Ely Callaway Jr.

Ely Reeves Callaway Jr. was an American Entrepreneur, Textiles Executive, Winemaker and Vintner and Golf Club Manufacturer, as the founder of Callaway Golf.

He had three successful careers – first in textiles, next in wine and finally in golf. Ely Callaway was born in 1919 in Georgia and raised in LaGrange, Georgia. Even as he moved up the corporate ladder in New York, and later in California, he held on to his southern roots and retained a distinctive, singsong twang to his voice and a genteel southern charm.

At age 10 he earned $150 selling copies of Literary Digest, and used his profits to buy a J.H. Hale peach tree that yielded a crop of $750 in their first year. “My father thought they were probably the easiest to raise successfully, and also very palatable versus any other peaches," he later told his alma mater, Emory University.

Ely Callaway played golf as a youth, and was a distant cousin of golf legend Bobby Jones. He won four successive championships at LaGrange’s Highland Country Club. He was a natural leader in school, and was business manager of his high school newspaper and yearbook. His family wanted him to be an engineer, but he was determined to obtain a liberal arts degree. He was senior class president, worked at the business manager for the university publication called The Campus and was a member of the Omicron Delta Kappa leadership fraternity. He graduated with a degree in history in 1940.

He joined the Army as a reserve officer in 1940 and earned a reserve officer’s commission through a correspondence course. Despite his intent to stay away from the family business of textiles, he was assigned to the Philadelphia Centralized Procurement Agency; the Army decided fabrics suited him after learning of his family’s history in textiles and Callaway Mills. He fulfilled his one-year obligation in October 1941, and decided to re-enlist. Just a few months later, Pearl Harbor was bombed, and his role and responsibilities expanded exponentially. "All of a sudden we were buying hundreds of millions of items of apparel and all of the fabrics," he says. "[By 1945,] we had about twenty-five thousand people working there administering contracts all over the United States. I was spending at the rate of something like $700 million a year under just my jurisdiction, with my name on every contract. So you learn business real quick," he told Emory Magazine.

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