HIGH PROFILE: ASU's biggest individual donor Neil Griffin dropped out of high school at 16

“As I went along with my life, I provided for my family and everything else. I had more money than I really needed. My real passion is education. As I thought about my own life, I thought about what incidents or people influenced me, and Arkansas State was a real tipping point for me back then.” - F. O’Neil Griffin.
“As I went along with my life, I provided for my family and everything else. I had more money than I really needed. My real passion is education. As I thought about my own life, I thought about what incidents or people influenced me, and Arkansas State was a real tipping point for me back then.” - F. O’Neil Griffin.

JONESBORO — Arkansas State University’s biggest individual donor dropped out of high school at 16.

His name is Neil Griffin and he is seated in a room in the newly named Neil Griffin College of Business at ASU in Jonesboro on a bright spring morning.

About a month earlier, the chipper, good-humored, 91-year-old semi-retired businessman, who grew up on a farm with nine siblings in nearby Needham and now lives in Kerrville, Texas, donated $10 million to Arkansas State. Coupled with an estate gift he made in 2012, it’s the largest individual donation in the school’s 109-year history and he was in town to receive an honorary doctoral degree from the school.

“I need to get myself a little black doctor’s bag,” he chuckles.

Griffin was raised about nine miles from Jonesboro on Arkansas 18, the fourth oldest of Samuel and Lydia Griffin’s 10 children — seven boys, three girls. Life was not unlike John Grisham’s rural northeast Arkansas novel A Painted House, Griffin says.

“Everybody was poor,” he says. “It was a community of family farms, not plantation types. The largest farm we had was a quarter section, 160 acres.”

His parents farmed cotton and soybeans, and though his mother never made it past eighth grade and his father went to school only through the fifth grade, Griffin says they were both smart.

“Memphis had two daily newspapers,” he says. “We took the Memphis Press-Scimitar. We were the only family in the whole neighborhood that took a newspaper. My dad read it every day. He and my mother, as I look back on it, were both pretty doggone intelligent people.”

In 1943, Griffin was a teenager caught up in the fervor of the war effort and wanted to do his part.

“I didn’t want to miss the biggest deal of my lifetime,” he says. “Patriotism was really something in those days.”

Griffin left school, lied about his age and joined the Navy, becoming a specialist in aviation and serving in the Pacific on the USS Petrof Bay, an aircraft carrier that supported invasions and provided air and bombardment support.

He was only 19 when he was discharged on Feb. 4, 1946, and returned home with plans to finish high school. The Nettleton principal had another idea.

“He said, ‘You’d be wasting your time here. You were always a good student, you ought to go to college,’” Griffin remembers.

He passed the college entrance exam and, with a letter of recommendation from the principal and help from the G.I. Bill, enrolled in classes a week after his discharge at what was then Arkansas State College and later became Arkansas State University.

Griffin and his fellow veterans wasted no time.

“We were all a helluva lot more mature than your typical college student,” he says. “I felt sorry for those young people there. The veterans were mostly pretty serious. I wanted to get on with my life.”

His accounting teacher, H.B. Foster Bowdon, made a lasting impression.

“He was a great influence on me,” Griffin says. “It turns out that he was only nine years older than me, but he was pretty serious. He started me on a career in accounting. We formed an accounting club when I was here and I was the first president. There’s a picture of ol’ Foster and me with our legs crossed.”

“As I went along with my life, I provided for my family and everything else. I had more money than I really needed. My real passion is education. As I thought about my own life, I thought about what incidents or people influenced me, and Arkansas State was a real tipping point for me back then.”

Despite working part-time jobs, first with a plumbing company and later at a basket factory and as a clerk at J.C. Penney, Griffin graduated in just 2 1/2 years with a degree in business administration.

There’s a story from around this time that Griffin shares concerning the mystery behind the first initial of his full name, F. O’Neil Griffin.

“I always wondered and finally asked my daddy, where did the F come from? He said, ‘You were named after my friend, F. Darr,” who was from the Brookland community in Craighead County.

Fast forward a few years and Griffin is working for a Jonesboro accounting firm.

