Correction: This story has been updated to reflect the correct spelling ofJohn Y. Brown Jr., the correct number of years J. David Grissom served as Centre College's board chairman and that the university faces a $48million budget shortfall.
A student editorial writer recently called him a “bully” who “doesn’t like to play by the rules.”
Faculty say he spat in the face of “shared governance” by insisting on a secret search for the university’s next president, followingin the footsteps of ousted President James Ramsey by “rejecting transparency, consultation, cooperation and collaboration.”
Boosters say he ran off the best athletic director in America, condemning the universityathletic program to years of mediocrity.
But to his admirers, 79-year-old J. David Grissom, a corporate wunderkind who has made fortunes several times over in banking and business, is just what the doctor ordered to cure the ills of the scandal-plagued University of Louisville:Beholden to no one. Supremely self-confident. A strong-willed SOB.
“He doesn’t care what people think,” said former Churchill Downs CEO Tom Meeker, on whose board Grissom served for more than 15 years. “He wants to do the right thing.”
Read this:Onetime college jock J. David Grissom wants U of L to value academics as much as sports
Grissom, who is chairman of both Mayfair Capital, a private investment company, and the Glenview Trust Co., which advises high net-worth clients, declined to be interviewed or photographed for this article.
Grissom’s mentor, David A. Jones Sr., the co-founder and retired chairman of Humana Inc., where Grissom was one of its first executives, added,“There was a cesspool out there and David has done a remarkable job cleaning it up.”
Since Grissom was appointed by Gov. Matt Bevin to the university’s board of trustees — and elected chairman a year ago by secret ballot — he has cracked down on spending at itsscandal-plagued foundation; steered the university away from tuition hikes, despite a $48million budget shortfall; and helped guide it back to full accreditation after it suffered the ignominy ofprobation.
He quickly made it known that there was a new sheriff in town: him.
He helped immediately end a deferred compensation bonanza that had paid out $22 million to Ramsey and his top lieutenants, and ban employees from being paid by the university and the foundation.
“There will not be any more of this dipping into both places,” he said after the board’s first meeting on his watch.
Background:U of L chairman opens the door -- slightly -- to a more open presidential search
See also:Calls to University of Louisville trustees about Tom Jurich didn't break law, Beshear says
He won a foundation pledge to halt the kind ofrisky real estate investments that cost the endowment millions of dollars.
“Those are our assets, and things need to change,” he said.
And when a trustee proposed a vote on a spending measure before the board had time to read it, Grissom cut him off, saying that that practice of the past wouldn't continue. The item was pulled from the agenda.
Said banker Mike Harreld, who workedfor Grissom at Citizens Fidelity Bank and was later its president: “David is driven to get things done, whether he chips some china along the way.”
CHIPPING THE CHINA
Some faculty members say that Grissom has been autocratic, even arrogant, and has stifled discussion and criticism.
During a heated meeting on his insistence on a confidential search for president, he suggested continuing the meeting behind closed doors — until he was informed that would be illegal, recalled political science professor Melissa Merry, who said the move suggested he wanted to suppress open debate.
And when the board was weighing a lawsuit against the foundation to recover up to $100 million in losses, he led the board in voting to delegate that decision to a four-member panel that included him, which was also seen as a move to limit debate and consolidate power.
And when asked by reporters why two trustees, including student representative Vishnu Tirumala — voted against that measure — Grissom said, “You’ll have to ask them."
Never mind that he had just informedTirumula that board policy allows only the chairman to speak to the media.
In an editorial last Oct. 17 in The Louisville Cardinal, student Megan Brewer wrote that Grissom hadtried to "keep too much concealed from students and staff" and that his "lack of promised transparency hasn't done anything to help gain back students' trust after the Ramsey administration."
In board meetings, Grissom has demonstrated a wry sense of humor. When trustee John Schnatter, the Papa John’s founder, couldn’t be found for a meeting, Grissom suggested he was “out selling pizzas.” And when interim President Dr. Greg Postel went before the board after his annual review, Grissom joked that he had been fired.
Postel seemed to take the quip in stride.
"I have a great working relationship with him," Postel told Courier Journal. "He has a hard-driving personality, and yet he maintains a sense of humor even when dealing with tough situations."
Trustee Raymond Bursesaid that Grissom has been anything but a dictator in board meetings. “He sits back and lets the board come to its own conclusions,” Burse said.
Added trustee Sandra Frazier, who also sits on the board of Glenview Trust, "He is very direct but incredibly fair and he listens to all sides."
But Grissom has been prickly when challenged.
