Bill and Sandra Patton (photo by Tony LaBruno)

While serving on the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee in 1979, William Patton Jr. (PMD 21, 1971) met Orange County superintendent of schools Robert Peterson, who was unsuccessfully pressing the group to include some academic events in conjunction with the Olympics. Peterson had created a small academic competition in Orange County called Academic Decathlon, in which teams of high school students with a range of academic skills would participate in 10 events—including essay writing, speech, sciences, math, and arts—to encourage and support students who might not have the highest GPA but nonetheless excel in certain subjects.

Patton’s interest was piqued.He appreciated the program’s inclusive vision, which required each team to include not just the best and the brightest, but also students with more modest B and C grade averages. Patton, who was definitely not an A student in his high school class in Normandy, Mo., a level of accomplishment he attributed to his focus on the golf team rather than schoolwork, would have loved such an opportunity. Within a year, Patton had left his position on the Olympic committee to become the first president of Academic Decathlon and subsequently helped guide its transformation from a small local event to the international competition it is today.

After Patton left the Olympic committee, he became the president of the Academic Decathlon—spending a day or so a week volunteering for the organization while keeping his day job as a vice president at Honeywell Corporation. He and the leadership team, which included Peterson and fellow former Olympic committee member Phil Bardos, put together a board of directors and started looking for support for the fledgling nonprofit. Before long, space was donated by Loyola Marymount University for the national competition and funding came from Pacific Life Insurance Company, Lawry’s Foods, Twentieth Century Fox, Walt Disney Company, and many other businesses.

In 1982, Academic Decathlon held its first national competition, with teams from 18 states. In that competition, a student from Reno, Nev., became the first C student to earn a perfect score, and his essay analyzing Macbeth ran in the Los Angeles Times. For Patton, it was an important proof point. “The objective was to find not just A students who deserved scholarships, but to find B students and C students who were competent to a very high level in certain areas, whether it be literature, mathematics, or whatever,” says Patton. “And you wouldn’t believe what could be found.”

The biggest challenge in the early days, Patton observes, was communicating the organization’s vision in a way that would convince high school administrators and students to invest their time in a new program, and, of course, raising money for everything from test-graders to marketing. When funds were tight, the board made personal donations to make ends meet. But over the decade that Patton was involved with Academic Decathlon, the event grew quickly. Sponsorships from Northrop Corporation, American Honda Foundation, and others provided support for the program and scholarships for student winners. One of Patton’s most treasured memories is when he and his wife were invited to the residence of Vice President George H. W. Bush, where they were honored for their contributions to children’s education.

Patton ultimately became president of Unisys Corporation, from which he retired in 1996; he also has served as non-executive chair of 15 companies. Today, he is chair and CEO of the Four Star Group, a small company that advises and invests in aerospace, defense, and homeland security companies and whose advisory board includes a number of U.S. Air Force generals, several of whom Patton met at the Program for Management Development at Harvard. (Patton himself served as a U.S. Army ranger for nine years.) He eventually had to step away from Academic Decathlon, but he has enjoyed watching the competition flourish and become a household name—and is thrilled when the event comes up in casual conversation and he’s able to reveal his role in its early days.

Patton defers all of the credit to Peterson, who died in 2003. “He was not only a genius; he was also a very nice man,” says Patton. But he stresses that the story of the creation of Academic Decathlon is, like the competition itself, about a group of people with different talents and skill sets coming together for a larger cause.

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