“My boss threw a file on my desk and said, ‘This man is coming in and I want you to do his tax returns.’”

Griffin looks at the file and, lo and behold, it’s his eponym, A.F. Darr from Brookland in Craighead County.

“He came in and I said, ‘Mr. Darr, I’m Neil Griffin, Sam Griffin’s son. I have a question for you. What does the F stand for?’ He said, ‘Nothing. And neither does the A!’”

Griffin laughs at the memory.

BUYING AND SELLING

After earning a degree in business administration, Griffin wanted to continue his schooling, so he moved to Austin, Texas, to attend graduate school at the University of Texas.

He earned a master’s degree in accounting and went to work in the Houston offices of Arthur Andersen & Co., one of the then “Big Eight” accounting firms.

He was transferred first to Dallas and later Denver, where he was in charge of the firm’s tax division.

He was hired away by a company called Western Nuclear and learned that he had a talent for buying and selling businesses.

“The president was quite a promoter, but he wasn’t very practical,” Griffin says. “He was such an entrepreneur, and I really learned that I was good at that and I liked it. That’s sort of what started me out. I spent a few years as a partner in an investment banking firm in New York, and gained additional skills in corporate finance and that sort of thing.”

Listing just a few of the positions he has held, he is the former president of Uptime Corporation in Golden, Colo.; former chief executive officer of TeleCom Corporation; former owner and CEO of the First National Bank of Kerr-ville in Texas; he was chairman and CEO of Colorado-based Mountain Banks, Ltd.; and former vice chairman of First City Bancorporation of Houston.

“I made my wealth buying companies and assets and then selling them,” he says.

Now he’s giving a lot of that wealth away to help young people get a college education.

“As I went along with my life, I provided for my family and everything else. I had more money than I really needed,” he says. “My real passion is education. As I thought about my own life, I thought about what incidents or people influenced me, and Arkansas State was a real tipping point for me back then.”

NEIL GRIFFIN COLLEGE OF BUSINESS

Jason Penry is the vice chancellor for university advancement at ASU and has known Griffin since 2013.

“Neil has an incredible sense of humor,” he says. “I laugh the whole time I’m with him, and I also learn a lot.”

Forty percent of Griffin’s $10 million gift will be used for scholarships, Penry says.

“That resonates strongly with Neil. He didn’t have a silver spoon when he was growing up. Two thirds of our students are Pell Grant eligible. They need financial assistance, and this scholarship program will go a long way in helping our students.”

The gift is designed to support 20 full scholarships a year to the business school, Penry says.

Soon after his gift was made, the university board of trustees approved naming the business college at the ASU System’s Jonesboro campus after Griffin.

That name on the building also raises the profile of the business school, which had 1,449 students last fall, Penry says.

“Having a named college elevates the college and puts it on a whole new tier. A named college gets more attention in national circles. It’s certainly elevated the profile of our business school.”

Griffin, who was in Jonesboro last spring with his third wife, Gena, to receive an honorary doctorate from the school, also wanted his gift to honor the accounting teacher who had such an influence on him so long ago. To that end, 10 percent of the donation establishes the H.B. Foster Bowdon Chair of Accounting. The endowment also includes funds for the Neil Griffin Dean of Business and the Neil Griffin Professor of Entrepreneurship.

ALAMO COLLEGES

ASU is not the only beneficiary of Griffin’s philanthropy. It’s also not the only place that has a building named for him.

Griffin has lived in Kerr-ville, a Texas hill country town of about 23,000, since the early ’80s. A few years ago he read a newspaper story about the low percentage of students from the town that went to college and wanted to see if something could be done to change that.

“A majority of the students in Kerrville are Mexican Americans,” he says. “There’s not a culture of college attendance, and many of them can’t afford it.”

There was also no local junior college, which is where Griffin stepped in. He consulted with the high school superintendent and the school board and organized an effort — and gave money — to transform an abandoned junior high building there into Alamo Colleges Greater Kerrville Center, a branch of the Alamo Colleges District, a network of five community colleges in Texas.

