Cincinnati financier Carl Lindner Jr., who used his experience running the family dairy store to build a business empire whose reach included baseball, banks and bananas, has died. He was 92.
He died Monday night after being taken gravely ill to a hospital that morning, said a person close to the family who was not authorized to speak until a statement had been issued.
Lindner became controlling partner and chief executive officer of the Cincinnati Reds in a 1999 deal that ended Marge Schott's rocky 15-year reign as owner. In contrast to her grandstanding, Lindner stayed mostly in the background — save for a lasting memory in 2000 when he picked up Ken Griffey Jr. at the airport in his Rolls-Royce following the blockbuster trade.
Lindner was chairman of Cincinnati-based American Financial Group, a publicly traded financial holding company that had more than $17 billion in assets. In 2009, Forbes magazine estimated Lindner's personal wealth at $1.75 billion, placing him among the 400 richest Americans.
Lindner ruled over a complex maze of corporations with nearly 70,000 employees worldwide.
American Financial Group owned, or held substantial investments in, Charter Co., marketer of fuel to electric utilities; Chiquita Brands International Inc., one of the world's largest food producers, and Great American Insurance Co.
His financial support for the University of Cincinnati, which named its business administration building after him, and various charities earned him a reputation as a philanthropist.
Tributes from current and former business school students poured onto Twitter early Tuesday. They thanked Lindner for championing the city and the university and sharing his wealth with them.
"He's got to be one of the most generous guys in Cincinnati," friend Richard Farmer, chairman of Cincinnati uniform maker Cintas Corp., said in 1993. "I don't know of any positive thing that's happened in Cincinnati that Carl has not been a part of."
In the business world, some critics considered him a ruthless takeover artist. He made millions in the 1970s and 1980s by investing, then retreating, from companies.
An alleged attempt by Lindner to take over Gannett Co. prompted former chairman Al Neuharth to call him a "shark in sheep's clothing."
Lindner made a name for himself by becoming one of Michael Milken's earliest and most prominent junk-bond players. But he also showed his investment smarts by predicting a decline in the junk-bond market in the late 1980s.
"Of course, Carl was always a couple years ahead of the pack," said James Dahl, a former bond seller for Milken.
Lindner had a reputation for working long hours in pursuit of the next great deal.
"I'm working over 80 hours a week and have to keep on track," he once told areporter in explaining why he usually refused interview requests. Even in his later years, he showed no signs of slowing down.
He was publicity-shy, yet he held a fundraiser for presidential candidate George H.W. Bush at his home in 1988. He also played host to Bush and Francois Mitterrand, at the time the president of France, at his vacation home in Ocean Reef, Fla., later that month.
Lindner paid his staff handsomely and threw lavish annual parties for them. At his 70th birthday party, Frank Sinatra entertained.
Lindner's fortunes began to slide in the late 1980s with the acquisition of Taft Broadcasting, a Cincinnati television and radio company.
The $1.5 billion takeover in 1987 left the new company, Great American Communications, mired in debt. The company was forced to sell several key assets in a short time, including cartoon creator Hanna-Barbera Productions.
In 1992, Lindner suffered losses of $560 million at Great American Communications and $284 million at Chiquita, leading to a $77 million loss at American Financial. In 1993, Lindner filed for "prepackaged" bankruptcy to restructure debts of Great American Communications.
Carl Henry Lindner Jr. was born in Dayton in 1919 but spent much of his youth in Norwood, a blue-collar suburb of Cincinnati. As he made his wealth, he moved to Indian Hill, where most of Cincinnati's rich and famous live.
Lindner, along with brothers Robert and Richard and sister Dorothy, helped his parents in a succession of dairy businesses, first in Dayton, and then in Cincinnati. He never finished high school because he was so busy.
In 1940, Lindner's father opened one of the nation's first cash-and-carry milk and dairy stores, in Norwood. That launched what became the United Dairy Farmers convenience store chain.
During World War II, with his father's health failing and his brothers being called into military service, Lindner began to direct UDF. By the mid-1960s, when Lindner left UDF to Robert's direction, the chain had more than 100 stores. That number has since more than doubled.
Lindner founded the cornerstone of his financial empire, American Financial Corp. (later American Financial Group), in 1959. From 1961 until the company went private in 1980, American Financial's portfolio made more than 60 times its original investment as Lindner diversified into banks, insurance and assorted industries.
