Around the Barrel - Transcript: Ep022 Bill French
Bill French: It's an amazing thing that Jack Daniel's has done, to make such a big difference in the lives of those very junior enlisted service members and their families, who oftentimes are away from home for the first time serving their country, some of them coming back from deployment and wanting to get back home to see mom and dad and see other family members.
Lucas Hendrickson: As Americans it's impossible to overstate how much we appreciate the sacrifices service members make for their country.
They step up willingly to defend the freedoms we enjoy in this country, and they often face circumstances that the average citizen will never truly be able to understand. But they also face the same struggles everyday civilians face, be it with family, kids, finances, relocation and general life in the 21st century.
On this episode, we talk with Admiral Bill French, the man in charge of the Armed Services YMCA about how that storied organization can assist those service members, not only in the everyday, but also with those special situations that require a ride home to where family can be waiting Around the Barrel.
Welcome back to Around the Barrel, the official podcast from the makers of Jack Daniel’s. I'm your host, Lucas Hendrickson. Jack Daniel’s has had a long history in support of the United States Armed Forces, and I'll point you in the direction of season one, episode seven of this podcast for a deeper discussion of that. You can find that episode at jackdaniels.com/podcast.
Today, the company focuses on a program called Operation Ride Home, which helps junior enlisted service members get home for special occasions, both celebratory and not so much.
The program helps relieve one stressor for service members and their families, but the work of the organization that oversees Operation Ride Home doesn't stop there.
Admiral Bill French spent most of his decorated naval career around submarines and knows well the interdependent nature military life requires. As the current head of the Armed Services YMCA, he's charged with helping make that interdependent life work to the best of its ability, not only for the deployed service members, but also for families serving at home.
Bill: My name is Bill French and I'm the president and CEO of the Armed Services YMCA. Our headquarters is located just outside of Washington, D.C., and I am originally from San Antonio, Texas.
I'm blessed to be part of an organization whose mission is to support junior enlisted service members and their families and a very unique relationship through Operation Ride Home with Brown-Forman and Jack Daniel's.
Lucas: Admiral French, welcome to Around the Barrel.
Bill: It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Lucas: We've mentioned Operation Ride Home, it's interaction with the military and it's place within the world of Jack Daniel’s a few times over the course of this show. Give us the backstory, the history of Operation Ride Home and how you got involved in it.
Bill: Yeah. Operation Ride Home really was an initiative by Jack Daniel’s. They reached out to one of our branch locations at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, not too far away from you guys' headquarters.
They said, “Hey, we want to do something to help families make it home for the holidays.” They said, “We'll give you $101,000.” What was unique about that was it's the home of the 101st Airborne Division. They said, “Hey, let's do this.”
The first year it worked well. It was all the families at Fort Campbell that benefited from it. It was a huge success.
Again, Jack Daniel’s said, “Hey, we want to do something bigger. Can we impact more military families across the nation?” That's really when we started doing it at 13 different locations, and it's grown from $101,000 invested in allowing families to get home for the holidays to last year about $220,000 allocated through Jack Daniel's and its distributors to help families get back home for the holidays.
I think it's going to grow exponentially every year based on the history working with Jack Daniel's. It's been a great relationship, and to date they've sent a total of about 7,200 family members back home for the holidays. It's really cool.
Now it's expanded. It's not just for the holidays anymore. It's also for special events within folks' lives. Folks fly back home to get married. They get to get to come back home or people come to see them return from deployment. They go home for other family events.
It's an amazing thing that Jack Daniel's has done, to make such a big difference in those very junior enlisted service members and their families, who oftentimes are away from home for the first time serving their country, some of them coming back from deployment and wanting to get back home to see mom and dad and see other family members. It's had a huge impact for the last eight years.
Lucas: How did you get involved and learn about the program?
Bill: Well, it's the Armed Services YMCA who Jack Daniel's decided to work with. We're the nonprofit that really facilitates and opens the door to find the right families for Jack Daniel’s to support through this program.
I've been with this organization for the last four years. I’m very lucky to be part of what the Armed Services YMCA does. We run many other types of programs that are complementary to what Operation Ride Home does.
We have other programs that we run to help the same folks, the same junior enlisted service members, whether it's preschool, childcare, food distributions, camping in the summertime or throughout the year and other things to help those families. There's lots of things we do.
Last year we impacted about 1.2 million junior enlisted members across 78 different bases in the U.S., but what I'm really excited about is what Operation Ride Home does. It continues to grow. It's a great program that Jack Daniel’s does such a great job at executing every year. We're blessed to be part of that relationship, and it's a key element of what we do to take care of those folks that are, frankly, taking care of us in defending our nation.
