-minded Panoz. Years later, he named his principal company Fountainhead Development after "The Fountainhead," her novel about an architect who refuses to compromise his vision. Panoz keeps the book in his office and gave copies of Rand's other opus, "Atlas Shrugged," to his children when he thought they were old enough to understand.
Not compromising certainly paid off. By the '80s, Elan's time-release medications were making it one of Ireland's biggest companies and Panoz was on his way to becoming one of its wealthiest men, worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
As their children reached college age, the Panozes started thinking about re-establishing themselves in the States so the kids could get an American education. In 1980, Elan scouted locations for a facility in the Southeast. Panoz was leaning toward North Carolina when the Georgia Department of Industry and Trade called him. He wasn't interested at first; he had been to Georgia years before, driving down U.S. 1 in an un-air-conditioned car in the summertime, and he wasn't eager to return. He changed his mind when the state offered him tickets to the Masters golf tournament.
"We took him to Lake Lanier Islands, and he loved it," says Ray McRae, a Gainesville banker who was on the recruiting tour and remains a friend. "I remember walking in the woods with him, and he came to this field and picked up some soil and said, 'By gosh, this is grape country!' "
Panoz had grown interested in wine through his travels, but it didn't dawn on him to try to make it in Georgia until he saw a roadside stand selling muscadines. He stopped and investigated. Grapes. In Georgia. Who knew?
He promptly flew in viniculturalists from California and planted a small plot of vinifera grapes in Gainesville. The results were promising, so he started buying land for larger plantings along I-85 near Braselton. His winery, Chateau Elan, opened in 1985.
Not all the neighbors approved of the chardonnay-sipping newcomers. "Don't forget, this was the Bible Belt," Nancy Panoz says. "We got all kinds of hate mail. Lots of it. Death threats, too."
The Panozes were grateful when Georgia's governor at the time, the teetotaling Joe Frank Harris, came to the winery dedication and raised an empty champagne flute in their honor.
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