Lindner had three sons with his second wife, Edyth Bailey: Carl H. Lindner III, 58, president of Great American Insurance Co.; S. Craig Lindner, 56, president of American Annuity Group and senior executive vice president of American Money Management; and Keith Lindner, 52, a former official at Chiquita.
∼LINDNER, CARL HENRY JR.
Carl Henry Lindner Jr, of Indian Hill (Cincinnati) died on Monday, 17 October 2011. Carl was born on 22 April 1919 in Dayton, Ohio. Carl Henry Lindner Jr. was the firstborn of a modest dairyman and his wife, Clara.
Lindner quit high school to help in his father's Norwood dairy store. Along with his father, he and his brothers Robert and Richard, and sister Dorothy, built it into United Dairy Farmers, a chain of dairy and convenience stores.
When the family founded what now is UDF on Montgomery Road in Norwood in 1940, the first day's sales amounted to $8.28.
Lindner often talked about the modest surroundings of his childhood, noting more than once that he picked up dates in an ice-cream truck.
Robert Lindner's family eventually took control of UDF, and Richard Lindner became sole owner of the Thriftway supermarket chain before selling it to Winn-Dixie Stores.
Lindner married the former Ruth Wiggeringloh of Norwood in 1942. They divorced seven years later with no children. He then married the former Edyth Bailey in 1951, and they have three sons who all went into the family business: Carl III, Craig and Keith.
Lindner cautiously entered the savings-and-loan and insurance business, founding his flagship company American Financial Corp. in 1959. In the early 1970s the company gained control of Great American Insurance, which would become its chief operating business.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the company bought and sold companies in a variety of industries. Lindner took the company private in 1981 and released little financial information to the public, but in 1995 the company sold stock to public shareholders under the new umbrella of American Financial Group Inc.
In 2003, Keith Lindner left American Financial to concentrate on the family's charitable pursuits. In 2004 Carl and Craig Lindner were named co-CEOs of the company while Carl Lindner Jr. remained chairman.
Lindner was a conservative icon, lobbying against Robert Mapplethorpe's 1990 exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center here and funding the Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy.
But he was pragmatic as well, contributing more than $1 million to Democratic President Bill Clinton during Chiquita Brands' battle over European banana quotas. He was well known as one of the biggest givers in the country to both political parties.
From humble beginnings running his father's dairy store in Norwood, Carl Henry Lindner Jr. grew into a billionaire, a friend of U.S. presidents and Greater Cincinnati's most successful entrepreneur.
The former Reds owner never shed the fierce competitiveness and loyalty that made him a hometown icon.
His influence ran to every corner of Greater Cincinnati. The high-school dropout bought and sold Kings Island, the Reds, Provident Bank and the Enquirer. His name is on buildings from the University of Cincinnati's business school to the tennis center at Lunken Playfield.
But it was the banking and insurance business that made him a billionaire. At his death, his American Financial Group Inc. controlled assets of nearly $32 billion and he was routinely listed as one of the richest men in America.
Ever the optimist, Lindner often carried an inch-thick stack of cards with motivational sayings - one was "Only in America! Gee, am I lucky!" - that he handed out to anyone he would meet.
He was a teetotaler, physically unimposing yet with a prominent shock of white hair and a penchant for wearing flashy neckties.
Even to his closest friends and colleagues, he was soft-spoken and rarely confrontational. Yet some business partners complained about unfair treatment and he flashed a harsh temper when confronting reporters who wrote what he perceived as unfriendly stories or criticism of his business dealings.
A devout Baptist and a longtime member of Kenwood Baptist Church, Lindner used his wealth and influence behind the scenes to become Greater Cincinnati's largest benefactor and economic development force. At the height of his personal giving he contributed millions of dollars a year to charitable causes, and brought thousands of high-paying jobs to downtown Cincinnati.
His companies brought thousands of employees to the region, and the annual Christmas party that he threw at Music Hall attracted some of the nation's biggest acts, including Bill Cosby and Frank Sinatra.
At the same time, Lindner thought of himself as an outsider, building his business career outside of Cincinnati's old-money elite. He was never a member of many of the most exclusive business and country clubs and his bar-the-doors business style, starting with a hostile takeover of Provident Bank in the mid-1960s, was out of place in always polite Cincinnati.
Perhaps the most public role of his career was his ownership of the Cincinnati Reds from 1999 to 2005. Lindner owned a minority stake both before and after that period but was the Reds' CEO for six seasons, and each of those years the team lost more games than it won.
