In late July 2019, Nashville songwriter Leslie Satcher was in town as a performer at the Sandy Lee Songfest. Hours before she was to go on stage, she was rehearsing at the home of Joel Hopper, who hosted her and her husband during Songfest for eight years.
Inspired by a sign she saw in his house, Satcher set down her guitar and started writing a song. The title: “Every Day Counts.”
That title says a lot about how Joel Ray Hopper, who died unexpectedly early Thursday morning at his home here, lived his life.
Shock regarding his death reverberated near and far. Hopper had some medical issues recently, though he was uncomplaining. “He’d say, ‘I don’t have a care in the world,’” longtime friend Bill Latta said Friday.
So people were stunned to learn that Hopper—a young-looking and -acting 77-year-old—was suddenly gone.
“I’m floored. I can’t even say the words,” Corky Taylor, a former Hendersonian who now owns the award-winning Kentucky Peerless distillery in Louisville, said Friday.
“I talked to him every week,” Taylor said. “I’ve known him since high school.”
When he was inducted into the Kentucky Bourbon Hall of Fame last year, Taylor said, he introduced three guests—Hopper, Latta and fellow Henderson native Tommy Dempewolf—as his best friends.
“I loved him to death,” Taylor said. “It hurts me, and it hurts a lot of people. I’ll tell you, I’m really going to miss Joe.”
Just the dry facts of Hopper’s life and career could fill volumes.
He grew up one of three sons of Wallace and Ruby Hopper, a hard-working couple who ran restaurants and bars (such as the Cloverdale Club on South Green Street) and a downtown pool hall. When Joe, the middle son, was young, they lived in a modest home on a small farm on the edge of town and had some horses.
A 1966 graduate of Henderson County High School, Hopper served a stint in the Army, stationed in Germany, then attended college. In 1973, Hopper joined locally based PB&S Chemical Co. as a purchasing agent and, learning for years under owner Raymond B. Preston, rose up the ranks. PB&S grew to become the 10th largest chemical distributor in America.
When Preston sold PB&S to giant German chemical distributor Brenntag in 1989, PB&S became part of Brenntag Mid-South. Hopper remained with the compamy and served as its president from 2005 until his retirement from full-time work in 2016. By then, through organic growth and acquisitions, he had helped guide it to being the largest operating company within Brenntag, with annual sales of $1.2 billion.
He also built an impressive resume of board positions locally and on state and national levels. Among them:
- Past board member and chair of the Henderson County Riverport Authority
- Past board member of Henderson Economic Development
- Past board member of the National Association of Chemical Distributors
- Past board member of the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce
- Inaugural board member and past chair of the Kentucky Chamber Foundation’s Leadership Institute of School Principals
- Founding board member of the Henderson Leadership Initiative
- Founding board member of the Men’s Bourbon Society of Henderson
- Board member and lead director of Field & Main Bank
- Board member of BridgeLink, the Henderson-Evansville organization that has long campaigned for Interstate 69 and a new bridge
- Board member of the Community Foundation of Henderson.
“He was on a lot of boards, so you know he was very well respected,” Taylor said.
“Joel was widely respected on the state level and especially involved with the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce,” Dave Adkisson, who was president of the Kentucky Chamber when Hopper served on that organization’s board, said in a statement. “He helped launch the Leadership Institute for School Principals through which the business community has invested more than $4 million in executive training for school principals, including several from Henderson County.”
Along the way, Hopper was named a Henderson County High School Outstanding Alumni Award recipient and inducted into its Alumni Hall of Fame.
In 2021, the Henderson Chamber of Commerce named him its Distinguished Citizen of the Year.
In 2009, while Hopper was its president, Brenntag Mid-South was named the Henderson Chamber’s Industry of the Year by the Henderson Chamber, largely because Hopper had withstood corporate pressure to relocate the company’s 80-employee headquarters from here to St. Louis—and even undertook a $1.6 million, 27,000-square-foot warehouse expansion here during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
“He was willing to put his job on the line to not only endorse a smart business decision to stay in Henderson but to secure the jobs of so many Hendersonians who committed their careers to PB&S and Brenntag and the community that supported our business,” Bill Fidler, a longtime friend and fellow Brenntag executive, said via email.
That commitment to Henderson was seen at many other times. When Fidler came to work at Brenntag Mid-South in 1992, “I remember our family looking at homes in Newburgh and Evansville in addition to Henderson, but Joel made it very clear that we absolutely needed to live in Henderson,” he said. Borrowing a line from Ray Preston’s playbook, Hopper told him, “If you’re to be part of the leadership team of a Henderson-based company, you need to live in Henderson!”
“I heard of Joel Hopper most of my adult life. He and my father were on the planning commission together … He’d come home and tell me things Joe Hopper did,” Scott Davis, now chairman and CEO of Field & Main Bank, recalled.
