FOR THE LOVE OF QUAIL
WHEN R. RANDALL ROLLINS WAS A CHILD, perhaps four or five years old, he would follow his father on their North Georgia farm, hunting quail in the rolling mountains of Catoosa County just shy of the Tennessee state line. The family had eighty acres of land and a house built from timber they’d cut themselves. They grew cotton, corn, and sweet potatoes, and raised chickens, hogs, and cows. “My dad loved the land and all the things it could provide,” Rollins recalls, his voice trailing back to a time eight decades distant. “And he just loved everything about hunting.”
This was before his dad, O. Wayne Rollins, traded full-time farming for work at the Standard-Coosa-Thatcher textile mill in nearby Rossville, Georgia, and before his father and uncle John W. Rollins bought a radio station in Radford, Virginia, that kicked off a regional broadcasting dynasty, and before they borrowed $60 million in 1964 to buy Orkin pest control in the first leveraged buyout recorded in the United States. In the years to come, the Rollins family would crack the top 50 on the Forbes list of wealthiest American families and oversee a philanthropic outreach via the O. Wayne Rollins Foundation and other family foundations that would give hundreds of millions of dollars to colleges and universities across the South and beyond—including a recent gift of $65 million to Atlanta’s Emory University for the third Rollins School of Public Health building, slated to break ground next year.
To that little boy in the Georgia hills in the late 1930s, however, his dad was simply a farmer in overalls. “The kind with that little hammer loop on the side,” Rollins remembers, “and he would
