If you’re going to spend some time with Lee and Jane Seidman, be prepared to laugh. But if you take yourself too seriously, be prepared for your evening to end while it’s still light outside. They don’t suffer inflated egos gladly.
One of the most philanthropic couples in Cleveland, the Seidmans believe in living life with a healthy dose of joy and a minimum of self importance. They are as generous with their time and good will as they are with their considerable wealth. Married for 33 years, they have long since lost track of all the money they’ve given away.
A few years ago, they decided to focus primarily (but not exclusively) on health care. Among their gifts was $42 million to create the University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center, which opened in 2011. But they also have broken their own rules when the spirit has touched them. They gave $1 million to augment insurance when a tornado demolished the gymnasium at Ursuline College near their home in Pepper Pike in 2013.
Lee, 85, and Jane, 76, have different faith backgrounds — he’s Jewish, she’s a Christian raised in the Eastern Orthodox Church — but they share a devotion to giving back. They are agnostic about choosing one health care institution over another.
“You know,” Jane says, “doctors are sometimes like car salesmen. One year they’re working at this dealership and next year they’re at another dealership. Doctors do the same thing. They go back and forth. And we use both University Hospitals and Cleveland Clinic for our own personal health.”
The car dealership analogy is not incidental. They met when Jane worked for Lee at his Jaguar-Volvo-BMW dealership on Mayfield Road in Cleveland. Among other things, she served as lease manager and was responsible for repossessing cars when lessees didn’t pay.
“She was great at it!” Lee enthuses.
Each was a divorced parent of three children. Today, the parents of six — they don’t distinguish between “his” and “hers” — delight in their grandchildren and the stuffed animal collection that fills their home. They sold the Motorcars Group that Lee founded in 1958 nearly two decades ago. Except for snowbird time in Florida, they are very decidedly Clevelanders.
They recently settled back and talked about their philosophy of life and laughter, and their love of philanthropy.
Q: You two have a lot of fun.
LS:
Everything we do, we try to have fun. If it isn’t fun, we don’t do it. If it’s funny, if it’s humorous, that’s even better. If it’s sad, we try to avoid it. We try to hang out with people who have fun. If they’re grouchy or down in the mouth, we just don’t hang out with people like that. It’s got to be fun. They don’t have to be funny, but they have to be fun. They have to enjoy their life and not complain.
Q: I’ve even heard you tell people it’s fun to give your money away.
JS:
I use the word “rewarding” more than fun. At the cancer hospital, it’s hard to say that it’s fun.
LS:
Yeah, “rewarding” is a better word.
JS:
I’m at the hospital a lot because I work on a lot of projects. [Dr.] Fred Rothstein [retired president of University Hospitals Case Medical Center] once said at a meeting that I am “hands-on.” I am. To have a patient come out and say “thank you,” that is rewarding.
Q: Where does your impulse to do so much come from? You could be playing golf and traveling to Europe.
LS:
We still do both. But my parents were very generous. My mother was the last of nine children. I had 15 uncles and aunts and their spouses, and I don’t think anybody was greedy. Everybody was willing to pitch in. We used to have family dinners, and there always was too much to eat because everybody would bring something. We’d contribute, in effect. So, I saw that growing up — how everybody would participate and how they helped others to improve their well being. That set an example.
JS:
I’m Lebanese. When I was 18 or 19 years old, Danny Thomas came and spoke to the Syrian Lebanese women in Ohio because he was from Toledo. He told us about St. Jude Hospital and asked us to contribute. That started me thinking about philanthropy.
LS:
Tell him about your mother.
JS:
She volunteered her whole life, mostly at Richmond Heights Hospital [now UH Richmond Medical Center]. I volunteered there along with her, and it was a way of giving back to the community. That had a big impact on me.
Q: Is that one of the reasons you focus on health care?
LS:
What’s more important
than health?
Q: A few years ago you decided to narrow your focus to hospitals in particular.
LS:
Yes, we had a list of approximately three dozen philanthropic entities that we had given to, but then we made a decision. We sent each of them a note thanking them and telling them that they were certainly worthwhile and we had enjoyed giving them whatever help we had, but now we were going to concentrate on hospitals. And we stopped giving to anybody except the hospitals and the Jewish Community Center.
JS:
And Ursuline College.
LS:
Yes, Ursuline, our neighbor in Pepper Pike.
Q: And you actually studied how to give.
