Biography|John Mackey — The Tower Where a Philosophy Student Quit Chasing a Degree

The Main Building at the University of Texas at Austin still throws a 307-foot limestone tower over Inner Campus Drive.

John Mackey walked under it as a student of philosophy and religion in the 1970s.

He was born in Houston on 15 August 1953.

His mother was Margaret Wescott Powell.

His father, William Sturges Mackey Jr., taught accounting and later ran a hospital-management firm.

After high school in 1971, Mackey spent time at Trinity University in San Antonio and then here, on this campus.

He stayed in university almost six years and left without a diploma.

He later credited that generalist reading, not a finished transcript, with teaching him how to run a company.

In 1976 he became a vegetarian after work in a campus-adjacent food co-op.

The turn that mattered sat off the formal syllabus.

He lived for a stretch at Prana House, an Austin vegetarian commune.

There he met Renee Lawson.

The two left the co-op in 1978 to open SaferWay, a small natural-foods shop.

They raised about $45,000 from family and friends to do it.

The Tower is not where Whole Foods was founded.

It is where a Houston-born student stopped treating a degree as the point of an education and started treating food as work.

Campus buildings from those years still stand and take visitors.

The commune and the first private shop do not belong on a public pin.

This one does.

A reader who wants the store can walk west to Lamar.

A reader who wants the formation can stop under the Tower.

Photo: Larry D. Moore, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (tower, circa 1980). Portrait: Joe M500, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons, 2009.