Lucas: Sure. I think you did a fantastic job unpacking what Operation Ride Home can do for service members, whether the focus tends to be on holidays or those big life events that are happening in a service member’s life and family.
Obviously there are stressors and issues deployed service members face that we at home couldn't even begin to understand. How much do you think these opportunities through Operation Ride Home impact those individual service members with alleviating some of those stressors on the job?
Bill: Yeah, I think you're right on. Great question. Certainly in what we asked those young people to go do – we've been at war continuously for 18 years. That’s the longest time period in which our nation has ever been at war continuously. We now have folks that are entering the military who were born while we were at war. That's all they ever know.
The unique challenges are not just for the service member. Certainly, he or she who's deployed understands what's going on and understands the risks, but I will tell you, it's just as important that we take care of those family members – the spouses and the kids.
Think about a child who gets moved every two to three years and whose parent deploys every year or a year and a half where they're gone. Then, they see other parents of their friends come back injured or maybe they don't come back. Think about your childhood and what it was like. I certainly lived a protected life when I compare it to what these young families have to deal with.
So, I think any time that a family has a chance to get back home and see the grandparents and see the aunts and uncles, whether it's at the holiday period or whether it's some other time, it makes a big difference.
It's an important part of their development as a family and those kids growing up. I think it helps in so many ways that we'll never really appreciate for these young families to get back home to see their folks.
I’ll tell you something else that's really neat that Operation Ride Home and Jack Daniel’s started in the last couple of years. It's the relationship you have with the NBA. Now we have this great opportunity to take families and bring them together.
In most cases it's a surprise at the ballgame. They get front row seats to go see their NBA teams play and they get all the visibility. It's just a remarkable way to leverage the fact that you bring families home.
The families are so important for whatever you do, but I think families in the military, for those folks that are deployed or deploying, are so critical. That's why they deploy. It’s so important to make sure they know we haven't forgotten about their service and what they're doing to make a difference for our country.
Lucas: Sure. You had quite the distinguished military career, retiring in October of 2014 as a vice admiral in the Navy. Can you think of a specific time when you were active duty, when you were coming up through the ranks, where you could have benefited from a program like this?
Bill: Oh, certainly. There were times when I would've loved to have been able to go home. I was a little bit different. I was commissioned, and I was an officer when I was commissioned. So, I think at the end of the day, I had the ability or my parents had the ability to get us back home to see folks.
What we're really talking about here is junior enlisted folks that are right out of high school. They're 18 to 22 years old. Half of them are married.
For pay grades, you come in and you're an E-1, then E-2, E-3, but at an E-4 pay grade, you're making about $26,000 a year in today's dollars. If you're married and you have a child or two, and particularly if you're living someplace pretty expensive, that's difficult to make ends meet just to live. Then, trying to go someplace on a trip and take the whole family gets to be prohibitive.
I will tell you, we really focus on those junior enlisted, the E-1s, E-2s, E-3s, maybe some E-4s to go do this with families and get them back home because we think that's so important.
Lucas: Absolutely. That said, how can junior enlisted members and their families get involved with the program? What is the best path for them to take advantage of what Operation Ride Home can provide them?
Bill: When it comes time, we work closely with Mark Day and the leadership there at Jack Daniel’s, and we decide on a time period in which we're going to advertise this. It's usually in the October or November timeframe. Then, we put the word out there.
One of the things we're careful to do is we work closely with the leadership on the base of the post where there's an opportunity for these folks to go. We allow that leadership to make a determination as to who should benefit from this great program.
The challenge we have is that despite the huge growth we’ve realized in our ability to send more and more families home, we're probably hitting a half or a third of the need. For every seat that we send somebody back home, there's probably three that are interested.
We obviously want to continue to grow the program as much as we can to meet all the needs, but we need to make sure that we're identifying the right folks. Those folks can talk to their leadership and get their names submitted for consideration. We'll try to send as many of them back.
Again, thanks to Jack Daniel’s and the great contribution they make every year, they have a chance to go see families.
Lucas: Sure. You talked about the partnership with the NBA and that visibility and opportunity for a family to have fun as part of that experience. Do you have a favorite set of stories that you've heard as feedback from Operation Ride Home? What kind of feedback are you getting from these folks after they are involved with the program?
Bill: Well, from every one of them I've got absolutely amazing feedback. The one I think that sticks in my mind the best is the very first one you guys did in Oklahoma City with the Thunder.
You guys put together a great little video that’s probably five minutes long. I watched it. I tell you, I had a tear in my eye because I was so happy to see this airman who was surprised because his kids were there and his parents were there. They were all so proud of him. He didn't know he was going to be able to see his family at that game. It was just tremendous.
Everyone since then has been similar. We did one in Fort Bragg with the Hornets. We did one in San Antonio with folks from Killeen from Fort Hood. I think we've done three of those so far, and they are just remarkable.
