Bellinger's friends build this stone bridge similar to one at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia.

College path, continued

Hello University of Illinois.

“Nope,” Randy said, cutting off his mother in midsentence. “I'm in West Lafayette, Indiana, and I'm enrolled in the Purdue University College of Agriculture.”

Lettie collected herself before she spoke.

“Randy, that's like an Ivy League school. Do you know how hard it's going to be at that school?”

Didn't matter.

Even on that first trip into town back in 1973, Bellinger knew this was where he was supposed to be. “I saw the courthouse, drove through downtown Lafayette, and just loved it,” he says.

Things were just starting to fall into place for Bellinger.

A friend from high school, Dellon Martens, was working at the Alcoa aluminum plant in Lafayette. Martens offered Bellinger room and board for $100 a month.

Then he met William Daniel, head of Purdue's world-renowned turf grass research center.

“He was the god of turf grass. He wrote the textbook we used at Danville,” Bellinger says.

Daniel even gave Bellinger a job. For $2.40 an hour, he worked in the greenhouse and turf plots doing research and was part of the crew that installed Daniel's revolutionary Prescription Athletic Turf system at Purdue's Ross-Ade Stadium.

The natural playing surface utilized a suction drainage system that made fields playable in anything short of a monsoon.

The money wasn't much, especially for a student paying out-of-state tuition. So Daniel helped Bellinger by finding other job opportunities.

“He sent me out to this guy's house one time,” Bellinger recalls. “Dr. Daniel told me the guy was having trouble with a putting green he had built in his backyard. He wasn't happy with the way it looked, so Dr. Daniel sent me out to see what I could do.

“I made some adjustments on his mower, triple-cut the green, and re-cut the cup locations, it was beautiful.”

To test Bellinger's work, the man walked onto his putting green with a ball and a putter. The first putt rolled straight into the cup. Practically before the ball came to a rest in the bottom of the cup, Bellinger had a job as the man's personal greens-keeper at the monstrous rate of $7.50 an hour.

Only later did Daniel let Bellinger in on the secret. Bellinger's new boss was Frederick Hovde, the recently retired Purdue University president.

Hovde told his neighbors, Jim and George Price, the founders of National Homes, who likewise owned putting greens and hired Bellinger on the spot. In turn, they told their neighbor, Bill DeFouw, owner of a large Lafayette automobile dealership. He, too, had to have a lawn by Bellinger.

Also on his list of clients was Helen Wymer, the widow of Floyd P. Wymer, one of the founders of another Lafayette manufacturing giant, Rostone Corp. She needed somebody to maintain her landscape plants and yard. Bellinger was quickly becoming the Robin Leach of grounds-keepers, catering to the rich and famous of Lafayette.

It was Wymer who played an influential role in helping Bellinger and his wife, Christine, BS '77 (forestry), start their own business a few years later.
After participating in commencement exercises together in May 1977 (Randy had graduated in December 1976), Christine and Randy became partners in a professional capacity, in a new venture started by Sears, Roebuck in Chicago called Sears Lawn and Leaf.

She took care of the trees and he took care of the lawns, but mostly, they drove, covering a huge territory spreading from northern Indiana, through Chicago and into southern Wisconsin.

“I didn't like Chicago,” Bellinger says. “Nobody trusted anybody else. Coming from a small farm community, it was a big culture shock.”

So it wasn't a great disappointment when the lawn service couldn't deliver on the promise of an off-season job that would get Bellinger and his new wife (Randy and Christine wed in October 1977) through the winter months.

The Bellingers came up with the idea of starting a landscaping business back in Lafayette.

“We were young and out of debt,” Bellinger says. “What did we have to lose?”

They began a letter-writing campaign to most of the businesses in the Lafayette area, selling their service as a way of improving the businesses' professional image.

Pretty gutsy, considering the Bellingers didn't own a single piece of landscaping equipment.
“We couldn't even show people any of the equipment we were going to use,” Bellinger says. “We just showed them a picture from a brochure.”

But that was enough for Rostone to become the Bellinger's first client. It may have had something to do with the fact that Fred Hovde's son-in-law was an executive with the company. Or, perhaps, it went all the way back to Helen Wymer, the widow of Rostone's founder, who gave them a place to stay until their business took off.

The Bellingers did everything from yard work to window washing to shoveling the parking lot in the winter.

Bellinger figured it would take $16,000 to jump-start their business. Although every bank they approached passed, their parents said OK to co-signing a loan.

Within weeks, Alcoa came on board, then Ace Hardware, Wendy's and Dairy Queen. Bellinger's Professional Grounds Maintenance, Inc. was in business for good.

The Bellingers paid off their parents in the first year of business.

By 1979, in just their second year of business, they picked up contracts with Egyptian Lacquer and Eli Lilly's Tippecanoe Laboratories, often putting on a show for their clients' employees.

“Whenever we had to do something like de-thatch the lawn, we'd make sure we did it during a shift change when lots of people would be walking by,” Bellinger says. “Nothing like doing a little advertising for a captive audience of factory workers moving in and out of the building.

“We did $65,000 in sales in 1979, and by 1981, we topped $250,000.” Business has continued to grow each year. The Bellingers now have an inventory of 20,000 trees in their nursery, selling nearly 4,000 a year.

Again debt free, Bellinger in the '90s set his sights on a new challenge, but not without his wife's blessing.

“What do you think about starting a golf course?” he asked Christine.

“Well, if we are going to do it, let's get started now, so we have time to build it and still be able to recover from the debt while we're young enough,” she replied.