In 2010, he donated more than $1.05 million to fund scholarships for Kerrville-area students at the Greater Kerr-ville Center. In 2017, he donated $2.445 million to pay for scholarships and other programs at Greater Kerrville Center, the largest gift in Alamo Colleges history. The center, which opened in 2008, now has about 300 students, says Shawna Fahrentold, the center’s off-site coordinator.

“He’s such an amazing man,” she says. “What he did through his life, being brought up poor, using the G.I. Bill to get his education and making his fortune. Now he wants to help people who are less fortunate. And he’s just so nice and such a great guy. I could listen to him for hours.”

He has also donated to Schreiner College, a private Presbyterian school in Kerrville, where he is a past member of the board of trustees. Last year, the school dedicated the Gena and Neil Griffin Fine Arts Center.

The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, home to the F. O’Neil “Neil” Griffin Conference & Education Center, is another Griffin beneficiary.

Pat Mulvey, vice president of development, met Griffin more than 20 years ago when Griffin was on the center’s Board of Visitors.

“Neil has been extremely generous to M.D. Anderson,” Mulvey says, declining to give a specific amount donated. “He’s just a genuine human being. He’s a very caring individual, a very giving individual, someone who takes interest in others and wants to see good done in the world.”

Griffin’s first gift for scholarships was $10,000 over five years to the University of Texas at Austin in 1954.

“I’d been out of school three years and I was trying to make a living, but I pledged a five-year gift to them. It’s just part of being a good Christian.”

For a long time, he declined any publicity or recognition.

“When I first started giving, I didn’t want the publicity that went with it,” he says. “That was part of my personality. But then I had one friend in particular that insisted that I should let my name be used. He said ‘You don’t know what kind of an influence that might have on your peers.’ I don’t do it for the publicity for myself, but if it helps others to give, that’s fine with me.”

Griffin has two sons from his first marriage — Cliff, who is deceased, and Richard, 64, who lives in Kerrville.

His second wife, Elaine, died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease. He and Gena were Kerrville neighbors, but had never met until their first date.

“A lucky day for me,” Griffin says.

They married in 1999.

“After a short time, I realized that he was about the most honest man I’ve ever met,” Gena says. “I loved that. And he grew up like I did. My dad was a carpenter.”

“We’re both from working class families,” Griffin says.

And he’s still working, managing his investments and charitable giving.

“I’ve continued to invest, but in the last few years I’ve spent more time on philanthropy than anything else,” he says. “I grew up as a fundamentalist Christian. I was taught that those of us who are blessed have an obligation to give back, and I’d like to be remembered as that.”

He will be remembered for a while, Penry says.

“The scholarships that he has established with this gift to Arkansas State, their impact will be felt by hundreds and thousands of students at Arkansas State. Neil believes education is the great equalizer. It makes an impact and it changes students’ lives and their families’ lives. He’s providing opportunities for decades to come.”

SELF PORTRAIT

Neil Griffin

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: Sept. 10, 1926, Mississippi County, near Osceola

MY FIRST CAR WAS: A used 1937 Plymouth.

GROWING UP, I THOUGHT I WOULD: Partner with my father as a farmer.

I AM HAPPIEST WHEN I AM: With other people.

THE BEST BOOK I EVER READ: Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry.

MY FAVORITE MEAL IS: Beef stew and cornbread.

IF I COULD INVITE JUST ONE PERSON TO MY FANTASY DINNER PARTY IT WOULD BE: Winston Churchill

THE QUALITY I ADMIRE MOST IN A PERSON IS: Integrity

ONE WORD TO DESCRIBE ME: Honest

“I’ve continued to invest, but in the last few years I’ve spent more time on philanthropy than anything else. I grew up as a fundamentalist Christian. I was taught that those of us who are blessed have an obligation to give back, and I’d like to be remembered as that.”

photo

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/JOHN SYKES JR.

“I’ve continued to invest, but in the last few years I’ve spent more time on philanthropy than anything else. I grew up as a fundamentalist Christian. I was taught that those of us who are blessed have an obligation to give back, and I’d like to be remembered as that.” - F. O’Neil Griffin.

Upcoming Events