LS:
Yes. When I got old enough to go to graduate school, when I was 60, I went to Harvard. They have a special course on philanthropy that I signed up for, and it was fabulous. You live in a dorm like the undergraduates. It was great. You go for six weeks, then a year’s break, then another six weeks, another break and another six weeks. At the end, they give you two things: a certificate telling you that you’ve completed the course, and a receipt for your charges, which are substantial. Harvard is not inexpensive, but it was worth it. We had a lot of fun, and we made a lot of friends.
Q: Would you recommend it to your colleagues and friends?
LS:
Yeah! It’s wonderful. You’re back in college. You’re like a kid again. They give you a roster of everybody who attends and we have a reunion every year, either in Cambridge or in another country hosted by one of the international students. We had students from all over the world — coincidentally, classmates from 26 countries and 26 of the 50 states.
JS:
I stayed home in Cleveland and held down the fort here while Lee was in school, but since then we’ve been to reunions in Istanbul, Dubai and Cuba as well as Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Q: That experience helped you decide where to put your money?
LS:
It helped us solidify our thinking. It’s called “impact philanthropy,” to make a meaningful contribution. In these years of inflation, $100 or $1,000 or $5,000 is good, but it doesn’t have [the same] impact. You need small gifts because you need people to get into the habit of giving. It’s OK to start small, but hopefully what you give away grows as your net worth grows.
JS:
People have congratulated us about our philanthropy and say, “I wish I could do what you do.” My answer is, you don’t need to do what we do. Just do something. That is my thrust. You can do what you can do, whether it’s giving an hour of your time or giving something to the food bank.
Q: Your gift to Ursuline College was something different.
JS:
Lee played golf with Sister Diana Stano [former president of Ursuline College]. We call her Diana. I happened to be in a restaurant one day, and she was sitting across from me. I knew it was Diana because I have her picture from Lee golfing with her. I went up to her and introduced myself, and we just became fast friends. We had dinner several times. She called us and she said, you have to come over and see the devastation from the tornado.
We don’t live far away and we had no damage whatsoever, not even a chair in the backyard. She said they called her at 5 o’clock in the morning to tell her. She said she prayed and told God: “I am so glad we had no injuries, and I know I needed a new gym, but I didn’t need your help!”
Q: Giving where you can see the
impact makes it more rewarding?
JS:
A hundred percent. Every area where we have given large amounts of money, we have a lot of personal contact. In the brain health department of the Clinic, we meet the people and we know what’s going on with research. At UH, at the cancer hospital and at Rainbow, we meet and we know all of the players, and we know what’s going on. We get reports, we socialize with the doctors and the staff, so we see it. Even at St. Jude, which is in Memphis, we’ve been there three times and we have contact there, and we know exactly what our dollars are doing.
Q. You mentioned socializing. That’s part of being a philanthropist, isn’t it?
JS:
Yes, it is. We try to attend as many events as we can. It’s being able to meet people in every role at the places we support.
LS:
Sometimes Jane and I look at each other and we say, “You know, wouldn’t it be great if
we could just stay home tonight? Maybe we should even take the phone off the hook.”
JS:
But if they need us, we’re here for them. It’s important. Don’t you agree with that, Lee?
LS:
Absolutely. Tell him about the lady at the supermarket.
JS:
Oh, it was when we gave to the cancer hospital and got that big exposure. I was in Trader Joe’s one day and a woman came up to me and she said, “I saw you on TV the other night and now I see you here. You do your own shopping!” I said, “Honey, I do my own shopping and my own cooking. I take my clothes to the cleaners. I’m just like you.”
LS:
You’re just like a real person!
Q: Imagine that.
LS:
Did you hear about the bucket? Anytime you think you’re a big deal, get an empty bucket and fill it up with water. Put your fist in it all the way to the bottom. Take your fist out of the bucket, then look inside to see how much of an impact you made. ZERO. So? You’re not such a big deal.
Q: Well, you’re a big deal in Cleveland.
LS:
We love Cleveland.
JS:
This is our home.
LS:
If somebody knocks Cleveland, I say to them: “Your ignorance is exceeded only by your stupidity.” I don’t let ANYBODY knock Cleveland. It’s the greatest place in the world to live. We really feel that way.
Q: What would you say to your friends if they asked you why they should share their wealth?
LS:
I would say, very politely, “Listen, do you think you’re going to take it with you? Get in the real world. Grow up and decide you’re going to help other people.” Well, I wouldn’t REALLY say that, but I’d like to.
