George B. Chapman Jr.

…he division head of personnel and public relations. He resigned from Aetna in 1967 to set up an independent agency, Chapman & Chapman, where he served as president until 1982. The fifth-generation family business is now run by his sons. Chapman served as chairman of the Northeast Ohio American Heart Association and the Martha Holden Jennings Foundation. He volunteered as a Cleveland Clinic Ambassador, served for over a decade on the United…

Hiroyuki Fujita

…e to Cleveland in 1992 to attend Case Western Reserve University (Ph.D., 1998), which presented him with its Outstanding Recent Alumni Award in 2010. An adjunct professor of physics, radiology and electrical engineering at CWRU and the University of Queensland, Australia, he holds 15 patents and has published more than 30 papers and abstracts in respected engineering, imaging and physics journals. He has received numerous awards for excellence…

Robert D. Gries

…and civic life. Gries, a graduate of Yale, has served on more than three dozen nonprofit boards, including the national board of the Council on Foundations. He helped to establish and was the first chair of the Grantmakers Forum of Northeast Ohio (Philanthropy Ohio). He has worked closely with the municipal school district twice, most recently as chair of the civic committee that recommended and then helped raise a bond issue providing more than…

George F. Karch Sr.

…cer. Karch had come up the hard way—selling newspapers, scrubbing pharmacy floors, laying pipeline and working as a laborer in a steel mill. After graduating from West High School, he enrolled in St. Lawrence University but dropped out less than two years later when his father lost his sight. He took night classes at Cleveland Law School while working in the bank during the day, and received his law degree in 1930. In 1940, he graduated from…

Steven A. Minter

…rged a new path in institutionalizing a collaborative relationship between the board and staff. Because program officers do the legwork on grants, Minter perceived that the board of directors often felt that they were merely rubber-stamping others’ decisions. He envisioned a far more active role for the trustees. He wanted to see their intelligence and experience brought to bear on major policy decisions. Immediately upon his appointment, Minter…

Edgar A. Hahn

…;s cultural life, helping to found the Northern Ohio Opera Association (which prompted the Metropolitan Opera to add a stop in Cleveland to its annual spring tour). As vice chairman of the Musical Arts Association he was instrumental in establishing the Cleveland Orchestra’s tradition of summer pop concerts. He was a trustee of the Cleveland Museum of Art, a director of National City Bank for 43 years, and in 1961 became a life trustee of…

Thomas G. Fitzsimons

…ld-drawn steel. In 1903, he purchased a second plant in Youngstown, and by 1907 the Fitzsimons Company was producing 500 tons of cold-drawn product each month. Fitzsimons was active in civic and political affairs, particularly in the tax reform movement, and ran twice for mayor of Cleveland as an independent candidate. He died in 1921, leaving three sons to run the family’s iron and steel businesses….

Support of Carl Stokes’s Historic Mayoralty

…ve. Propelled by a lead gift of $1 million from the Schubert Foundation, $5.2 million had been pledged in support of Cleveland: NOW! by that fall. Had not a street activist by the name of Ahmed Evans used monies he earned in running a NOW!-sponsored youth program to buy guns, the public-private partnership that the foundation helped to assemble around NOW! might have indeed jump-started Cleveland’s physical and socioeconomic revival. But the…

Downtown Cleveland’s Resurgence

…ls, museums, stadiums, a convention center and a medical technology showplace. The Cleveland Foundation supported many of these endeavors, typically by providing planning, site analysis or design grants or supplementing construction budgets with funding for public amenities. The foundation also facilitated improvements in downtown infrastructure and downtown transportation, providing planning grants for a county-wide Regional Transit Authority…