TUPELO, Miss. — They were losing their furniture manufacturers to China.

A giant auto manufacturer from Japan would save them.

That’s the shorthand of this story.

It is a story that begins with David Rumbarger, CEO and president of the Community Development Foundation (CDF), arriving in northeast Mississippi in 2000, the local market in dire need of an economic jumpstart.

Only, before it can get better it gets worse. Much worse.

“Yeah, 9/11 happened nine months into my tenure and we were in a recession,” Rumbarger said on a recent morning, seated at a table in one of CDF’s “Toyota” conference rooms, where walls are lined with posters promoting the annual Tupelo Elvis Festival.

“Furniture companies were off-shoring all their jobs,” he said, “so we were having an almost monthly announcement of a furniture company closing here and locating in China.

“It became a burning platform for change.”

Crossing the right lines

The community had been forced into change before, of course.

“We started with cotton and farming at the turn of the century,” Rumbarger said, launching into a quick recap. “We started with mechanization after World War II, furniture came in ’54 and just blew up until the ’90s, so this was the next economic cycle.”

Rumbarger and other community leaders did their best to imagine not just a few years ahead, but decades of tomorrows. They concluded the industries with the brightest postmodern future were automotive manufacturing and food processing.

They cast their lot with the former.

“A lot of folks thought we were as crazy as hades, ‘What do you mean you’re gonna buy 1,500 acres and bring in a major automobile manufacturer?’ ” said Randy Kelley, executive director of the Three Rivers Planning and Development Alliance.

“Our elected officials laid their careers on the line,” he said. “We needed the jobs. They ended up crossing county lines (Lee, Pontotoc and Union) to form partnerships and make it happen.

“The building of partnerships with elected officials, developers, our organization, the Tupelo Community Development Foundation … it’d take a half day to give all the kudos.”

David Fernandes, who has been in Toyota management since 1998 and this year became manager of the Tupelo-area plant in nearby Blue Springs, knows the legend well.

“It’s pretty remarkable,” he said, “to see local government come together and pull off that type of opportunity.”

Thank you, thank you very much

This small town in northeastern Mississippi is famous for being the birthplace of Elvis Presley — Jan. 8, 1935, to be exact. The Tupelo Elvis Festival draws tourists from across the globe.

Eighty-six years after he was born, the King of Rock & Roll still has the town’s most recognizable face, is still the one man who gets a pass on wearing a white jumpsuit.

But he now shares the main stage, as it were, with Toyota Motor Manufacturing Mississippi Inc., which made an investment of $980 million, according to the Tennessee Valley Authority, after announcing in 2007 it would locate in Blue Springs.

A quick bit of Toyota history: Kiichiro Toyoda was the son of Sakichi Toyoda, who invented distinct types of textile machinery. Kiichiro worked for his father’s company in Japan, but by the late 1920s also was developing plans for an automobile, and by 1933 had established an auto division within Toyoda Loom Works.

By 1937, Toyota Motor Corp. formed as a spinoff, the company later explaining the name change from Toyoda to Toyota as a matter of “luck and prosperity.”

Apparently so, because now everyone knows the name Toyota.

“People hear Tupelo, and they mention Elvis first,” said Kim Caron, owner of The Caron Gallery on Tupelo’s Main Street, which underwent a $15 million transformation after Toyota came to the region. “But the next thing they say is you have a Toyota plant.”

Elvis’ rise to fame began 75 years ago and, of all places, at Tupelo Hardware. In a 1979 letter written by a former employee, Forrest L. Bobo recalls that fateful January day in 1946 when Elvis and his mother, Gladys Presley, dropped by the store.

As the story goes, 11-year-old Elvis wanted a .22-caliber rifle, but he didn’t have enough money. So, Mom said she would help him — if he would instead buy a guitar, which sold for $7.75, plus tax.

Elvis accepted the gift.

“What a good mother,” said Caron, whose gallery is just few doors down from the hardware store.

And what a good native son.

For Elvis became an effective ambassador in the afterlife, playing a supporting role in the courting of Toyota.

“We used Elvis in the recruitment of all of our plants at that time — plants we didn’t get, and we used it with Toyota,” Rumbarger said.

“It became Americana. If you’re thinking of America, you’re thinking Elvis and rock ’n’ roll. Everybody knows Elvis worldwide. It helped place us. It gave me an introductory card.

“And when we went to some of the trade shows, we printed up little Elvis pins and everybody wanted an Elvis pin.

“Elvis is always gonna be around,” Rumbarger added, “but thank goodness he’s passed because he can’t do anything bad now to ruin his image.”

Staying the course

Once Rumbarger, Kelley and other leaders were all-in on acquiring a major auto manufacturer — and it cost $24.5 million for the land, with $298 million as the “all-in number,” Rumbarger said — they took a deep breath and stepped into the light.

