Clyde W. Anderson Memorial Endowment

This endowed scholarship was established by The Anderson Foundation and family of Clyde W. Anderson. In 1917, 14-year-old Clyde W. Anderson of Florence dropped out of school and began delivering newspapers to help support his family after his father’s death. Anderson soon learned of complaints from northern construction workers building nearby Wilson Dam that they could not get their hometown newspapers. Seizing a business opportunity, Anderson coordinated with northern newspaper publishers and the railroads to ship a number of these papers to Florence, where he sold them from a crude newsstand built from piano crates. Within a few years, his profits allowed Anderson and his brother to invest in their first book store in downtown Florence. Charles C. Anderson, Clyde’s son, inherited the store in 1950 and began expanding it into a chain of bookstores that were incorporated under the name Bookland in 1964. In the 1970s, Bookland continued to expand into shopping malls that were springing up all over the Southeast. By 1980, the company boasted 50 stores, and Charles Anderson had also established a book and periodical distribution business. Charles’s sons, Charles Jr. and Clyde B., began working in both the bookstores and the wholesale business. In 1988, Bookland acquired Gateway Books, a chain of stores based in Knoxville, Tennessee, and doubled the size of the company, but 27 of 50 stores were closed later because they were underperforming. Charles Anderson Jr. took the excess books and fixtures and opened the first of the company’s superstores in 1988 in Huntsville. In 1992, the company officially changed its name to Books-A-Million, Inc., and went public on the NASDAQ exchange with an initial stock offering of 2.6 million shares at $13 per share. By 1993, Books-A-Million had 113 stores across the Southeast, including approximately 84 Bookland stores and 29 Books-A-Million superstores.
Priority shall be given to incoming freshman or transfer student who are children of employees of companies affiliated with or owned in large part by the Anderson family (Charles or Joel R Anderson and lineal decedents) including but not limited to Anderson Media, Books a Million, American Promotional Events, Anderson Press, CRG Holdings, Anderson & Anderson, including subsidiaries and affiliates. It is the donor’s intent to award scholarships to good students who may not have financial means or academic credentials to receive assistance otherwise. Recipients shall have composite ACT scores between 21 and 28.