He approved the trade for Ken Griffey Jr. in 2000, even sending his private jet to bring Griffey to Cincinnati and then personally driving the hometown star back to Cinergy Field from Lunken Airport in his Rolls-Royce.
But as the Reds' losses mounted, Lindner never spoke publicly to fans and privately bristled at talk-radio criticism.
That period ended in late 2005 when Lindner sold a controlling stake in the Reds to a group headed by Bob Castellini.
Shy and scornful of reporters, Lindner nevertheless became a focus of media attention because of his substantial wealth and his far-flung business dealings.
The controversies included millions of dollars in political contributions as his Chiquita Brands International Inc. was waging a trade war with European countries, a bevy of lawsuits and federal charges over business deals that benefited Lindner and his company more than other shareholders, and a high-profile battle with the Enquirer in 1998 over a series of critical stories on Chiquita.
Lindner built a national reputation in the 1980s as a high-risk trader, becoming a business partner of symbols of the decade's excess such as junk-bond king Michael Milken and Cincinnati's own Charles Keating.
He was the classic "value investor," buying properties few other investors wanted and waiting years, or even decades, to reap the benefits.
That gave him a portfolio including the old Penn Central railroad, Circle K convenience stores and New York City landmark Grand Central Station.
But Lindner spent the two decades before his death shedding assets that didn't deal with insurance and transferring others to his three sons. That left American Financial as mostly an insurance and financial services company.
He lost his stake in Chiquita in 2002 when that company emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In 2004, Lindner, his family and American Financial reaped nearly $1 billion in stock when they sold Cincinnati's Provident Financial Group Inc. to Cleveland-based National City Corp.
The moves consolidated the business around safer insurance businesses. Lindner also transferred tens of millions of dollars to his three sons and their families, solidifying for generations a wealth that he never enjoyed growing up.
He died Monday night after being taken gravely ill to a hospital that morning, said a person close to the family who was not authorized to speak until a statement had been issued.
Lindner became controlling partner and chief executive officer of the Cincinnati Reds in a 1999 deal that ended Marge Schott's rocky 15-year reign as owner. In contrast to her grandstanding, Lindner stayed mostly in the background — save for a lasting memory in 2000 when he picked up Ken Griffey Jr. at the airport in his Rolls-Royce following the blockbuster trade.
Lindner was chairman of Cincinnati-based American Financial Group, a publicly traded financial holding company that had more than $17 billion in assets. In 2009, Forbes magazine estimated Lindner's personal wealth at $1.75 billion, placing him among the 400 richest Americans.
Lindner ruled over a complex maze of corporations with nearly 70,000 employees worldwide.
American Financial Group owned, or held substantial investments in, Charter Co., marketer of fuel to electric utilities; Chiquita Brands International Inc., one of the world's largest food producers, and Great American Insurance Co.
His financial support for the University of Cincinnati, which named its business administration building after him, and various charities earned him a reputation as a philanthropist.
Tributes from current and former business school students poured onto Twitter early Tuesday. They thanked Lindner for championing the city and the university and sharing his wealth with them.
"He's got to be one of the most generous guys in Cincinnati," friend Richard Farmer, chairman of Cincinnati uniform maker Cintas Corp., said in 1993. "I don't know of any positive thing that's happened in Cincinnati that Carl has not been a part of."
In the business world, some critics considered him a ruthless takeover artist. He made millions in the 1970s and 1980s by investing, then retreating, from companies.
An alleged attempt by Lindner to take over Gannett Co. prompted former chairman Al Neuharth to call him a "shark in sheep's clothing."
Lindner made a name for himself by becoming one of Michael Milken's earliest and most prominent junk-bond players. But he also showed his investment smarts by predicting a decline in the junk-bond market in the late 1980s.
"Of course, Carl was always a couple years ahead of the pack," said James Dahl, a former bond seller for Milken.
Lindner had a reputation for working long hours in pursuit of the next great deal.
"I'm working over 80 hours a week and have to keep on track," he once told areporter in explaining why he usually refused interview requests. Even in his later years, he showed no signs of slowing down.
He was publicity-shy, yet he held a fundraiser for presidential candidate George H.W. Bush at his home in 1988. He also played host to Bush and Francois Mitterrand, at the time the president of France, at his vacation home in Ocean Reef, Fla., later that month.
Lindner paid his staff handsomely and threw lavish annual parties for them. At his 70th birthday party, Frank Sinatra entertained.
