The Box - Marc Levinson [23]
McLean was born in 1913 near the tiny town of Maxton, deep in the swamp country of southeastern North Carolina. Maxton, once called Shoe Heel, had been populated by Scottish Highlanders in the late eighteenth century. The local newspaper was the Scottish Chief, and local lore had it that Shoe Heel was renamed Maxton when a rail passenger shouted, “Hello, Mac!” from a train window and ten men responded. At the time of McLean’s birth, Maxton Township, with about thirty-five hundred residents, was very rural and very poor. Electric lighting had arrived in Robeson County only in 1901. The town of Maxton, with about thirteen hundred inhabitants, had telephone service, but the surrounding area did not; as late as 1907, residents of Lumberton, the county’s largest town, had to ride the train to Maxton to make long-distance calls.2
In later years, McLean took to portraying his life as a Horatio Alger story, in which his mother taught him business by giving him eggs to sell, on commission, from a crate at the side of the road. The reality was not quite so harsh. Although the family was far from wealthy, it was not without resources. McLean’s father, also Malcolm P. McLean,* was “a member of a prominent and widely connected family,” according to an obituary published in 1942. An 1884 county map shows half a dozen McLeans farming near Shoe Heel, and several other McLeans farmed or practiced law in Lumberton. Angus Wilton McLean, probably a cousin—his mother, like Malcom’s, was a Purcell—started a bank and a railroad in Lumberton, served as assistant secretary of the United States Treasury in 1920–21, and was governor of North Carolina from 1925 to 1929. Family ties may have helped the senior McLean obtain a job as a rural mail carrier in 1904 to supplement his income from farming. Upon young Malcom’s graduation from high school in 1931, in the depths of the Great Depression, family ties got him work stocking shelves at a local grocery. Those local connections helped once more when an oil company needed a gas station manager in the nearby town of Red Springs, as a family friend lent McLean the money to buy his first load of gasoline.3
As recounted by McLean in the American Magazine in 1950, his rise began when he learned that a trucker earned five dollars for bringing the station’s oil from Fayetteville, twenty-eight miles away. McLean proposed to do it himself. The station owner let him use an old trailer that had been rusting in the yard. McLean Trucking Company opened for business in March 1934, with McLean, still running the service station, as the sole driver. Soon after, family ties helped once more when a local man agreed to sell McLean a used dump truck on installments of three dollars a week. With the truck, McLean won a contract to haul dirt for the Works Progress Administration, a federal public-works program that at one point employed more than eleven hundred people in Robeson County. Even after hiring a driver, McLean earned enough to buy a new truck to haul vegetables from local farms. According to a much repeated tale, one trip found McLean so poor that he couldn’t afford to pay the toll at a bridge along the way; he left a wrench with the toll collector as a deposit, redeeming it after selling his load in New York.4
This rags-to-riches tale fails to do justice to McLean’s immense ambition. By 1935, at twenty-two years