In the 1980s, Preston became chairman and majority stockholder of what was then called Ohio Valley Bank, and Hopper was in his orbit.
“When I started at the bank, he and Ray were very close,” Davis said of Hopper. “He’d be in there. I quickly learned who he was. I learned this guy has panache and style, and was someone I wanted to be around.”
The role the hard-charging Preston played in molding Joel Hopper can’t be overstated, those who knew him well said.
In Preston, Davis said, “You got to observe somebody who was exactly as he appeared to be. He was a no-nonsense guy who meant what he said and did what he said he would do, and was very forthright and didn’t pull any punches, and sometimes that wasn’t very positive.
“That direct nature, Joe picked a lot up on, because Joe’s manner was like that as well because he doesn’t mind telling you his own unvarnished opinion,” he said. “I’ve often told people who weren’t used to Joe’s opinion—I think I told the Kentucky Chamber board—criticism was Joe’s love language. You know he told you those things not because he was mean-spirited, but because he wanted to help you. Not everyone felt that way”— including some people on the bank’s board of directors.
Hopper’s bluntness belied his generosity.
“When he would hear that somebody had a need, he had to do something about it—pass the hat, write a check, (get a friend or friends to) split it with him,” Davis said. “Since Thursday I’ve had people tell me what he had done for them. Some was emotional support, some was helping pay bills they needed to get caught up.”
Several years ago, businessman Stanley Shields would periodically call a group of fellows together to sip bourbon late on a Friday afternoon. One December evening, they gathered at Hopper’s home on U.S. 60-East.
After the men had a drink or two, Hopper called them to attention. He had become aware of a woman who was raising a 10-year-old granddaughter by herself and was struggling. Christmas was coming up, he reminded the men; they should do something. He literally passed the hat and generous amounts were dropped in. “I think it was $1,200,” Shields said.
More or less directly from that night, the Men’s Bourbon Society of Henderson was formed in late 2019 as a fraternal and philanthropic organization under the umbrella of the Community Foundation of Henderson, with Hopper and an advisory board of local businessmen in charge.
Almost immediately, the society donated $10,000 each to the Audubon Kids Zone and the Boys & Girls Club, and gave $1,000 grants to five other nonprofits.
The next year, the Covid pandemic took hold, and Hopper led the formation of the Henderson Employee Relief Fund to provide financial assistance to workers in need, such as restaurant workers who were furloughed. The Bourbon Society put up the initial $20,000 for the fund, which over time grew to $700,000 from other sources.
Just before that Christmas, Hopper led a group of young society members to Walmart to try to identify shoppers in checkout lines who looked like they could benefit from a little assistance, and paid for their purchases.
A year later, the organization donated $24,000 in gift cards to the Family Resource Centers in Henderson County School System to help staff help students in need of food, clothes, health care and more; the year after that, it donated more than $26,000 more in gift cards.
The Bourbon Society went on to participate in a $48,000 collaboration to replace the American Legion Honor Guard bus and a $250,000 collaboration to improve safety at local schools. This spring, the society donated $20,000 to a Henderson County flood relief fund and raised $5,000 for St. Anthony’s Hospice.
To date, the Men’s Bourbon Society and partners have donated more than $1 million to those in need.
“He came from working-class people,” Satcher, the Nashville songwriter who spent many hours chatting with Hopper on his side porch, said. “He knew what it was to not have enough.”
“Mr. Joe, he had an eye for the future,” she said. “He could have easily sat on his laurels and done nothing. He could have gotten on a boat and gone to the Keys. He had a heart for that community.”
“He was a good citizen,” said longtime insurance agent Latta, who had known Hopper since they were in Little League at age 9 and was perhaps his closest friend. “Henderson was his home. He gave back in a lot of big ways and small ways.”
Hopper was not shy about leaning on his friends to help as well. Once, Latta recalled, Hopper hosted representatives of the Kentucky Chamber Foundation at a meeting in the board room at Field & Main and told local business people about the need to contribute money to support the foundation’s leadership program for school principals.
“And Bill Latta is going to start it off at $5,000,” Hopper announced. It was the first Latta had heard about it.
“And everybody claps,” said Latta, who knew there was no way out.
Hopper was known as an impeccable dresser with old-school manners. “We traveled a lot, and he was forever getting an ironing board out if he saw a wrinkle in a shirt or pants,” Latta said. “I’d say, ‘Joe, we’re going down to a sports bar!’”
That made no difference to Hopper, who would rise to his feet if a lady approached his table at a restaurant or groan if he saw a man wearing a cap indoors — “a lot of that old traditional stuff they don’t teach anymore,” in Latta’s words.
For all Hopper did in local civic affairs, perhaps nothing meant more to him that the Henderson Leadership Initiative, or HLI.
