Briggs, Robert W.

Hidden beneath a large area rug in the Akron offices of the GAR Foundation is a black circle of burned hardwood floor. It was on that spot that vagrants, who had once lived in the then-vacant and gutted Andrew Jackson House, had built a fire to stay warm.

They were eventually forced out, partly because an Akron Police cruiser noticed the flames one night. The house was later condemned, which forced the recalcitrant owner to sell for less than half of the $1 million he had been asking for the historic property. 

At the time, Robert W. Briggs, president of the GAR Foundation, had been looking to move the organization’s headquarters back to downtown Akron after it had temporarily relocated to Fairlawn. He was in the process of negotiating for space at the University of Akron when he learned the Jackson House might be available.

GAR worked with the Chesler Group, which bought and restored the house, and in 2009, the private foundation moved into its new offices. 

“It’s a brand-new building in an old shell,” Briggs says of the house, which was built in 1868 and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. 

Now, many of the home’s original features, including the oak floors and many of the original, solid walnut doors, are the same as when Andrew Jackson — the Akron lumber baron, not the president — helped build the city’s downtown. 

While he is proud of what the house became, Briggs also is more than willing to show off reminders of its not-so-proud history. That’s why, for some visitors, he will walk into his office and pull up the area rug that covers the original oak floor and point to the black, burned spot. 

For Briggs, that spot serves not only as a reminder of what happened to the house, but also what can happen when you ignore a place or a thing or a person.

Of course, Briggs has likely never been accused of ignoring anyone. Perhaps that’s because he’s been through his own trials and kept mementos from those times. They’re memories, mostly, that he relies upon on a daily basis.

At age 6, Briggs and his family lived in Paris, Ky. His father, who a few years earlier had worked for Firestone Tire and Rubber in Cincinnati, was employed at another automobile-related job south of the Ohio River. 

He was also an alcoholic, Briggs remembers. And in the mid-1940s, his mother packed up her boys and their belongings in a 1939 Ford Coupe and drove 250 miles north to Wooster, where they lived with an aunt and uncle until they were able to get on their feet. 

“We were, by today’s definition, homeless,” Briggs says. 

Eventually, Briggs’ mother found a secretarial job making $45 a month. They moved into a house without central heat. Later, as his mother made more money and Briggs and his brother got jobs delivering The Daily Record after school, the family upgraded its living arrangements to a place affectionately nicknamed Termite Court. Briggs changed paper routes to one that took him straight through the heart of the College of Wooster. Even at that young age, he dreamed of becoming a lawyer, and being around a college helped make that seem more possible.

In 1953, his mother remarried and the family moved out of Termite Court and safely into the middle class. 

“I do recall envying people who appeared to be rich with Cadillacs and big houses,” Briggs says. “It helped me a lot to understand a them-and-us mentality. It helped me, once we were in the middle class, to communicate to those who had always been in the middle class about the folks on the other side of the tracks, that they are just like us.”

Throughout it all, Briggs relied on the strength of his mother and the lessons she taught him. One stood out: Be optimistic.

Early last decade — sometime around late 2001, early 2002 — Briggs noticed a chronic negativity when it came to the economic future of Northeast Ohio. Corporations weren’t doing anything with regard to economic development. Neither were politicians.

By then, Briggs had stepped away from his duties as managing partner of Buckingham, Doolittle & Burroughs in Akron and was not a full-time foundation director. He called together the heads of several other foundations in Northeast Ohio for a meeting.

“Our economy is in the dumper,” he said at that meeting. “Nobody is doing anything about it. I know this isn’t foundation work, but let’s talk about it.”

The groups kept talking about it, and in 2004, the Fund for Our Economic Future was formed. Since then, the fund has raised almost $80 million. It has awarded more than $62 million in grants aimed at regional economic development organizations that accelerate, attract and grow companies in Northeast Ohio. Some of those organizations include BioEnterprise, JumpStart and Team NEO.

Several of Briggs’ friends mention his work on the fund as a stark example of his leadership style and ability. 