When you look at it, it's incredible how excited those families are to be able to be together, whether it's a holiday or whether it's some other time when you unexpectedly get to see your loved ones. Then, to be able to go enjoy an NBA basketball game in the front row and all the stuff that goes with that, it's a life memory for everybody there, the kids and parents alike.
Lucas: Right. What about any other non-NBA affiliated stories? What are your personal favorites to hear from these folks?
Bill: Well, there's been a few. One couple had the opportunity – the timing worked out that they were able to fly home together to get married from different locations. We thought that was neat.
Another one was a way to get back for a funeral, which is not quite as upbeat, but it was the only way that this family could get back home to be with family at a very critical time.
There are just a host of stories of folks who couldn't get home otherwise, particularly folks that are currently serving in Alaska or Hawaii. It's just extraordinarily expensive to be able to pay for that flight back.
In many cases, those young junior enlisted service members will go to those locations and spend an entire three year tour there, working hard and never having a chance to get back home to see their parents, their grandparents, their aunts and uncles and those types of things.
So, if you have a chance to go do that, it really makes a big difference on your outlook and your ability, one, to be an effective parent, and also to be an effective soldier, sailor, marine, airman or coast guardsman. It just makes you more apt to want to go do good things for the folks you work for.
Lucas: Right. You mentioned before that Operation Ride Home is a part of a larger opportunity with the Armed Services YMCA. Tell us more about what that organization does for service members and their families year round, not just how it interfaces with Operation Ride Home.
Bill: Right. We work closely with each one of the bases. Today we're at 87 different bases. We have different ways to provide services, but we try to work closely with the leadership of the base to determine the specific needs or requirements of those service members and their families there.
We have core programs that we run. We run a program called Operation Little Learner, and it's a program where we teach moms, essentially, how to teach their kids how to learn. We start when the kids are about a year and a half to two years and it goes all the way up to preschool. The mom and the child have to come in together. It's amazing.
One of the things you realize when you're in the service is the help that you normally get from mom and dad or aunts and uncles – that's not there. We try to fill that gap and teach these primarily young moms how to be their child's principal teacher throughout life and give them the tools to do that.
Then, we have a program for kids who are a little bit older, in elementary school up through middle school, called Operation Hero. Military kids move so much and they've got unique challenges. What we found is many of these kids are struggling in school because they've moved schools or they're struggling because they're the new kids. There are some social issues.
We work through both social challenges and academic challenges to make sure that those kids have a leg up when it comes to how they can deal with those challenges. We meet twice a week after school for a total of five hours a week. We have ten weeks of instruction and it really gives those kids the opportunity to fit in with their classmates.
We help them with their homework. We help them be accepted amongst themselves. It’s one teacher and no more than ten kids. It's a real opportunity to give those kids a chance to perform at the next level. The whole idea is to have them come into Operation Hero for a semester or two semesters and then get them involved in some other extracurricular activity after that.
We do summer camps. We partner with YMCA and other organizations. Last year, we sent about 15 thousand kids to some type of summer camp.
We have drop off care at hospitals called Operation Children's Waiting Room. When a mom or dad has to go in to take either themselves or some unhealthy child, they can drop the healthy kids off at this waiting room and we watch them at no charge. Then, they come back, pick the kids up and leave the hospital.
Lucas: So, obviously, the Armed Services YMCA’s programs extend far beyond what people probably think of as YMCA here domestically, a place to workout or swim. That's pretty fascinating. How long has that organization been doing its work?
Bill: Yeah. We are the longest established military service organization in the country. 1861 is when we started. We were identified during the Lincoln Administration. We didn't fight, but we were on the battlefields supporting those who did fight during the Civil War. We've been recognized by every president since Lincoln, up through and including President Trump.
Lucas: That's awesome.
Bill: It is great.
Lucas: That’s a similar timeline as Jack Daniel’s in the long run. I think the company has done a fantastic job of trying to make people aware of Operation Ride Home, but there's always stuff to be done for that. How can people get involved and/or donate to Operation Ride Home if they are interested?
Bill: Well, that's a great question. Thanks for asking. The best way to find out more about what we do, how we do it and more about our programs if somebody is so motivated is they can go to our website, www.asymca.org. You go there, again, it's asymca.org, and there's an opportunity to learn about all the different programs we have, where we have a presence, and who we support.
There's an opportunity to donate to the cause. We are really dependent on donations to do everything we do. Some nonprofits have some supplementary income. We are really strictly dependent on our donations in order to continue to provide the programs the support we do.
We also have a presence on all the social media from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter to Instagram. So, we're available. We’re always looking for those who want to make a difference to contribute.
