by Mike Sharkey
Staff Writer
After almost 33 years of service, literally, to BellSouth and its predecessor, Southern Bell, Rande LeFevre retired Monday as the phone company’s regional manager of corporate affairs. About six weeks ago, LeFevre had open heart surgery and has been recovering at his San Marco home since. He says the surgery played a very minor role in his decision to leave BellSouth.
“The timing is right,” he said. “I’m excited about doing something different for the next three or four years. I’m not retiring from the working world. I love work.”
And BellSouth loved him.
“He’s a giant in our industry,” said his last boss, Jim McCollum. “Everyone in the media knows and respects Rande. He worked hard, he was always there when people needed him and he was honest.”
“Rande was a dynamic influence for BellSouth in the First Coast area,”said Joe Lacher, BellSouth president-Florida. “Given the difficult task of representing BellSouth in a widespread area extending south to Putnam County, he has represented the company in an excellent manner. Rande has excelled at every task BellSouth has given him during his 32-plus year tenure and he will be missed.”
“Regional Manager of Corporate Affairs” is a fancy name for “public relations” and a far cry from where LeFevre started with the company. In 1970, shortly after he was discharged from the Air Force and a third tour of Vietnam, he joined Southern Bell as a line technician in Orlando. Interestingly, his time in the service more than prepared him for the job.
“When I was in the Air Force, I was a technician and dealt with nuclear weapons and I had top secret clearance,” said LeFevre. “I relish what the service did for me. They taught me about electronics and that helped me with my job at BellSouth.”
What the Air Force left out, LeFevre learned on his own. Over his three-decade career with the phone company, LeFevre is probably one of the few who can legitimately say they did it all. After his initial position in Orlando, LeFevre spent the next eight years as an installation technician and repairman before he was sent to Melbourne and promoted to supervisor. A year and a half later, LeFevre left the hands-on world and entered upper management as an office manager in Daytona Beach.
In 1981, LeFevre returned to Jacksonville — he’s a 1965 graduate of Fletcher High School and lived at the beach since long before he was a teenager — at a time when the telephone industry was undergoing a nationwide overhaul. LeFevre said the divestiture of the country’s long distance carriers in the early 1980s was by far the most interesting era of his tenure.
“The break-up of AT&T created seven regional phone companies — now there are only three — and through that I had a lot of interaction with the media,” explained LeFevre. “I sort of melded into the position of speaking to the media.”
The job turned out to be perfect for LeFevre. Unlike many other media spokesmen, LeFevre not only grew up professionally with his company, the diversity of his employment over 33 years added credibility to not just his job but his ability to speak authoritatively about most aspects of BellSouth. Although it wasn’t his job to deal with the public on a daily basis, because LeFevre had spent years in the field he was able to assist customers who had technical questions. Or, he found someone who could.
“One of the benefits of my position was that I worked my way through all the departments,” he said. “I could answer their questions or I could ask friends that I had in the various departments.”
Although the communications industry underwent physical changes in the 1970s — the advent of touch-tone phones meant the demise of rotary phones — LeFevre said the industry, and BellSouth in particular, went through enormous growing pains during the divestiture process. And, it wasn’t easy or pleasant.
“Leading up to, and during, the divestiture, the breakup was kind of traumatic,” he said. “At the time, we all worked for AT&T and we had to make a decision. Some departments went with AT&T. I had some good friends and co-workers that, after the divestiture, I couldn’t talk to. It wasn’t strictly enforced, but by law I couldn’t talk to them.”
The negative affects of the divestiture eventually eroded and LeFevre’s career stabilized. He said one of the unique aspects of working for BellSouth for so long was realizing that it took dramatically different people with diverse skills working together to make the company a success.
“It’s a very fragmented industry,” said LeFevre, adding he still remembers much about his former positions. “I could go out today and still hook up phones to poles. People talk to the PR guy and say, ‘What’s he going to know about wiring?’ The answer is, a lot. I have friends in other departments and we had good relationships. I was one of them. I was a knuckle-dragger.”
Those inter-department relationships are exactly what kept LeFevre with the communications giant for over three decades.
“That made my 33 years very enjoyable,” said LeFevre. “Never did I wake up one time and say I didn’t want to go to work.”