WILLIAM E. ANDERSON
(1900 - 1980)
Born on a small farm in Utah, William E. Anderson "shocked wheat, cut trees, operated a thrasher, cut beets and hunted prairie dogs and coyotes," as the Cincinnati Enquirer reported in January, 1960. The number of causes he promoted and boards on which he served in his late years would indicate that he maintained similar variety and energy all his life.
He will be remembered, however, principally as the prime mover in the establishing of The Greater Cincinnati Foundation.
He came to Cincinnati from Cleveland, where he had noted the important contribution being made to that community by Cleveland's community foundation - one of the first and the largest such organizations in the country. Accepting contributions from public-spirited citizens, putting the funds in trusts in local banks, the community foundation would make grants under the direction of a Distribution Committee, made up of volunteer civic leaders. Its strength lay in the assurance that the funds would be distributed wisely, primarily for capital or one-time expenditures, by individuals knowledgeable regarding the ever-changing needs of the community.
Anderson was eager to see such a foundation in Cincinnati. "He gave some speeches promoting the idea ten years before it became a reality," his son, William H. Anderson, reports. He teamed with Guy Thompson, then Executive Director of the Community Chest, in organizing group meetings of civic minded citizens. The idea gained wide support among bankers and others. But it took a coincidence to get it started.
The Fresh Air and Convalescent Aid Society had been providing free summer vacations to mothers and children for sixty years. In 1963 it "faced the reality that the services it was providing were no longer needed, due to modern trends in health care and the expansion of family camping programs by other health and welfare organizations," according to a statement by Mrs. Starbuck Smith, Jr., a trustee. A committee was formed to "seek ways in which its sizeable endowment fund could best be used to serve more vital and urgent community needs." They found Andy Anderson - or more likely, Andy found them.
These endowment funds, amounting to some $580,000, were contributed to enable the formation of what was called The Greater Cincinnati Foundation. A Trustees' Committee, comprised of the chief officers of six leading banks, was formed, with Anderson as its Chairman, and a Distribution Committee created, composed of individuals appointed respectively by the Academy of Medicine, the Community Chest and Council of the Cincinnati Area, the Cincinnati Bar Association, the presidents of the three large local universities, the Cincinnati Institute of Fine Arts and two by the Trustees' Committee. Mark Upson, recently retired P & G executive, became its first Executive Director.
Anderson played a significant role in the GCF for 27 years. He was a trustee from 1963 to 1967 and then became Associate Director for two years to assist Mark Upson in the day-to-day administration. On Upson's retirement in 1971 Andy became Director, and continued in that role for five years. As a step toward full withdrawal, in 1978 he again became an Associate Director, primarily helping to evaluate grant requests, and continued in this capacity until his death in 1980.
Under Andy the basic policies were foffi1ed and the course set. When he stepped down as Executive Director, the assets had reached $10.5 million. The GCF had become an important source of vital contributions to the community - and by 1988 the seed he'd planted had grown to assets of nearly $62 million.
William Ervin Anderson, "Andy" as he was known widely, was born February 14, 1900, in Union, Utah, a small town just outside of Salt Lake City, the son of Martin and Sarah Smith Anderson. The family, consisting of four boys and two girls, was very poor. When Andy was six, "the parents took the family up to Canada, homesteading in southern Alberta, out on the plains," son Bill says. "It didn't work; they couldn't make a go of it. So at age 12, they moved back to Utah." It was there that Andy completed his education.
"I decided at a young age that I was going to school and make something of myself," Andy said in the January 3, 1960 Enquirer interview. "I knew enough about hard physical work that I wasn't interested in doing it the rest of my life."
"My father was a pretty reticent guy about his early years," according to Bill. But when Andy was 14, and his older brother, Floyd, 16, they left home and struck out on their own.
Andy and Floyd were very close, from the earliest days to the very end. "Floyd was the leader, in pushing to get away from the hard life they had been leading, working long hours in the field," Bill says. They moved to the home of an aunt, but were totally self-dependent. They got jobs, still continuing their schooling, and saved money for college. They did go to the University of Utah, working their way through, and in 1921 Andy was graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Floyd was still two years ahead of him.
A year of teaching at Davis County, Utah, High School, where he also coached a fairly unsuccessful football team, convinced him that he'd rather be a lawyer than a teacher. Floyd was already pointed in that direction - probably was a major influence on Andy's decision. So the two of them proceeded to work their way through the Harvard Law School, graduating with LLB degrees in 1926.
"They were really close to charity cases," Bill states. Andy had a free room in the home of Professor Austin Scott, noted for the classic legal work, Scott on Trusts; Floyd was taken in by the dean of the law school, Roscoe Pound.
