Visible Men Academy in Manatee County moves on from founder’s exit
Louis Parker didn’t have much in common with his classmates at Phillips Academy Andover in 1969.
The child of an uneducated facilities manager, Parker showed up at the nation’s most elite boarding school having grown up on a diet of government cheese and powdered milk.
His dad couldn’t read. His buddy Jeb, meanwhile, lived in the same dormitory and would become Florida’s governor, while Jeb’s father and brother would both go on become president of the United States.
Parker had gotten a scholarship to Phillips Academy in Massachusetts, and it was a gift that dramatically altered his life’s trajectory, opening doors unimaginable to him as a poor child growing up in Pittsburgh. Those doors would lead to the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and then the heights of corporate America.