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| Affiliation | Republican |
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| Name | Bill Randles |
| Address |
Liberty, Missouri 64069, United States |
| Email | None |
| Website | [Link] |
| Born |
00, 1963
(61 years)
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| Contributor | RBH |
| Last Modifed | RBH
Feb 28, 2012 11:36am |
| Tags |
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| Info | Strength and vision. These are the words that have always defined Bill Randles. From the time he was a small boy, growing up in Northwest Arkansas, Bill could see how to reach beyond his circumstances to a brighter future. His life is a testament to the spirit of America and the vitality of the American Dream.
Early Years
Bill was born in 1963 in the small Ozarks town of Springdale, Arkansas. His parents married as teenagers and had Bill a little more than a year later. Until Bill was ten years old, his family lived in a trailer park and operated a roadside fruit stand. From the time he was a little boy, Bill worked in the family business, stocking, loading and unloading trucks, pitching melons, and helping out any way he could. But he also had another job – school. When he was seven years old, Bill's father told him if he wanted to get out of Arkansas he would have to do well in school. So from that time on, Bill treated school like his other job. He developed a tenacity. That, coupled with a relentless optimism about his future, began to pay off.
Other areas of life improved too. When Bill was ten, his family moved to a new trailer on thirty acres of land in the country. In his free time, Bill would steal away to the woods and imagine what life could be like. He saw things as they would be, not as they were. In the woods, he was free. Free to hunt and fish, to vex the snakes in his path, free to think in solitude, and free to dream.
With all that freedom came the greatest gift of his life. At the age of fifteen, Bill gave his life to Christ in what he calls a deep process of reflection and revelation. One year later, he felt the calling of God to preach God’s word. For the next many years, Bill traveled around the Ozarks preaching at churches and revivals.
Education
In the fall of 1981, Bill left Northwest Arkansas for Bolivar, Missouri where he attended Southwest Baptist University on a speech and debate scholarship. He had excelled in speech and debate in high school and was pleased when SBU recruited him for its team. During his four years of college, Bill won two national speech championships and numerous other awards and accolades.
After SBU, Bill went to Baylor University and received Master of Communication Studies degree. In 1986, he decided to take the law school admissions test. Of the over 100,000 students taking the test that year, Bill’s score was one of the top ten in the nation. That opened the door to his greatest educational experience of all – Harvard Law School. The young Ozarks minister graduated from Harvard in 1990, with honors.
A life-long lover of history and public policy, and the inner-workings of the two, Bill thrived at Harvard. As one of the few conservatives there, he often found himself defending conservative ideals and principles. Despite the liberal orthodoxy taught by most of Harvard’s esteemed professors, and swallowed whole by most of his classmates, the liberal teaching helped Bill to further analyze his own conservative views, to carefully understand and dissect the other side’s accounts of the world we live in, and to better articulate his own. As a result, Bill left Harvard even more conservative than when he arrived. Armed with the best legal and political education student loans could buy, Bill was ready to head back to the Midwest. He decided to join a large law firm and allow himself three years to pay off those student loans. Then, he would enter a life of politics and follow the best traditions of the Grand Old Party.
Career
Bill began his law practice in St. Louis. He spent his first two years of practice at Lewis & Rice, a large firm in the city. It soon became apparent that it would take him a lot longer than three years to pay back the $100,000 in student loans his Harvard degree had cost him. In fact, it took twelve.
In 1992, he got an offer to join what was to become the largest firm in Kansas City, Shook, Hardy & Bacon. For the next sixteen years, Bill used the same skills that had earned him the nation’s top honors in speech and debate and served him well as a minister, to defend the firm’s largest clients. During his last ten years at Shook, Hardy, Bill was a partner and owner in the firm and one of its most successful trial lawyers. He managed multi-million dollar books of business, large teams consisting of lawyers, analysts, administrative and support staff, and defended cases all over the country where hundreds of millions of dollars were at stake.
But by the end of 2008, Bill’s professional focus changed. After watching his former law school classmate, Barack Obama, run for president, and a mediocre career politician ride Obama’s coattails into the Missouri governor’s office, Bill decided it was finally time for him to reclaim the goals he had when he left Harvard. It was time for him to utilize the many years of studying history and public policy, the decades of executive experience, and his vision for his state and country. It was time for him to take a stand. At the end of 2008, he left his lucrative law practice for a chance to make a difference.
To make ends meet, Bill and his wife, Bev, started a consulting firm in Kansas City. But Bill, ever the visionary, decided to do something he had never done before – invest in the stock market. Just as the bottom was falling out of the market in 2009 and every expert was advising Americans to either “play it safe” with tried and true performers, or to avoid the market altogether, Bill took a chance – on America. He took all the money he and Bev had left from his law practice, and invested every cent in American companies that most experts were saying were doomed to fail. Companies like Ford Motor Company, U.S. Steel, Alcoa, John Deere, and Caterpillar. He invested in these companies when their stocks and America’s confidence in them were at an all time low. And the reward has afforded him the time to fully devote himself to his campaign.
Who Is Bill Randles?
As governor of the State of Missouri, Bill will take every ounce of the leadership, vision, and extraordinary spirit that fueled him to become a successful lawyer and businessman. Unlike most career politicians, Bill has actually lived among the people. He knows who they are because, despite the Harvard law degree and litany of successes, Bill Randles is still just a country boy at heart. He never lost that Southern accent and he never stopped being that small town boy who saw beyond the horizon. As one person put it, “There is no pretense with Randles. He just is.” His garage is stacked with trout fishing gear and his mind is stacked full of ideas for how to make Missouri the standard to which all other states will aspire.
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