Christine Mayer, a former Buckingham, Doolittle & Burroughs attorney and now the chief operating officer of GAR, says that Briggs worked magic in uniting institutions that had never worked together and often didn’t trust each other.

“Rob, in part because he is an optimist, managed to bring all of those disparate geographies together and helped this organization to knit itself together,” Mayer says. “It really was a huge question at the beginning whether we would do anything at all. But he is such an optimistic person that he makes everybody feel it is safe to get in the water.”

Briggs’ effect on GAR is more subtle but just as important. The private foundation doesn’t fundraise, instead relying on an endowment. As such, the money available to give is more dependent on the stock market than it is its executive director.

But Briggs has fundamentally changed the way the foundation gives out money, Mayer says, giving the organization a focus on specific areas with which to fund. Primary among them is education.  

After Briggs graduated from The Ohio State University’s law college in 1966, he had to give a couple years to the United States Air Force. 

He worked as a JAG officer in California, representing a wide range of criminal law as a defense attorney.

In 1967, he received a case that had him defending a conscientious objector who was accused of disobeying a direct order from a commanding officer. 

The defendant had applied to be discharged because of his status as a conscientious objector, but that application had been delayed far longer than normal.

“He got so frustrated, he disobeyed a direct order and was criminally charged for that,” Briggs says. “My ambitious defense suggested that my boss and his boss intentionally delayed the process so this guy would disobey an order.”

So here is Briggs, living in California with his first wife, essentially accusing his own commanding officer of, if not a crime, then certainly a moral vacancy. It didn’t go unnoticed.

“That raised the ire of the wing commander, the top dog on the base,” Briggs says, “and that resulted in his screaming me out of his office.”

Briggs was transferred a couple weeks later. Goodbye, sunny California. Hello, Goose Bay Labrador in not-so-sunny Newfoundland.

“That’s the kind of person he is,” says Rob Malone, a partner at Buckingham, Doolittle & Burroughs who was hired by Briggs 35 years ago. “He is fearless.”

Briggs’ time in Goose Bay was uneventful but also cut short by about five months when his stepfather, the man who had become his surrogate father, committed suicide. 

It was a sad time in the family’s life but one that introduced Briggs to Jim Herndon, a lawyer in Akron who agreed to handle Briggs’ stepfather’s estate and ultimately hired Briggs.

Briggs worked with Herndon’s firm until it was merged with Buckingham, Doolittle & Burroughs. He continued under Herndon’s wing, learning a lot about how to deal with people and how not to.

“He was a terrible taskmaster,” Briggs says. “If he was upset with me or something I had done, he would tell me in front of anybody and everybody. 

“But, from that negative,” he says “there were so many more positives.”

Herndon, for example, belonged to Sharon Golf Club and would take a young Briggs to client lunches and golf outings. 

Years later, when Briggs was a senior partner surrounded by young junior associates, he reciprocated.

Bill Caplan was a first-year associate at Buckingham, Doolittle & Burroughs in 1980 when Briggs stepped into his office and asked him if he wanted to golf with some clients at Firestone Country Club. 

Caplan, who had just moved to Akron from Cincinnati, had spent much of his time buried in tedious research. An avid golfer who started playing at age 12, he rarely got to interact with clients. 

“I am some kid who is really green behind the ears,” Caplan recalls. “Now I have the opportunity to be in the golf cart with a client for a couple of hours. I get to know the person and solidify a relationship. When you are just doing research, you don’t get to build relationships. [Briggs] got me out beyond the desk and helped me understand what the practice of law is all about.”

In the 10 years that Briggs served as CEO and president of Buckingham, Doolittle & Burroughs, the firm nearly doubled its number of attorneys, going from 80 to 140. The firm also opened offices in Cleveland, Columbus and Florida.

“It was a big growth spurt,” said Orrville Reed III, now a partner who started at the law firm in the 1970s about the same time as Briggs. “You only do those sorts of things if you’re an optimistic guy.”

