Robert Tucker is best known for building North Carolina-based Shoe Show into a national brand, but he told a story once about how an encounter with a homeless man changed his way of thinking.
Tucker, who died Saturday, Sept. 30, 2023, at age 86, started supporting Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs after daughter, Lisa, Shoe Show’s president and CEO, graduated from there in 1989.
In 2010, the Tuckers gave the private, Christian university $5 million to begin construction of the Tucker Student Center, which has since become the heart of campus life for the more than 3,100 students who attend the school located 50 miles west of Charlotte.
At the dedication ceremony for the 110,000-square-foot building two years later, Tucker surprised everyone by announcing an additional gift of $500,000 via the telling of his experience.
“I remember once being in New York, and I crossed the street and saw a homeless man. I gave him $5 or $10,” Tucker noted that day. “I’ll never forget his face, and I always wondered if I gave enough. So, I’m going to give another half-million dollars in honor of Dr. Dee Hunt (former vice president of Student Development who died in 2021).” The crowd reportedly broke into applause, and Hunt’s face crumpled with emotion.
Tucker was born Aug. 5, 1937, in Badin, about 45 miles northeast of Charlotte. His parents divorced when he was a baby, and he and his mother, Gertrude, would go to live with her parents in Albemarle. During the wartime era, his mother, who had learned welding in Charlotte, moved to Akron, Ohio, to work in the defense industry at Goodyear Aircraft.
After World War II, his mother remarried and the family moved to Concord. Tucker changed his last name to his stepfather’s to ease confusion at school, according to his obituary.
Growing up, Tucker worked as a cook and curb boy at his stepfather’s restaurant, Tuck’s Tavern. He also cleaned the parking lots of an ice cream shop and another local restaurant. Tucker ran track in high school, but still found time to work at Baucom’s Shoe Store during his senior year. That experience helped launch him and his wife to open their shoe store in Kannapolis in 1960. They named the store Shoe Show.
Concord-based Shoe Show has grown into a $1 billion-plus enterprise with more than 1,100 stores in 47 states that go by Shoe Show, Shoe Dept., Shoe Show Mega, Shoe Dept. Encore, Shoebilee and Burlington Shoes. His daughter, Lisa, became president of the company in 2018, and is also the current treasurer of Gardner-Webb University’s board of trustees.
In 2019, Robert and Carolyn Tucker gave another historic gift – a $4 million endowment to establish the “Tucker Heart, Soul, Mind, and Strength Scholarship.” The full-tuition, room and board scholarship is based on the Tuckers’ “life verse,” Mark 12:29-31. In the Scripture, Jesus gives the two most important commandments. The first one is to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The second is to “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
In lieu of flowers, the Tucker family requests that memorials be directed to the Tucker Heart, Soul, Mind, and Strength Foundation, P.O. Box 648, Concord, NC 28026.
Funeral services will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 7, at North Kannapolis Baptist Church, 312 Locust St.