He lashed out at interim Provost Dale Billingsley, whojoined faculty in protesting the closed presidential search. Grissom toldreportersBillingsley declined an invitation to jointhe board in interviewing the finalists, saying he was “too busy.” The implication was that Billinsgley was too lazy or uninterested to participate.
From November:University of Louisville is considering doing away with the school's Athletic Association
Background:University of Louisville reins in troubled foundation but decides against lawsuit
While Billingsley did say he was busy, Grissom didn’t mentionthat Billingsley also said faculty, not an administrator, needed to be involved for a“thorough and authentic” search.
Grissom and the board ultimately compromised, agreeing last month to allow eight campus representatives to meet finalists if they sign confidentiality agreements.
He has maintained that the best-qualified candidates — presidents serving at other universities — won’t apply if their names are disclosed during a search. And he has insisted the approach was in the best interest of the university.
That claim rankled faculty, including professor Ricky Jones, chairman of the Pan African Studies Department, who in a CourierJournal column called it “paternalistic” and an “overly usedflaccid claim.”
A review of Grissom’s nearly 60 years in business and public life show his management style at U of L is nothing new.
“He doesn’t suffer fools,” said Dan Ulmer, who succeeded Grissom as chairman of Citizens Fidelity.
In the 1970s, as chairman of what is now called the state Council on Postsecondary Education, Grissom warned Gov. Julian Carroll, who appointed him, against playing politics with university budgets and admonished university presidents to expect “a very pointed examination of the need for any program which appears to be duplicated elsewhere in the state.
“Nobody is going to push him around. Whether they are university presidents, political figures or anybody else,” Courier Journal said in an editorial.
And in 2004, at a Greater Louisville Inc. breakfast, Grissom said corporate executives sometimes have to act, not talk.
“If you've got a boil,” he said, “take out the needle and deal with it.”
That is what Grissom did in October as he led the board in its 10-3 vote firing athletic director Tom Jurich, who declined to commentfor this story.
EARLY SUCCESS
James David Grissom was born in 1938 and graduated from Atherton High School. He has said he grew up in a family of “comfortable means” but his parents had to struggle to send him to Centre College. His father, who died at age 52 of lymphoma, was a chemical salesman, David Jones said.
Grissom majored in English and worked his way through Centre driving a bus between what were thenseparate men’s and women’s campuses, recalled Margaret Menges Stroup, co-valedictorian of the class of 1960, who said both were among Centre’s “working poor.”
Even then, he was goal oriented, she said, and spent only three years at Centre so he could start law school a year earlier at U of L.
“The thing that impressed me about David was that he knew he was going in a certain direction and he pursued it without distraction,” she said.
His first break came in 1962, when David Jones,then an associate at the firm later known as Wyatt Tarrant & Combs, recommended Grissom asits first-ever hire of a new graduate without an Ivy League pedigree.
“He was analytical, straightforward and honest," said Jones, himself a Yale Law School graduate.
Grissom represented Kentucky Fried Chicken and was so talented that the owner, John Y. Brown Jr.,offered him a job as president.Grissom, then only 29, turned him down.
Grissom also was outside counsel for the company that later became Humana. In 1969, founders Jones and Wendell Cherry hired him asexecutive vice president, at a salary of $50,000— equal to$346,445 today.
They kept him only four years before he was plucked away by Citizens Fidelity, a $1.6 billion company that was Kentucky’s largest bank, where his rise was meteoric: CEO at age 37, chairman of the board by 40.
He later said some bank veterans were displeased.
“I knew that behind my back they called me 'Chicken King',” he said. “The first several years were clearly learning years for me.”
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But Grissom took charge, according to former executives: One of his initial acts was to move the start of the executive workday up by30 minutes, to 8 a.m., with meetings as early as 7 a.m.Under his leadership,the bank’s net income grew from $12 million to more than $60 million, and Citizens became the first Kentucky bank to operate across county lines.
But with success came tragedy.
On June 14, 1970, his first wife, the former Mary Ellen Wilhoite, was driving on Upper River Road near Indian Hills Trail when her car hit a guardrail. She bumped her head on the windshield but didn’t appear to be injured. Resting at home that night, she became violently ill and died.
“It was unbelievably traumatic,” said David Jones, a best friend and neighbor. Grissom was suddenly a single father to boys, 8 and 10, and a daughter who was only 8 months.
He remarried a couple of years later but that relationship ended in divorce. His third —and current — marriage is to the former Marlene Meil Byck.She has been an art collector, an appraiser and a prolific fundraiser, including for the Waterfront Development Corp., where President David Karem said she raised $30 million over 30 years — three-fourths of all private gifts.
Together, the Grissoms raised six children; Grissom’s oldest son by his first marriage, also named David, now 58, is a world-class guitarist who has played with John Mellencamp and Joe Ely.