Deciding that they couldn't make a living as lawyers in Utah, Floyd went to Akron and later to Cincinnati to join the Frost & Jacobs firm; Andy took a job with a small Cleveland law firm called Cull, Burton and Laughlin. The 'Burton' partner, Harold Burton, later achieved fame as a U.S. Supreme Court justice.
Again, a year was enough. "I found out they didn't need a young lawyer. They needed someone to bring in business and not being from Cleveland I wasn't the man to do it," he told the Enquirer reporter. Son Bill's account is a little different, perhaps less politic: "the firm was just plain falling apart. It was a bad year for Dad." It soured him, Bill believes, on the law.
So Andy got a job with the Central National Bank in Cleveland, and was put through a general banking course. He landed in the trust department - and there he found his niche. It was as a very successful trust officer that he built his career.
In 1934 the Central Trust Co. in Cincinnati was looking for a new head trust officer. Floyd learned of this and suggested that Andy apply for the job. Charles DuPuis, then president of Central Trust, took an immediate liking to him, and on January 1, 1935, he got the job.
He did very well in it. As Fletcher Nyce, who succeeded him as Central Trust president, put it, he did "a marvelous job." His rise through the trust department was steady. He was made a vice-president within a year, and became senior vice- president and trust officer in 1956.
About three years later, as Bill Anderson tells the story, Andy got a call from Fred Geier, a director of the bank, asking him to lunch. Geier was concerned that the bank had not groomed a logical successor to the presidency. The position was then held by William Mitchell, who had been brought to Cincinnati from J.P. Morgan & Co., New York, in 1949, for the job. Central Trust, Geier felt, would face a "horrible problem" if anything happened to Mitchell. Andy agreed the problem was an important one, and said he'd concern himself with it.
The next morning Andy phoned Geier. He'd wrestled with the matter that night, he said, and on reflection he felt things weren't that bad. The bank had good people, he told Fred; it would make out perfectly well. Within a few weeks, in 1960, Andy was asked to be president. Mitchell stayed on as chairman and for some time was Chief Executive Officer. Andy himself became chairman of the board in 1964. He had been elected to the bank's board of directors in 1954.
Anderson's administration of the bank was not an exciting one. The growth was steady and thoroughly satisfactory: capital stock rose from $8.4 million to $11 million, surplus from $12.6 to $16 million. But Nyce's appraisal was: "he introduced no change in direction in the bank, no real innovations or new policies. He strengthened the personnel and was highly regarded by the employees; helped build an excellent organization in the trust department especially. (William) Mitchell (his predecessor) had built a very good foundation, and Andy built on that."
Andy was 60 when he was made president, and some felt his number one assignment was to develop a successor. The shortness of his term would tend to support this.
One of his important qualities, according to Nyce, was the way "he'd get along with people, get people to play on the team. He was a good team player himself."
"He was a perfect gentleman," Nyce adds. "I don't know anybody that didn't like him and admire him for his capabilities." Fletcher says he was well liked in the industry, and in the city. "He was known in banking circles for his equable nature. He never got flustered."
Shortly after he took the presidency, Central Trust faced a problem, as Bill remembers it. The loan ratio to deposits was higher than acceptable. If the bank had gone to the Federal Reserve and discounted loans, it would have sent out alarm signals. The bank had bonds that could be sold to provide the needed cash reserves, but the bond market was low, and the bank officers were reluctant to take a loss. Andy called a Saturday morning meeting where he was clear and firm: sell the bonds, take the loss, and let's get on with it. The bank did.
Bill feels this was an important episode in Andy's bank presidency: it showed the other officers he could be decisive, and take action even when it was unpleasant to do so.
It was a quiet, conservative administration. "He saw that we didn't go overboard in any direction," Nyce says.
His role as a leading banker led to his being chairman of the finance committee for the Republican Party in Hamilton County for a short period. When Ronald Reagan came to Cincinnati in 1965 to launch a tour of the state, Andy and his wife, Marian, met him at the airport. Reagan was averse to making his barnstorming trip in small planes, so the Andersons drove him around a large part of Ohio. But son Bill feels that in the '50s and '60s, Andy leaned toward the Charter Party.
Anderson served as a Trustee of the Bureau of Governmental Research, which performed a watchdog service for the operation of local government. He was also a Ruling Elder in the Seventh Presbyterian Church, but religious activity was not a part of his life. "Once you're an Elder, you're an Elder for life," Bill comments, indicating Andy's role was not an active one. His early start was in a Mormon environment, but Andy was never a devout practitioner.
He thoroughly enjoyed his golf game, and played in the low 80's. He was an excellent bridge player, swam at every opportunity, and even did a little skin diving.
His enjoyment of people resulted in numerous club activities. He was a past president of the Harvard Club of Cincinnati, and was member of the Commonwealth, Commercial, Literary, Bankers, Lawyers and Queen City Clubs, and the Coldstream and Cincinnati Country Clubs.
