Lorry Lokey is having a lot of fun—giving away millions of dollars. The founder of media relations company Business Wire—established in 1961 in San Francisco and sold to Berkshire Hathaway in 2006—Lokey now spends his days overseeing his considerable philanthropic efforts. To date, he has given away close to $700 million with a goal of $1 billion and is recognized as one of the top philanthropists in the country.
Lorry Lokey
We sat down with Lorry late last year in his welcoming and comfortable Atherton home to talk about his recent donations to Oakland-based Mills College and penchant for giving to educational institutions, women in business, running a company, and giving away money. No doubt these are some of his favorite subjects, and he had no shortage of engaging stories to share. Understated, humble, and determined, with serious sparkle—Lorry is the kind of person you’d like to have as your boss, serve on your board, or sit down with for an afternoon.
What inspires you to give away so much of your money?
What am I going to do with it? Very few people give much away. To understand me, you have to understand the Depression. I was in it. At age six, in 1933, I knew things were terrible. Fortunately, my father always had a job. When you go out to buy a loaf of bread, like I did for my mother one day—and I came home with the nine-cent white small loaf and she got so mad. She chewed me out because I could have paid two cents more and got a loaf twenty percent, thirty percent bigger. That was the day I learned percentages.
So I grew up as—not as a penny pincher, but more, “What is the value of this?”
The recession isn’t bothering me a bit. At one point I was down $70 million, and I got $30 million back, and this was very early in the game. It’s tremendous fun.
So you’re raising funds to be able to give them away.
Sure, it’s fun. Having retired and not wanting to sit around—in a way, I’m doubling my pleasure. I’m keeping busy, and I’m seeing results that make me very happy. When you see a research building or the business school go up, it isn’t that your name is on it, it’s that you see people being cured, in the case of a hospital. You see people being educated and being better people in the world than had they not been able to go there.
One thing I’ve learned is that you can’t save the world. You can do things like contributing to the Hispanic University in San Jose or Sacred Heart High School. As a result, kids who would have been on the street are going to be excellent contributors to the world. The $8 or $9 million I put into Santa Clara for tuition aid, that will cover dozens of kids every year.
What made you choose education as the primary focus of your giving?
The thing that impresses me most in later life as to what made all this [his successes] possible is grammar school, how important that is. That’s the basis of what I became. Then high school and college contributed. I began as a regular donor to Stanford [where Lokie graduated from with a degree in journalism] somewhere around the late 1970s, early ’80s. Certainly for the last almost thirty years, education has been the prime recipient.
Some of your most recent large donations have been for Mills College. How did you get involved with Mills?
Back when I was at Stanford, on Friday or Saturday nights, the men went over to Oakland and dated Mills girls. There’s how I heard of Mills College. I thought it must be a good school. I’d hear more about it through the years. My youngest daughter got her BA there, and I became rather endeared to it. I figured I should become a donor.
The thing that attracted me to Mills is that it is clearly a good investment; I don’t give charity, I give investments. That’s important. In fact, this word philanthropy drives me nuts. People at Notre Dame de Namur in Belmont came up with a better word: benefactor.
I favored Mills especially because in the early years, say the first twenty years of the forty-seven years I was at Business Wire, women made the business. The women I hired were bright as hell; only a few men joined us in those days.
Can you tell me more about that.
So, for me, the grant for the Mills business school was a major step toward expressing my thanks for the women who made Business Wire. Usually when you do a name thing, you have to come up with about a third of the money. Some of these guys, especially these billionaires, get away with twenty percent or fifteen percent and that . . . you’re putting a name up there on a building, you should pay accordingly.
When I do a grant I want it to accomplish something, to get it going. To be the underlying building block that will make it happen. So the stem -cell lab at Stanford the grant was originally $33 million. Then Stanford called and said the naming rights were going to be $75 million; I figured if it’s a $225 million building, I’m damn well going to give one third, so that’s what I did. It’s my biggest single grant ever, though University of Oregon has the most money, $134 million.
So far the total giving pledged or actually given is $675 million; my objective minimum is $900 million, which means there’s $225 million I don’t have yet, but I know where the money is, it’s in banks (laughs).
I understand that you were very progressive about childcare in your business practice and that it was inspired by something that your former wife, Eva, experienced. Can you tell me about that.
Eva and I were married, and by the time I paid off her ring and the wedding and all that, I was $85 in the hole, which I took care of by delaying bills. In those days you could delay thirty or forty days without penalty. So I caught up, but it was very important that Eva work. So she got a secretarial job at an insurance company in San Mateo. We found out in our second or third month of marriage that she was expecting. In about her seventh month, the boss calls her in—by the way, she’s in a back office, not seeing people—and tells her, “Your condition is becoming an embarrassment, and you’ll have to resign today.” That was normal in those days; it was 1954.
About seven or eight years into Business Wire, one of the women got pregnant. I told her to bring the baby to work. And she did. I just said, “Get your job done, do your best.” The second woman, a year or two later, the same thing. With two babies in the place at one time, we took the conference room and turned it into the nursery. I told the two women, “If we need the conference room for a meeting, we’ll give you thirty minutes, and you just have to put the babies somewhere else.” I think we only had to do that once or twice. And it made good sense. We just didn’t have any crying kids. The problem we had was people stopping at the desk all the time to ogle the babies, which I didn’t mind at all. The moms paid for this [the childcare], I just provided the space. The nursery thing, it really did a lot to let people know how I felt, and the basic, the golden rule: I wanted to treat them as I would want to be treated if I were in their spot, and I came up with that long before I founded the business.
It proved to me that you could have a working mother if you could provide a facility. We did get up to seven kids at one point. We did not loose a mother ever, until they retired.
You have to hand it to these working women. Because whether or not they had kids, it’s compounded: they had the house to clean and the dinners to make and not many guys lifted their fingers for that.
By the way, I also gave away a good portion of the company to long-term employees. Many, like twenty women, are millionaires now.
It appears you are very personally involved in these grants.
Oh yes, you follow through. Even when a project is done, I go back and ask what else they need. I have done this on several occasions, especially at the grammar school where I have to drag it out of them because they think it’s a lot of money.
Alameda school in Portland—I’ve only put, I think, under $2 million into them. Heck, I can’t think of anything that’s been under $2 million on construction, but it’s meant a lot to them. Suddenly, it’s easier to sell houses in the area because the school is getting known for the improvements. But more importantly is what it’s doing for the kids.
What makes you decide about one project over another?
There are thirty or so lesser grants that go to institutions, museums, the humane society, the opera, symphony—those types of annual grants running from $10,000 to $100,000 a year, depending on what it is. That’s my little piddly stuff. It accounts for roughly one percent of all my giving. So it takes care of things that are important to support, but I don’t want to put that big a chunk in. Basically I say no to everyone. I’m saying yes to those I’m familiar with.
Do you want to say anything about being one of the top twenty-five philanthropists in the country?
Oh, big deal (laughs). I guess I’ve been as high as number ten. I couldn’t be on it this year [2009] because only several million went out; I froze everything because I have to regain capital. My concern about this rating is that I’m on it in the first place; I think it’s awful that I’m not down around 150 or 200 because that’s how much money is around that could be going out. When I landed as number ten, I saw 
household names down in the 30s and 40s and 50s, and they are certainly far wealthier than I am.
Chérie Turner is the editor of the Nob Hill Gazette