Offering corporate incentives, Rumbarger says, wasn’t even a question in their situation: “I don’t think it makes a bad deal good, but it makes a good deal doable. In a rural state like Mississippi, we have to use incentives because it gets us back to par.”

Community leaders also wanted to put forth the most positive attitude possible.

“We called it the ‘Wellspring Project’ … abundant resources,” Rumbarger said. “We talked about the workforce, the work ethic of the region, we talked about manufacturing as a history, and went to automotive shows, went to Detroit several times, called directly on companies, worked projects that were coming through at the time.”

And encountered more than a few skeptics.

“There was a radio group out of Jackson, a morning show, ‘J.T. & Dave,’ and they called it the ‘Wishing Well Project,’ ” Rumbarger said.

“It was a swing for the fences,” he continued. “And afterward, somebody asked me, ‘Well, what happens if you don’t land it?’ Well, we had several shots. And we never thought we were out of the game.

“Mazda came through and looked. The UPS truck facility that went to Savannah, Georgia, came and looked … each time we garnered more information about what they needed and what they wanted.

“So, when Toyota came around the second time (after choosing San Antonio over the Blue Springs site), we knew exactly what we had to do. First, to qualify that site, and two, make it over the goal line.”

Seeing is believing

Making it over the goal line meant first gaining positive yards with someone at Toyota who had leverage. Rumbarger had met Dennis Cuneo, then senior vice president of site selection for Toyota Motor North America, “just to shake his hand.”

“I knew I had to get to Dennis to get his attention,” Rumbarger said. “But I’d never had a direct call with him, because he was always kind of behind the corporate veil.

“He had talked on a panel with Glenn McCullough; he used to be the chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Glenn’s from Tupelo, Glenn’s a friend. So, I called Glenn, ‘Can you help me to get to see Dennis Cuneo in New York City?’ ”

This morphed into a visit from Cuneo.

“I knew we couldn’t have a big old community love-in. So, we got the president of the community college, the president of BancorpSouth, the president of one of the furniture manufacturers here, so we had three people and myself, and said to Dennis, by himself, ‘Here’s the business case.’ ”

Cuneo, who now operates his own consulting firm, DC Strategic Advisors LLC, recalls other sites were in the running, including Chattanooga — eventually the home of a new Volkswagen plant — and a West Memphis site that Cuneo said Toyota toured twice.

But what most resonates about that visit to Tupelo all these years later is a walk he made through one of those furniture manufacturing plants.

“They were working piecemeal,” Cuneo said. “Pretty strong work ethic. That impressed me.”

As did Rumbarger’s PowerPoint presentation.

“He showed the manufacturing workers within a 60-mile commute,” Cuneo said. “Then he compared that to San Antonio (where Toyota located a plant after first rejecting the Tupelo area) and showed that there were more people (in this region) than there were in San Antonio.”

Cuneo also credits then-Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour becoming actively involved in the process, saying that he “really moved the needle.”

Waiting is the hardest part

From May of 2006 until Toyota’s announcement for Tupelo/Blue Springs in February of 2007, the company sent representatives to the area at least 16 separate times, Rumbarger says.

So, if they were close to getting over the goal line, there were also still multiple chances to fumble short of pay dirt.

“It’s relationship,” Fernandes said of Toyota doing its due diligence before signing off on a site and a community. “You’re learning about each other, gaining trust with each other.”

For example, an environmental inspector was on the proposed site for two full days.

“We were right there with him the whole time,” Rumbarger recalled. “And he told me later, after we won the project, ‘You’re the only guys that stayed with me. Everybody else just dropped me off.’ ”

Not only did they stay with him, but they introduced him to Southern hospitality.

“We brought him in a barbecue lunch, nice pie and iced tea,” said Rumbarger. “Just do what you do normally to friends. Treat them like we would want to be treated.”

While that was within their control, an economy on the downswing was out of their control. This was especially frustrating because community leaders already had six years of work into the Wellspring Project, including going to Washington and getting Mississippi Highway 78 an interstate designation — I-22.

For all the excitement later in 2007 when Toyota broke ground, the project stalled in 2008 amid the recession.

“They stopped,” Rumbarger said, the pain of that time still clear in his voice now. “They hired 110 people in management. And they were making plans, had their job fairs all lined up, and Toyota said, ‘We’re gonna hold and see how the economy rebounds.’ So, we held for 18 months.

“We had people in the community saying, ‘It’s just gonna be a big roller rink. They’re never gonna occupy.’”

In Rumbarger’s mind those days? The fear of what might never be.

And an earlier trip to Erlanger, Kentucky, the site of Toyota’s first American manufacturing plant, had made his dream that much more real.