By 1930 Anderson had married Marian Hagler, daughter of William Hagler, a North Dakota banker, businessman and farmer. There were four children: two daughters, Katherine Allen (Mrs. Theodore C. Rook), Sally (Mrs. Thomas Bart Brush); and two sons, William Hagler and David Warren.
The Andersons had a summer place in Northport Point, Michigan, which they bought in 1951. Andy loved it; he wrote for The Literary Club a paper entitled 'Tall Tales in the Woods' which reflected his attachment to the small home well out in undeveloped land, surrounded by what Bill calls "rough hewn landscape." Andy had a jeep and a chain saw, and spent much of his time cutting firewood for the cool Michigan evenings.
He was looking for a larger area to work in, and heard of a man in a hospital who wanted to sell forty acres. Andy went to see him and bought the property although it was half a mile away from his own land. "He would spend a couple of hours every day on his jeep, clearing trails, working the woods," Bill recalls; "he was ecstatic over the beauty of the trees, and the quiet."
Two years before his death he was stricken with prostate cancer. The doctor told Marian, Andy had six months to live. His energies lessened, and it was suggested he step down as Director of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation, which of all his interests was the one closest to his heart. "He really didn't want to do it," Bill says. But he served the last two years as Associate Director, one of the staff group that screened requests for grants.
Two qualities predominated in Andy Anderson's make-up: energy and congeniality. These made him a good ambassador for the bank, an effective initiator of the Greater Cincinnati Foundation, and one of the City's most active participants in community programs.
He ,loved parties, and people. He played the clarinet and saxaphone, and was happy when he could gather a few of his instrument -playing friends around him as a sort of pick-up orchestra. He always carried his clarinet in the car, and at a party it took an absolute minimum of persuasion to make him go and get it for a little impromptu musicale. When he had to go to the hospital for a few days, he took his clarinet with him, and delighted the nurses by playing for them.
Ron Roberts, executive director of the Cincinnati Business Committee, tells of being at a black-tie rehearsal dinner in the lower level of the Cincinnati Country Club. The atmosphere was a bit dull and "stuffy". Andy was persuaded to bring out his clarinet and started playing tunes from Oklahoma. Ron went over, stood with him, and started to sing. This went on for ten minutes or so, when Andy looked up and said, "You know, we should be playing in some bar. We'd make some drinking money and have a lot more fun."
Ron always felt Anderson was "a down-to-earth guy stuck behind a formal white shirt." When Andy was made Chairman of the Board of Central Trust, he was assigned a big black Cadillac. Ran West, advertising man who lived almost next door, stopped by to see it, and found Andy in an old sweater, with a bucket of sudsy water, washing the car.
Bill Anderson reports his father was relaxed. He "always" brought home a full briefcase from the office, but "he didn't worry about things he couldn't do anything about." He was not a procrastinator; if he had something to do, he'd do it.
His energy expressed itself in his driving. "He was a wild driver," Mary West, Ran's wife, reports. "He was always in the middle of the road." At the cottage in Northport, "he drove his jeep as wildly as he did his automobile." Ran drew a cartoon of him, showing a deer speaking to her young fawn. "Don't go out in the forest today," she is saying; "Mr. Anderson is driving his jeep."
As Nyce put it, "he had a tremendous zest for life," great enthusiasm for whatever he tackled.
And the things he tackled were legion. He was president of the Lloyd Library and Museum of Cincinnati, a member of the board of the L.B. Harrison Club and of the Finance Committee of Xavier University, a director of the Cincinnati Chapter of the American Red Cross, The Community Chest, the Y.M.C.A., the Council of the Cincinnati Area, Inc. He was chairman of the 1963 campaign of the Greater Cincinnati United Appeal and of the University of Cincinnati corporate fund in 1965, and headed a committee of sixty civic leaders to support the Library Levy on the ballot November 8, 1966.
He was a member of the Finance and Investment Committee of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, the Trust Policies Committee of the American Bankers' Association, the Men's Advisory Committee of the Greater Cincinnati Girl Scout Council, the Standing Committee on Conference of the Ohio Bankers' Association, the Endowment Fund Association of the University of Cincinnati, the Finance Committee of Xavier University Endowment Fund, the Informal Committee of the Frank L. Weil Institute of Advanced Studies in Religion and the Humanities, the Editorial Advisory Board of Lloydia, the publication of Lloyd Library and Museum, and the Advisory Committee of Internal Medicine, General Hospital. He was a director of Union Sand & Gravel Co., Huntington, West Virginia, and Ohio Valley Real Estate, Inc. among others.
For his services to the community, the Greater Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce in 1980 gave him its highest award, naming him A Great Living Cincinnatian.
For a man who as an impoverished youth said, "I'm going to make something of myself," Andy Anderson had done pretty well.
(With permission of the author.)
