Full hearts

Ted Roden pointed to his heart.

“In here,” he said. “It makes you feel good in here.”

He’s 87, and has lived in Odessa since 1947 when he moved here to help his brother, Tom “Pinkie” Roden, in the liquor retail business and earned a grand living with a beer distribution center.

The entire fortune could stay in the family, trickle down from generation to generation. Nope, that’s not Ted Roden. And that’s not his wife, Jan.

They’ve lived in a modest Odessa home for almost 26 years and never once thought about upgrading. They love golf. And they love giving back.

Like a $591,000 gift to the University of Texas of the Permian Basin to endow the Pinkie Roden Chair of Entrepreneurship.

And the funding to open up the public Ratliff Ranch Golf Links. That was Ted Roden, too. And the Jan and Ted Roden baseball field at UTPB as well as UTPB’s Jan and Ted Roden Center for Entrepreneurship.

A statue at UTPB, the campus walking trail, a collection of Western art donated to the university? The Rodens, all of it.

And don’t forget the 30 or so strangers’ tuitions the Rodens paid for, not from a scholarship fund, but because they received a phone call from a UTPB administrator who said someone needed help.

So, in there. Right below the spot on his chest where Ted Roden pointed.

It’s full.

And as he’s in his life’s twilight, he feels good and modestly accepts the praise.

“Ted’s philosophy is he made his money in West Texas, and he wants to put it back here,” Jan Roden, 71, said.

Ted and Jan Roden love this community, and that’s why they donate financially and physically, especially to education projects, they said. And that’s why the Ector County Democratic Party will honor them Oct. 23 at the annual Local Heroes Banquet.

“They have obviously given back a lot,” local party chairman John Wilkins said. “They’re longtime Odessans who have contributed a lot to the community. They’ve contributed to the Democratic Party in the past and also, of course, they’ve been benefactors to the city and UTPB.”

When Ted Roden started Standard Sales Company in 1952, he and his 10 employees sold about 100,000 Anheuser-Busch cases of beer a year, moving them with three trucks to retail centers.

Today, 14 million cases are shipped from Standard Sales eight distribution centers in Texas, Mississippi and Colorado. The total sales volumes is near $225 million and 500 employees work for the company that Ted Roden sold to his key employees in 1984 for half of what they offered him.

Roden said a little bit of “the right place at the right time” luck led to his success.

He had a chemical engineering degree from the University of Texas. And before working for his brother, he worked on the Manhattan Project, the U.S. World War II nuclear weapon program.

That’s not quite the background that leads to business success.

When he started the company, Texas’ Lone Star and Pearl beers all outsold Anheuser-Busch products because they were a nickel cheaper.

But marketers with Anheuser-Busch decided to hold their more expensive product’s price while inflation evened out the market.

Once the beers cost customers the same, Ted Roden’s business flourished, he said.

And when the business flourished and he later retired, Ted and Jan turned around and gave back to Odessa and Odessa’s nonprofit organizations millions of times over.

Because it filled them up.