“They gave us some things to look for,” he said. “They said we don’t see a whole lot of couches on front porches anymore, we see newer cars in the driveways, we see routine maintenance being done, people’s yards are cleaner, we had five banks, and now we have 11 banks.”

Fitting in

The first Toyota Corolla in Tupelo was produced in 2011 — four years after the announcement that Toyota was coming.

A decade later, the 1,700-acre campus — plus an additional 1,100 acres of “buffer” that sits off I-22 — is like its own town. It has its own exit, 73A, and employees and visitors follow Magnolia Way to the plant, which comes with a dedicated water tower emblazoned with “TOYOTA” in huge red lettering.

By 2017, Toyota had built one million Corollas in Tupelo; Corolla was the world’s top-selling car in 2019 and 2020 and, by some metrics, might be the best-selling car all-time.

The Blue Springs plant now churns out 170,000 Corollas annually and has the capacity to produce as many as 200,000. Total investment in the facility is north of $1 billion.

The work is all grounded in the so-called “Toyota Way.” It isn’t just a slogan.

“Respect for people — all our stakeholders,” Fernandes said. “We do that as a core fundamental with team members. Our approach to the world is always continuous improvement. There’s always a better way to do things.

“I’d say the folks who were part of starting this plant would be shocked if they came here today and saw all the improvements.”

Toyota also has engaged with the community. By its own counting, the company has donated more than $5.3 million to local nonprofits.

“They give to everything,” Rumbarger said. “And not just give, but get involved — community cleanup days, they take on Arbor Day projects, they work with our state park system.

“They went from being not here to one of the biggest impacts in the community.”

By 2018, the company was announcing an additional $170 investment and 400 new jobs to build the 12th-generation Corolla, plus they built a new $10 million visitor and training center.

Toyota now has about 2,400 direct jobs and a study from the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Center for Automotive Research, based on 2015 data, found that Toyota supported 8,700 jobs in Mississippi (direct, indirect and spinoff); direct employees, the study reported, earned $307 million in payroll.

Sabryna Summers, 32, is a server at Amsterdam Deli & Grill in downtown Tupelo and rents a house near the plant in Blue Springs.

“It’s made rents go up, land costs go up,” she said, “but it’s been a benefit because it’s given locals better-paying jobs and it’s closer to home.”

Simply put: One doesn’t have to be a captain of commerce to recognize the Toyota-before-and-after phenomenon.

“You didn’t see a whole lot of anything new before,” said Summers. “Toyota brought recognition to the area. It’s a landmark, something that people know.”

And yes, it has changed people’s thinking.

Early on, community leaders made a concerted effort to engage local small businesses with Toyota, everything from cleaning services and coding companies, to helping minority businesses become certified.

Those companies had one chance to make a first impression.

“With the Toyota Way, they have a standard they will accept,” Rumbarger said. “And you have to meet that standard.”

A 30- to 50-year plan

So, Rumbarger says, “A lot of small businesses already here got a piece of Toyota business.”

Other businesses, however, had to react to the new competition.

“It has caused existing industry to value their people more,” said Caron, of The Caron Gallery, and who has an employee whose spouse works for Toyota.

“They had to step up and make sure they have benefits. Yes, if you’re a local furniture plant (that) sells at low-end price points, it’s hard to compete with Toyota,” she said. “But it also makes them feel, ‘I need to do a little better, have a higher pay scale.’

“It makes everyone step up their game.”

A game that Rumbarger says is far from over. And he says that is true for the three-county area near the Toyota plant, and it will be true in the area around the new $5.6 billion Ford battery plant at the Megasite of West Tennessee in Haywood County.

“We’ve got another site, as battery becomes pertinent, behind the existing Toyota plant for a sister plant,” Rumbarger said. “We’ve proven ourselves in 10 years what we can do.

“We want to prove ourselves again to get that sister plant at some point.”

Fernandes, the plant manager in Blue Springs, gives away nothing about Toyota’s future plans in Tupelo, but says, “To see what’s happened after 10 years is amazing.”

He began his Toyota career 23 years ago as a line supervisor at a plant in West Virginia.

“What I can tell you,” Fernandes said, “is that the Toyota Way hasn’t changed. But I’ve been amazed at the speed of change with our product and our industry.

“It’s more competitive than ever.”

As evidenced by the amount of investment from Ford at the Megasite of West Tennessee and the trove of incentives the company received.

“For Ford,” Rumbarger said, “you had done enough due diligence that you had wrung out the risk in that site and workforce in Memphis, Jackson, and the region, to be able to staff the plant, run the plant, and be productive.

“You’re looking at a 30- to 50-year cycle on something like that. It’s not just, do it now, and in 10 years we’re doing something different.”