Max Fisher
Max Martin Fisher was an American businessman and philanthropist, and presidential advisor. Fisher founded Aurora Gasoline, an oil company that owned Speedway gas stations. After selling the company, he was chairman of United Brands and several other companies and invested in large-scale real estate projects.
A major fundraiser for Republican Party candidates, Fisher was an advisor on Middle East and Jewish issues to every administration from President Dwight D. Eisenhower to President George W. Bush.
Fisher spent much of his life raising money for philanthropic endeavors. For more than forty years, he led civic organizations, organized business leaders, and helmed investment efforts in Detroit. Outside Michigan, he supported American Jewish and Israeli causes.
Life and career
Fisher was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Russian Jewish immigrant parents and grew up in Salem, Ohio, where his father owned a clothing store. He attended Ohio State University on a football scholarship and graduated with a degree in business administration in 1930. While a student at OSU, he was initiated into the Alpha Epsilon chapter of the Phi Beta Delta fraternity, which is now part of the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity.In 1930, Fisher joined his father's Keystone Oil Refining Company, a motor oil reclamation business, in Detroit as a $15-a-week salesman before forming his own company in 1932. He grew the business, Aurora Gasoline, into one of the largest gas station chains in the Midwest before selling the business in 1959 to Marathon Petroleum for $40 million. After retiring from management in 1963, he sat on the board of Comerica, the consumer and investment bank, Sotheby's, and United Brands.
Fisher reinvested his fortune in major real estate deals. In 1977, he joined with Taubman and Henry Ford II to buy the Irvine Ranch south of Los Angeles for $337 million; Fisher's group would sell the property six years later for an estimated $1 billion.
For decades, Fisher served as a trusted advisor to U.S. presidents and Israeli prime ministers, rallying for causes from the Six-Day War to Ethiopian Jewry. By quietly forging new ties between Washington and Jerusalem, he pioneered a new era in American Jewish activism and politics and was considered the elder statesman of North American Jewry. In 1975, he was asked to personally mend relations between the Gerald Ford administration and Israeli leadership. Jimmy Carter invited him to watch the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1977.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, Fisher was one of the most successful fundraisers for the Republican Party. He was a delegate from Michigan at the 1964, 1968, and 1976 Republican National Conventions, and an alternate in the 1988 Republican National Convention.
Philanthropic activities
Jewish organizations
Fisher supported Jewish and general causes worldwide and played a major role in almost every major Jewish communal organization. Fisher served as national chairman of UJC's predecessor organizations, the United Jewish Appeal from 1965 to 1967; president of the Council of Jewish Federations from 1969 to 1972; and chairman of the United Israel Appeal, Inc. from 1968 to 1971; and president of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit from 1959 to 1964. He served as Honorary Chairman of United Jewish Communities, Council of Jewish Federations, and the American Jewish Committee.In addition to being honorary chair of UJC, he was founding chairman of the board of governors of UJC's overseas partner, the Jewish Agency for Israel. He was also active in the American Jewish Committee, B'nai B'rith International, and Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.
Detroit
In Detroit, Fisher backed the $60 million Max. M. Fisher Music Center, which serves as the home for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and includes a public high school for the performing arts center called The Max.Ohio State University
He also donated around $20 million to finance Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business for development of a new six-building business campus that opened in 1998. An additional pledge of $5 million was given to the Fisher College of Business in February 2005 to support Master of Business Administration programs.Personal life and family
Fisher was married twice:In 1934, he married Sylvia Krell who died in 1952. They had one child, Jane Fisher Sherman, former chairman of the United Israel Appeal, Inc. and former co-chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel Committee on Israel.
In 1953, he married Marjorie Faith Switow. They had two children together: Julie Fisher Cummings and Marjorie Fisher Aronow. Switow also had two children from her prior husband, George Allen Frehling, whom Fisher adopted: Mary Fisher, AIDS activist and Philip William Fisher, who founded the charity Mission Throttle
Fisher has 15 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren. Fisher financed the schooling of his nephew Stephen M. Ross, who called him, "the most important role model and inspiration for me in life".
He died March 3, 2005, at about 11:30 am in his home in Franklin, Michigan, surrounded by family. He is interred at the Clover Hill Park Cemetery in Birmingham, Michigan.