In the early 2000s, a group of friends—Hopper, Davis, Gleaner editor Ron Jenkins and bankers Dale Sights and Herb McKee—began meeting and sharing concerns that a generation of Henderson leaders like Ray Preston, newspaper owner Walt Dear and physician and prolific fundraiser Dr. John Logan were retiring from public life or had died. They feared that there weren’t young leaders prepared to follow in their footsteps.
After years of talk, Hopper visited the University of Georgia’s Fanning Institute of Leadership Development. “It got us started with our first curriculum,” Davis said.
In 2007 HLI launched its first class of 20 young adults—business people, industry executives, attorneys, financial consultants and others—and over a year of monthly classes, exposed them to leadership concepts, provided mentorship and guided them to pursue a community improvement project, both for the benefit of fellow citizens and to gain experience in collaboration.
To date, HLI has graduated some 300 young people—“Fellows,” in HLI parlance—who make up a veritable Who’s Who of community leadership in elected office, business, education, the nonprofit world and more.
City Attorney Dawn Kelsey (Class of 2008) is among those Fellows and today serves as vice president of the HLI board and president of the Community Foundation, among much else.
“Joel’s impact on our community was profound, not just through his visible leadership, but through the way he quietly mentored so many of us—urging us to embrace challenges and stay committed to making a difference,” Kelsey said in a message. “His greatest legacy may be the generation of Hendersonians he inspired to lead with purpose and a deep sense of responsibility for the well-being of our community.”
Others remember Hopper provided personal guidance or inspiration, directly or indirectly.
Shields recalled going to Hopper with some dilemma, only to be told, “You know what to do, Stanley. Why are you asking me?”
Other times, Hopper would call out a friend for a perceived error or misdeed. “He did it because he liked you, he wanted to help you,” Shields said. “He didn’t do it out of meanness.”
“I’d known of Joel and his career,” but really only got to know him until about five years ago, Mark Weaver, chairman of the Community Foundation of Henderson, said. “At my age, rare to find a mentor and a friend. I didn’t know the guy was going to bless me with both our leadership and his friendship.”
He said Hopper was especially helpful as the Community Foundation set out on the path to becoming a fully independent, self-governing organization in recent years. “He had an understanding of … the different pieces on the chess board, what I needed to do next,” Weaver said.
“I was telling someone the other day, he was one who took me under his wings and supported me from day one, which was cool,” Casey Todd, a 2022 HLI Fellow and entrepreneur who founded Hometown Roots, Roast Coffee Bar and Homer’s Barbecue, among other ventures.
“There was HLI,” Todd said of his exposure to Hopper. “But really, the late-night conversations at the bar, talking about leadership, those were the best times. He genuinely asked how people were doing—mom and dad, Tori and the girls. And he meant it. Definitely a very inspirational fellow. He was 100% Henderson.”
“He could be stubborn, he could be intimidating to some people,” Henderson County Judge-Executive Brad Schneider, a 2008 Fellow and current HLI board member, said Saturday. “He could be my way or the highway.
“But he was a person in my life I will cherish and thank the Lord I met as long as I live,” Schneider said. “People in Henderson County probably wouldn’t know my name if I hadn’t gone through HLI. Through it we became good friends and he became a mentor of mine. He had great perspective and could be bluntly honest, because he cared enough.
“I will miss him greatly,” he said. “He could be a bull in a china shop, but he helped a lot of people, a lot of times without anyone knowing. It’s a great loss for the community. I’m heartbroken.
“Every town that’s successful needs people like that,” Schneider said. “They can lead, or they can sit on the sidelines. Even up to his last breath, he was not on the sidelines.”
At age 18, Darrell Littrell and a friend rented a basement apartment in Hopper’s then-home on Green River Road. “He said, ‘You can have the run of the place. Just stay out of the laundry,’” Littrell recalled.
Instead, “I used the washer and dryer after midnight,” even using Hopper’s own detergent. In the daytime, “I’d say, ‘You smell like me!’”
They went on to become good friends, and as Littrell and his wife built successful businesses, Hopper would—as he did with other successful friends—come to him seeking money for community causes.
“The first check I wrote was probably $200,” Littrell said. “Then they got bigger and bigger. You never had to ask him if he wrote a check, because you knew he had. And I trusted that Joe had vetted” whatever cause he was raising money for.
He still has a voicemail from 2022 when money was being raised for the American Legion Honor Guard bus: “Darrell? How’re you doing, buddy? Joe Hopper. Give me a call. I’ll give you a little update. I’ve got some really cool news I think, about this bus. See ya, bye.”
“There are people you want remembered, because they had a huge impact on the community,” Littrell said. “I just want him remembered.”
He and Hopper spoke often. “I’d end our conversation with, ‘What would Henderson do without you?’” Littrell said.
“He’d say, ‘They’ll be just fine.’”
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Memorial services for Joel Hopper will be at 1 p.m. this Tuesday at Rudy-Rowland Funeral Home. Visitation will be from 9 a.m. until service time Tuesday at the funeral home.
