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EARLY MORNING and Betty Talmadge is already at work. She weaves her way briskly through Talmadge Farms, a meat-packing division of Cagle's Inc., with foreman in tow. With one heave, she opens a solid metal door and disappears into a chilly corridor.
Talmadge is rushed. A representative from the Peachtree Sheraton Hotel is due at her plantation in Lovejoy, Ga., at 11:30 for a tour. Later that day, she must make sales calls, peddling Talmadge Hams and other Cagle's meat products to buyers across the Southeast.
Betty Talmadge is one of the firm's top producers, with yearly sales that near $5.5 million. She is a member of the Committee of 200, an organization of the nation's top businesswomen, and was the Georgia Business and Industry Association's entrepreneur of the year in 1983.
At 64, Talmadge has shed the image of a senator's wife and a darling hostess to stand in her own right. Within the last 10 years, when most women her age think of retirement and grandchildren, Talmadge has become a millionaire through her two companies: Betty Talmadge & Associates, a meat brokerage, and Betty Talmadge Enterprises, which specializes in Southern-style entertaining.
Talmadge frowns at discussing income, but her empire is valued at more than $1.5 million. Betty Talmadge, who was Georgia's youngest first lady, knows how to make a buck.
Betty Shingler Talmadge was born into a family of entrepreneurs and politicians. Her father was mayor of Ashburn, a small town in south Georgia, where she grew up. At 18, she married Herman Talmadge and at 24 became Georgia's first lady. In 1956, Herman was elected a U.S. senator and Betty began her career as a senator's wife.
"My grandfather was an entrepreneur type," she says, "and he made do with what he had. He started a roadside store chain that sold pecan products and he had been in the cotton and lumber business."
Talmadge's mother was a "typical Southern lady" who advised her daughter to "be a nice complement to Herman." Talmadge doubles over with laughter. "Back then, we believed if you were pretty and sweet, somebody would put you up on a pedestal and worship you," she says. "And that, as you know, is a bunch of bull. It was...