Lucas: Okay, and information about Operation Ride Home can be found where?
Bill: It can be found a couple of different places. One, if you go to that location, you'll see information about Operation Ride Home. Then, there's a separate website that Jack Daniel’s and Brown-Forman run that also gives you access to Operation Ride Home.
At either location you can identify the funds that you donate so they can go strictly to Operation Ride Home, if that's what you'd like to do. We have a good number of folks that want to make sure that the dollars they contribute go towards Operation Ride Home and the program that Jack Daniel’s runs.
The other website is jdoperationridehome.com. That's another website you can go to to strictly provide any donations to make sure they go to Operation Ride Home.
Lucas: Can you talk a little bit about your experience being a commander of junior enlisted folks and the issues that they go through, what you saw as a commander of them and how that informs what you are able to do now through Operation Ride Home and the ASYMCA to help them along their path?
Bill: Yeah, I’m glad to do that. During the time I spent in the Navy, I had the opportunity to serve in various locations and for various different types of commands.
Most of my career was in submarines. I had a total of five submarine tours, and two included command of a submarine. Then, I went on to have command of a squadron of submarines. The reason I bring that up is that I had an opportunity to see firsthand the challenges that our young sailors had to deal with.
They’re not any different than non-sailors or civilians, but I think when you look at what we expected them to do, particularly when we deployed for six months at a time and we were away from our families, they were really dependent on their spouses to take care of the kids.
It was amazing how many of them were challenged with issues. Many times the issues got to be so bad that we'd have to come into port at some point and then let folks go back to be able to take care of those issues. Many of them had challenges with finances, just like many young folks do. I learned early that there's many, many challenges.
Then, you fast forward from that time to the first time I heard about the Armed Services YMCA, I had a little over 30 years in the Navy and I was stationed in San Diego. The branch in San Diego reached out to my wife and asked her to be a member of their board for that branch.
That lasted the two and a half years we were there. My wife became intimately involved in what the Armed Services YMCA was all about, and therefore I became very interested in what the Armed Services YMCA was all about.
Then, fast forward another three or four years, and it was time for me to leave the Navy. I had promised my wife that we would leave Washington, D.C. We bought an RV, we'd go back to San Diego and all these things were going, right?
So, I get a call and somebody says, “Would you consider coming back and working with the Armed Services YMCA?” I went back to my wife and said, “Hey, forget the year off, forget going to San Diego. We're going to stay here because I'm thinking about this job.” I said, “What do you think?” She goes, “I will only stay in Washington D.C. and not go to San Diego if you take that job. No other job.”
That's how passionate we are as a family. The only reason I'm here is because of the passion that we have for this organization, because we saw firsthand what it does to change the lives of young enlisted folks.
At the end of the day, that's what makes our country strong. That's what makes our nation strong. We need to continue to do everything we can to take care of those dedicated young people who put their lives on the line and sometimes put their families in the back seat so they can be out there in harm's way, making sure that we can have our freedoms and live in the greatest country in the world.
Lucas: Sure. Just a side note out of my own curiosity – was purchasing an RV your way of trying to show her what life on the submarine was like for a while?
Bill: That’s a long story. What I really wanted was a boat. So, I said, “Hey, what do you think about a boat?” She said, “Yeah, a boat sounds great.” I said, “Great. There's a boat show next week.”
She goes,”Oh, there’s just two things about a boat.” I go, “What's that?” She goes, “Well, it's got to be at least a hundred feet long.” I go, “Okay. What’s the second thing?” She says, “Well, it's got to have a crew of 10.” So, I said, “How about an RV?” She says, “Okay.”
Lucas: Admiral Bill French, thank you not only for your service, but also for what you're doing right now. Also, thank you for joining us Around the Barrel.
Bill: Lucas, thank you very much. Thanks again to Operation Ride Home and everybody at Brown-Forman that supports this great program. You guys are having a huge impact. You ought to be very proud of the impact you're having. I know your employees are a big part of what makes all this stuff happen. It's a great company, it's great leadership and it's great employees, and thanks for being such a great support for us and all those that serve.
Lucas: Around the Barrel is the official podcast of the Jack Daniel Distillery. Follow the podcast on the web at jackdaniels.com/podcast. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate and review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you gather your on demand audio.
Always remember, with great podcasts and great whiskey, please enjoy responsibly. Join us next time for more conversations Around the Barrel. Again, for more information about how you can get involved with Operation Ride Home, please visit jdoperationridehome.com.
Your friends at Jack Daniel’s remind you to drink responsibly. Jack Daniel’s and Old No. 7 are registered trademarks. Copyright 2019, Jack Daniel’s. Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume, 80 proof. Distilled and bottled by Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee. Around the Barrel is intended for listeners 21 years of age and older.
