Illustration by Chris 'Honeysuckle' Ellis.
"You should get a little theater into your exhibitions,” Joe Orgill suggested within months of my becoming director of The Dixon Gallery and Gardens in 2007. His voice was uniquely his own, two parts Southern drawl and one part friendly growl. At first, I wasn’t quite sure how to listen.
By the time I met him, Joe had done everything there was to do at the Dixon. He was already a major donor, an effective fundraiser, and at one time or another he chaired most of our boards and committees. If Joe believed in a project, an exhibition, or an acquisition, he put his considerable influence behind it, and it got done. He was generous yet measured with his advice, and people trusted him. He tempered any suggestion he made with the disclaimer that it came from someone who “sold hammers for a living.” I eventually figured out how to listen, and the Dixon’s shows gained a bit more theatrical flair.
Joe Orgill actually did sell hammers for a living, from a hardware distribution company that bore his family’s name and traced its origins in Memphis to 1847. Not that you would learn anything about that upon meeting Joe, or suspect that he had transformed a small regional wholesaler into the world’s largest independently owned hardware business. When you encountered Joe Orgill for the first time, you’d usually find yourself telling your own story to him, not the other way around. He had a way of putting people at ease through his genuine interest in their lives. He pulled for them, and most could see right away that his encouragement was real.
I believe that helping others do well was part of Joe Orgill’s personal recipe for success — in business and in life. It remains a guiding principle at Orgill, Inc., and Joe’s willingness to serve was the gift he brought to other organizations he supported. He had a talent for making good institutions better, whether it was the Dixon, Church Health, Baptist Hospital, First Tennessee Bank, or any number of other iconic entities across the city fortunate enough to have captured Joe’s interest.
Joe was more than the sum total of his business acumen and philanthropy. In fact, he was one of the most completely three-dimensional people I have ever known.
He was well-read, and more than a casual student of literature. When I met Joe, just before his seventieth birthday, he was in an English graduate program at the University of Memphis (he admired F. Scott Fitzgerald). Joe loved art and architecture and film, but he was a horseracing enthusiast as well. He cheered for the University of Memphis football program before it was something to cheer about (Joe went to Yale), and he was nearly obsessed with his golf game.
He was a classic. Orgill had style and grace and a kind of unstudied elegance that scarcely exists anymore. He arrived at every meeting, every opening, every social event impeccably dressed, and he had the wardrobe to do it. He was generous but thrifty (our business lunches usually took place at Subway). He was brilliant and successful, yet also humble and self-deprecating. The breadth and sheer variety of his many friendships was as impressive to me as it was perfectly natural to him.
Joe Orgill passed away earlier this year after a brief illness. He was 80 years old, but he was active nearly to the end and seemed much younger. To his wife, Irene, to his daughters, Adele, Irene, Anne, and Kate, and to the rest of his family, it was a difficult and sudden loss. To his many friends in Memphis, a place he loved and quietly served for six decades, it felt exactly the same way.
Kevin Sharp is the director of The Dixon Gallery and Gardens.
