Who is Zanvyl Krieger?

Our beloved benefactor, Zanvyl Krieger,
died on September 15, 2000 at the age 94.

by Tristan Davies

By turns a distiller, a lawyer, and an extremely successful business entrepreneur, Zanvyl Krieger made his name best known as an extraordinary philanthropist. His greatest single gift was a $50 million challenge grant, made in 1992, to the School of Arts and Sciences of The Johns Hopkins University. To pay fitting tribute, Hopkins renamed its core institution, so that it is now properly identified as the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. The gift is believed to be the largest ever directed exclusively to a U.S. school or college of arts and sciences, the division of a university that focuses on the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.

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Krieger was a life-long Baltimorean with committed civic ties. He played an ownership role in both the Baltimore Orioles and the Baltimore Colts. His charitable concerns ran the gamut from the Krieger Children's Eye Center at Johns Hopkins's Wilmer Ophthalmological Institute to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Also among Krieger's beneficiaries are the Kennedy Krieger Institute, a world-renowned clinic for children with disabilities, and the Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins's Homewood campus. All along, Krieger was a die-hard sports fan. At one time, the favorite and most frequent guest in his box at Memorial Stadium was Milton S. Eisenhower, who served as President of Hopkins from 1956 to 1967 and again in 1971-72.

Zanvyl Krieger was born in 1906, the last of Herman and Bettie Farber Krieger's eight children. His father died when Zanvyl was only four, but the family's fortunes had been already established. The Kriegers owned the Baltimore brewery that made Gunther Beer. They also distilled rye whiskey at a time when rye was a popular drink among Americans; most of the rye sold in the United States came from Maryland. After completing high school at Baltimore City College, Krieger enrolled at Johns Hopkins, from which he received a degree in political science in 1928. From Hopkins he went to Harvard Law School, from which he was graduated in 1931. Upon returning to Baltimore, he went to work for the law firm of Weinberg and Sweeten.

With his family's support (the older brothers took over the business when their father died, then switched to investment banking during prohibition), Krieger began a career in real estate development. Working as a lawyer in the Army Air Corps during World War II, he rose to the rank of major. After the war, he met his future wife, Isabelle Lowenthal, at a resort in New York State's Catskills. They were married in 1947.

Back in Baltimore, Krieger began work on the project that, for the majority of Baltimoreans today, he would be best known: the founding of the city's professional football franchise, the Baltimore Colts. "In this country if a town doesn't have a big-league team it's not a big-league city," Krieger told a reporter for The Baltimore Sun in 1991. The franchise, founded in 1953, was a success, winning national championships in 1958 and 1959. Building on the Colts' success, Krieger played a fundamental role in the founding of the Baltimore Orioles baseball club as well. He was a minority partner of the team until it was sold to Edward Bennet Williams in 1979. Krieger kept his box on the third base line. It put him as close as he could get to the team's star, Brooks Robinson. A near-constant companion of Mr. and Mrs. Krieger there was Hopkins's President Eisenhower. "We didn't miss many games," Krieger said of his relationship with Eisenhower. "He was a wonderful man, a great guy to go to the games with. He knew the game." (Eisenhower was the younger brother of war hero and U.S. President Dwight David Eisenhower, who had also been a university president, at Columbia.)

Krieger's intellectualism, mingled with his innate business acumen, led him to his greatest financial triumph--and the primary source of his vast civic largess. In 1964, he became the key investor in a start-up company called U.S. Surgical, which owned the rights to a method for closing surgical incisions without cloth fiber stitches. With Krieger's backing, the surgical staple was born. By the early '90s, at the time of Krieger's $50 million gift to Hopkins, U.S. Surgical sold $500 million worth of surgical staples a year and controlled 75 percent of the market. In the meantime, the company had also become a pioneer in the field of laparoscopic surgical instruments. This sagacious investment allowed Krieger to move from civic involvement to epic philanthropy. In large measure, his close friendship with Milton Eisenhower was the driving force motivating Krieger's giving to Hopkins: As Krieger saw it, Eisenhower's legacy captured what was best about Hopkins. An important aspect of his $50 million gift was the provision for the endowment of ten Eisenhower-Krieger Professorships across the 20-plus disciplines represented in the Krieger School.

In 1995, the University repaid Krieger's beneficence by renaming its School of Arts and Sciences for this extraordinary philanthropist. Already, the University had renamed the Kennedy Krieger Institute to reflect a Krieger Foundation gift, established the Krieger Mind/Brain Institute, and, with the Department of Physics and Astronomy's move to the Bloomberg Center, renamed the Keyser Quadrangle's old Rowland Hall as Krieger Hall. In 1992, Krieger was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters by the University. "I want to die a poor man," he said on the occasion of his grand challenge to the School. "If things keep going this way, that's what's going to happen."

In 1996 the Maryland chapter of the National Society of Fund Raising Executives named him Philanthropist of the Year. The Society estimated that he had given charitable contributions totaling $100 million, mostly through the foundation bearing his and his wife's names. As is so often the case with the successful, Krieger's 1928 Hullaboo yearbook caption reads prophetically: "Krieger is about to be a success. But Zip, as he is popularly known, possesses capabilities other than in business. He suffered through many difficult and involved economics courses, and after finishing an examination in 'Corporation Finance' he walked out in the hall and said brazenly: 'Now all I need is a corporation.' We can safely say that some day he will have a corporation to which he may apply a good dose of the theories he conquered so easily."

In fact, he did.