Grissom walked away from the bank at age 50, in 1989, after it was acquired by Pittsburgh-based PNC. The nationalbanking giant named him PNC'svice chairman, but Grissom wanted to run the show, said Thomas O’BrienJr., who was then PNC's top officer.
“He wanted to be the boss and there was only one boss and that was me,” O’Brien said in an interview.
Grissom left with $600,000 severanceand millions of dollars of PNC stock, which he plowed into new investments at Mayfair. Those included purchasing a struggling theater chain called Regal Cinemas, which was later acquired by buyout firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts for $1.2 billion.
YumBrandschairman and CEO David Novak called Grissom one of the nation’s “savviest entrepreneurs” when Grissom was appointed to Yum’s board in 2002.
The Regal deal and others — as well as stock he accumulated while a director at Humana, Columbia Healthcare Corp., Capital Holding Corporation, LG & E and other corporate giants — make him a very rich man.
He and his wife divide their time between a 9,680-square-foot home on four acres off River Road assessed at $1.6 million and a 627-acre,$4.1 million farm in Henry County wherethey raise Angus cattle. In November they sold an oceanfront home inPalm Beach County, Florida, for $9.1 million.
The Grissoms also have given huge amounts to the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, where Marlene Grissom is a Life Trustee, and to the Parklands of Floyds Fork, among other nonprofits.
“He is immensely generous — among the most generous people in the history of the commonwealth,” said John Roush, president of Centre, where Grissom was board chairman for 22 years. The Grissoms have donated more than $20 million to the school, and in 2014 endowed a scholarship for first-generation students believed to be the largest gift ever to a public or private university in Kentucky.
Grissom has been far less generous to U of L; foundation records show that he’s given $128,407, and nothing since 2010. Grissom and university spokesman John Karman declined to comment on the size of the gifts or why he stopped giving.
FEW ISSUES
Through his long career, Grissom has largely avoided controversy and scandal, but in 1994he was one of several witnesses called to testify before a federal grand jury investigating passage of a heavily lobbied 1984 bill to allow banks to operate across county lines.
Neither Grissom nor his bank was implicated in the scandal, which ultimately saw15 state lawmakers and lobbyists convicted on corruption charges.
In 1997, when Grissom was on the board of what was then called the Kentucky Center for the Arts, he allegedly discouraged a witness from talking to the lawyer for Diane Cameron Lawrence, a center employeewhose sexual harassment suit against director Marlow Burt eventually was settled for $218,000. Courier Journal reported that the witness, Tracey Cooke, said in a deposition that Grissom told her that if she “cared about the center, I would not speak.”Grissom declined to comment at the time.
More:Tom Jurich's Louisville legacy: bold businessman or bully? Depends on who you ask
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In 2001, in a federal insider trading lawsuit, shareholders accused Grissom and three top executives at Providian Financial Corp., a struggling credit card company, of selling about $25 million in stock at artificially inflated prices. Grissom, who had recently been named interim chairman, and the others were accused of knowing about an accounting change not disclosed to the public that allowed the company to defer reporting about $30 million in losses, according to court records and news accounts. Grissom said in a letter to clients thathe never sold shares based on inside information — his sales were based “in substantial part by tax planning."The suit was settled for $8.6 million.
That same year, PNC, Grissom’s former employer, sued his new company, Glenview Trust, for luring away a top trust officer who allegedly violated a pledge not to solicitPNC customers. The executive, Ron Murphy, and Grissom said the suit was without merit but the company paid PNC $525,000 and agreed to return some documents.
Glenview Trust,which now has 45 employees, manages $10 billion for 525 clients, according to its website.
In his sole direct dive into politics, Grissom led an unsuccessful campaign in 2007 to persuade voters to support a library tax in Louisville.
A registered Democrat, Grissom has given equal amounts — about $50,000 — to candidates of both political parties over the years, favoring Democrats in local races and Republicans, including Sen. Mitch McConnell, in federal contests. Grissom has given no money to Bevin's campaigns.
Grissom has never sought public office and once told KET that“politics is something I wouldn’t do very well and don’t have any interest in."
Roush, the Centre president, said Grissom has served the public best in fundraising campaigns and on boards like U of L's.
Roush and others say Grissom has nothing to gain in his service to the university, which allows him freedom to do what's best for it. "He doesn't have to be doing this," Frazier said.
Roush said: “He is the epitome of a citizen leader. David faces life unafraid and people like that get things done.”
Andrew Wolfson: 502-582-7189; awolfson@courierjournal.com; Twitter: @adwolfson. Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: www.courier-journal.com/andreww