Andrew Jackson sold his home to a man named John Johnson in 1910, and then Johnson turned around and sold it to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows eight years later. 

The Odd Fellows was — indeed it still is — a service organization that, according to its website, aims “to improve and elevate the character of man.” The group did charitable works for the community, oftentimes anonymously. 

So perhaps it’s fitting that someone such as Briggs now spends a significant amount of time in that house. After all, he would have made an ideal Odd Fellow. 

“He does so much in our community that people have no idea about,” Malone says. “Very few people really know what he has accomplished.”

Like the Odd Fellows, Briggs also takes great pleasure in helping other people succeed. He frequently quotes Dale Carnegie, the author of several self-help and business leadership books, particularly with regard to the benefits of helping others achieve their goals.

This, he says, he learned from his mother. She is 98 years old and still living in Wooster. 

She is a person, Briggs says, that everyone can count on and everyone loves, which is not so different from how his colleagues and friends describe him.

“Even when she didn’t have anything, she gave back,” he says. “She was just a rock.”

BRIGGS' CAREER TIMELINE 

1947: His mother divorces his father and moves the family to Wooster. 

1953: Briggs’ mother marries Bob Freeman, and the family moves safely into the middle class. “He really became our surrogate father,” Briggs says.

1963: Briggs is admitted to The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law despite a mediocre undergraduate career at Duke University and bad LSAT scores. “I’ll never forget interviewing with the associate dean there. He said, ‘You have a slim chance of making it in law school. If we accept you, you probably won’t finish.’”

1966: Graduates from OSU’s law college in the top 25 percent of his class and achieved his lifelong goal of becoming a lawyer. “I don’t know why I wanted to be a lawyer. Maybe it was Perry Mason.”

1967: Assigned to be a judge advocate in the United States Air Force. He is initially stationed in California before raising the ire of the wing commander and getting transferred to Goose Bay Labrador in Newfoundland.

1969: Honorably discharged from the Air Force and leaves Goose Bay to head back home to Wooster. “They really didn’t need lawyers in Goose Bay anyway. There were four of us, and we didn’t do much.” 

1970: Akron attorney Jim Herndon of Herndon and Bartol handles Briggs’ stepfather’s estate, and eventually hires Briggs. One year later, the law firm merges with Buckingham, Doolittle & Burroughs.

1990: Named president and CEO of the law firm.

1995: Named president of the GAR Foundation. 

2000: Steps aside as president and CEO of Buckingham, Doolittle & Burroughs and focuses his efforts on the GAR Foundation. “When the time freed up from managing the law firm, I got more heavily focused in the foundation business. Frankly, since 2000, it has been the most rewarding time of my career.”

2003: Buys a farm just outside Hartville, Ohio, and gets his first two Belted Galloway calves. “It’s a little bit of heaven in a really highly compressed world.”

2004: Helps lead the creation of the Fund for Our Economic Future, a collaboration of foundations in Northeast Ohio that focuses on economic development. 

2010: Elected chairman of the Knight Foundation. Additionally, he is given the Harold K. Stubbs Humanitarian Award, which recognizes those who have made contributions in areas such as social action, government, business, medicine and law.

LIFE LESSONS FROM ROBERT BRIGGS

Negative attitudes can sink companies and nonprofits. They do so much damage. Being around negative people drains me dry. 

On the other hand, optimism is infectious. 

I remember a receptionist who , when I would come in each morning and say, “How are you doing?” she would say, “Not bad.” So I would say, “Does that mean you are bad but not too bad, or semi-good?” Over time, whenever I asked her how she was doing, she said, “I’m doing great.”

As a leader, you have to give credit where credit is due, and you have to do that in front of as many people as possible. 

I haven’t attained my successes alone. If you want to take credit for everything, it’s not going to be a fun trip. 

Honesty is incredibly important. When you are mentoring someone, you have to be honest in your criticism, but you also have to be constructive and supportive. And you do it one-on-one, never in front of anybody else.