Mack met them attending community events. Caldwell would be there, often as sponsors, and had worked with them since the mid-nineties. Caldwell has also managed retirement plans for the Boys & Girls Clubs for years.
Mack had discovered Boys & Girls Clubs as a 10-year-old and became an employee while attending Jacksonville State University in Gadsden, Alabama. He took college classes in the morning; each afternoon he was arts and crafts director at a Club. In January 1970, one month after graduation, 23 years old and single, Mack became a unit director. Later in the 1970’s, he was assigned to the then – Boys Club of Sarasota County, where he reported to executive director Ray Humphrey – and became interested in Ray’s daughter Lynne, a club volunteer. They married in 1974 and moved to Tuscaloosa in 1975 for Mack’s promotion to executive director. After their two sons were born, Lynne taught school full-time and earned two degrees from the University of Alabama. (J. Mack, Jr. is now chief operating officer for Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Florida and Dustin is manager of information technology at Williams, Parker, Harrison, Dietz & Getzen, a Sarasota law firm.)
Mack became executive director of a club in Albany, Georgia, in 1985 but took a detour two years later, moving to the trust department of C&S Bank in Alabama. He soon discovered that he missed the Clubs, realized he made a mistake and returned to the Boys & Girls Clubs where he was tasked with resuscitating a nearly dead club in Sarasota. He succeeded so well that when he retired in 2011, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Sarasota County comprised four Clubs and six after-school programs, serving thousands of children each year. He is now a consultant for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.
Over the past 20 years, Mack couldn’t help but notice the commitment Caldwell has for the entire community and what a close-knit family they are. Caldwell makes this a better place for all of us to live and work and is proud to be a part of it!