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NORTHEAST OHIO BUSINESS HALL OF FAME

CHOICE LEADER—DAVID BRENNAN
by Inside Business editors

November 2003—He’s saved steel mills and developed buildings. But David Brennan’s biggest impact is on the world of education.

It’s difficult to miss the big white hat. An unchanging piece of Akron businessman David Brennan’s wardrobe, the distinctive snow-white Stetson is actually a nod to events that took place almost two decades ago.

Brennan was in an Alabama airport in 1986 during a get-acquainted trip to a steel mill his company had purchased and was trying to resuscitate.

A television reporter there accused Brennan of coming to town wearing a black hat. Brennan planned to cut a significant portion of the mill’s labor force in order to trim costs.

Brennan responded that he was the good guy — wearing the white hat — trying to save jobs.

A local businessman saw the spot when it aired that evening and sent Brennan a white Stetson.

Ever since, it’s become his symbol that he’s one of the good guys.

Professionally, Brennan has made a reputation for doing things in a big way.

Akronites may recall Brennan’s bash for the first President Bush. A man with friends in high places, Brennan hosted a backyard buffet for the president in 1990. The affair raised $500,000 for now-Sen. George Voinovich’s successful gubernatorial campaign. His fund-raising has helped other candidates who support his passion for school choice.

He has assisted in the renovation and rejuvenation of downtown Akron. His many projects include the 1992 construction of Main Place, a $12.5 million, five-story office complex; and Canal Park, a 9,000-seat minor-league baseball stadium that opened in April 1997.

These days, the 72-year-old has been in the spotlight with his school-choice efforts. His White Hat Management LLC runs more than 30 charter schools, with one each in Denver and Phoenix, and is looking to expand. Brennan’s growth in school choice was emboldened when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Cleveland’s school voucher program to be constitutional in June 2002. The program gives tax vouchers to thousands of poor children in failing public schools to help pay their tuition to private or parochial schools in Cleveland

Brennan didn’t start with a silver spoon in his mouth. His father was an Irish-Catholic family physician from Boston who moved to Akron during World War I to work for Goodyear. Adept at languages, his father could communicate with many of the plant’s foreign workers.

The youngest of six children, Brennan mowed lawns and stoked coal furnaces for neighbors. His father died at 64, when Brennan was 18. Upon graduating from St. Vincent-St. Mary High School in 1949, Brennan attended Ohio State University, graduating in 1953.

Brennan used his accounting degree to start a bookkeeping service for local physicians. He balanced their books for $10 a month per practice, and he soon had 100 clients.

He enrolled into Case Western Reserve University’s law school in 1954 and passed Ohio’s bar in 1957. Soon after, he started his own law practice in West Akron.

Initially, entrepreneurialism wasn’t Brennan’s forte. He lost a $4,000 inheritance in a frozen custard stand, money in a furniture manufacturing company, and his investment in a hotel chain.

But Brennan’s luck changed in 1974 when he and partners in a real estate investment corporation sold land that would eventually go into the creation of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. The $4 million price tag was $2.5 million more than the note Brennan and his partners owed on the property.

Next, with businessmen Richard Hamlin and James McCready, Brennan formed The Brenlin Group Inc., a manufacturing holding company incorporated around Hamlin Steel, which was based in Akron. Serving as the group’s chairman and CEO, he acquired struggling companies in leveraged buyouts. The group would own nearly 30 companies.

One such company was an 82-year-old steel mill in Gadsden, Ala. Purchased in 1986, the facility had lost more than $100 million in the three years before Brennan owned it.

To get it back into the black, Brennan laid off a third of the mill’s work force and cut benefits from $23 an hour to $16. Renamed Gulf States Steel, the mill turned a profit in one year, allowing Brennan to give 20 percent of the earnings to workers in a profit-sharing arrangement.

As Brenlin began buying factories, the partners took notice of the undereducated work force in many parts of the country.

Brennan, in a May Cincinnati Enquirer interview, says, “We couldn’t easily replace [the work force] because a huge percentage of people applying for our factory jobs also were under-educated.”

In 1987, Brennan opened his first learning center at a plant in Spartanburg, S.C. Employees’ reading and math skills at that plant jumped from fifth-grade level in 1987 to tenth-grade level in 1995, Brennan writes in his Victory for Kids: The Cleveland School Voucher Case (New Millennium Press, October 2002).

This led to the formation of White Hat — Brennan is the chairman — in 1998. Its services are broken into three parts: traditional elementary schools, alternative high schools for dropouts, and support and resources for home-school parents.

The voucher case could not have been won without Brennan, says Bert Holt, former administrator of the Cleveland voucher program. Every institution that had any stake in the Cleveland Public Schools — teachers’ unions, newspapers, legislators — fought it.

When it comes to educating children, Holt describes Brennan as “a combination of Mother Teresa and General Patton.” After nearly 19 years as a Cleveland Public Schools administrator, Holt had seen all kinds of attempts to “rescue” the system. However, poor, urban parents still had to send their kids to schools where they were assigned — schools that had no competition, Holt says. She credits Brennan with “taking the chains off that” with the Cleveland voucher program.

Mark Thimmig, president and CEO of White Hat Ventures LLC, the parent company of all White Hat organizations, says Brennan is on an “impassioned mission, which is all about children and families.” And in this case, it is disenfranchised families for whom public education isn’t meeting their needs, he says.

Brennan learned from his father that treating people with dignity and respect is paramount. For him, it all comes down to one tenet: “Love one another.” Trying to find ways to “emancipate an increasingly large number of our population who has been enslaved by a system of education that doesn’t work for them” is “doing the Lord’s work,” he says.

Voinovich lauds Brennan’s efforts, saying, “He’s not doing this out of some pecuniary interest.” Brennan provides an opportunity for people to develop “their God-given talents so they can take care of themselves and their families and contribute to society,” Voinovich says, adding, “That’s his motivation.”

Ann, Brennan’s wife of 46 years, says her husband is tough, determined and knowledgeable and able to do numbers in his head. “He was always going to be successful,” she says.

Anthony Manna, chairman of Janna Enterprises and the Brennan, Manna & Diamond LLC law firm, has been Brennan’s partner for 17 years. He describes Brennan as someone who has proven that “the more you give — the more you give to charity, the more you give of your time — the more you get back.”

Brennan’s record of charitable contributions are legion. The beneficiaries of his philanthropy over the years include Summa Health System, the Akron Symphony Orchestra and the Ohio Ballet. “There is probably no charitable event, of any significance, that goes on in Summit County,” that the Brennans aren’t involved in, Manna says.

His most recent donation was one of his biggest. In October, St. Vincent-St. Mary announced that it was the recipient of a $10 million gift from Brennan. The school said it may be the biggest donation to a U.S. high school.

He has won numerous awards for his contributions to education and has served as a trustee at all his alma maters, also establishing law chairs at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Akron.

Brennan, whose health problems have included heart disease and who was driven in his early years by the belief that he wouldn’t live past 55, has no plans to slow down.

“Success carries with it ... obligations greater than our benefits,” he says. One of those obligations is “to leave this society better than we found it.”

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