Lindner's fortunes began to slide in the late 1980s with the acquisition of Taft Broadcasting, a Cincinnati television and radio company.
The $1.5 billion takeover in 1987 left the new company, Great American Communications, mired in debt. The company was forced to sell several key assets in a short time, including cartoon creator Hanna-Barbera Productions.
In 1992, Lindner suffered losses of $560 million at Great American Communications and $284 million at Chiquita, leading to a $77 million loss at American Financial. In 1993, Lindner filed for "prepackaged" bankruptcy to restructure debts of Great American Communications.
Carl Henry Lindner Jr. was born in Dayton in 1919 but spent much of his youth in Norwood, a blue-collar suburb of Cincinnati. As he made his wealth, he moved to Indian Hill, where most of Cincinnati's rich and famous live.
Lindner, along with brothers Robert and Richard and sister Dorothy, helped his parents in a succession of dairy businesses, first in Dayton, and then in Cincinnati. He never finished high school because he was so busy.
In 1940, Lindner's father opened one of the nation's first cash-and-carry milk and dairy stores, in Norwood. That launched what became the United Dairy Farmers convenience store chain.
During World War II, with his father's health failing and his brothers being called into military service, Lindner began to direct UDF. By the mid-1960s, when Lindner left UDF to Robert's direction, the chain had more than 100 stores. That number has since more than doubled.
Lindner founded the cornerstone of his financial empire, American Financial Corp. (later American Financial Group), in 1959. From 1961 until the company went private in 1980, American Financial's portfolio made more than 60 times its original investment as Lindner diversified into banks, insurance and assorted industries.
Lindner had three sons with his second wife, Edyth Bailey: Carl H. Lindner III, 58, president of Great American Insurance Co.; S. Craig Lindner, 56, president of American Annuity Group and senior executive vice president of American Money Management; and Keith Lindner, 52, a former official at Chiquita.
∼LINDNER, CARL HENRY JR.
Carl Henry Lindner Jr, of Indian Hill (Cincinnati) died on Monday, 17 October 2011. Carl was born on 22 April 1919 in Dayton, Ohio. Carl Henry Lindner Jr. was the firstborn of a modest dairyman and his wife, Clara.
Lindner quit high school to help in his father's Norwood dairy store. Along with his father, he and his brothers Robert and Richard, and sister Dorothy, built it into United Dairy Farmers, a chain of dairy and convenience stores.
When the family founded what now is UDF on Montgomery Road in Norwood in 1940, the first day's sales amounted to $8.28.
Lindner often talked about the modest surroundings of his childhood, noting more than once that he picked up dates in an ice-cream truck.
Robert Lindner's family eventually took control of UDF, and Richard Lindner became sole owner of the Thriftway supermarket chain before selling it to Winn-Dixie Stores.
Lindner married the former Ruth Wiggeringloh of Norwood in 1942. They divorced seven years later with no children. He then married the former Edyth Bailey in 1951, and they have three sons who all went into the family business: Carl III, Craig and Keith.
Lindner cautiously entered the savings-and-loan and insurance business, founding his flagship company American Financial Corp. in 1959. In the early 1970s the company gained control of Great American Insurance, which would become its chief operating business.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the company bought and sold companies in a variety of industries. Lindner took the company private in 1981 and released little financial information to the public, but in 1995 the company sold stock to public shareholders under the new umbrella of American Financial Group Inc.
In 2003, Keith Lindner left American Financial to concentrate on the family's charitable pursuits. In 2004 Carl and Craig Lindner were named co-CEOs of the company while Carl Lindner Jr. remained chairman.
Lindner was a conservative icon, lobbying against Robert Mapplethorpe's 1990 exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center here and funding the Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy.
But he was pragmatic as well, contributing more than $1 million to Democratic President Bill Clinton during Chiquita Brands' battle over European banana quotas. He was well known as one of the biggest givers in the country to both political parties.
From humble beginnings running his father's dairy store in Norwood, Carl Henry Lindner Jr. grew into a billionaire, a friend of U.S. presidents and Greater Cincinnati's most successful entrepreneur.
The former Reds owner never shed the fierce competitiveness and loyalty that made him a hometown icon.
His influence ran to every corner of Greater Cincinnati. The high-school dropout bought and sold Kings Island, the Reds, Provident Bank and the Enquirer. His name is on buildings from the University of Cincinnati's business school to the tennis center at Lunken Playfield.
But it was the banking and insurance business that made him a billionaire. At his death, his American Financial Group Inc. controlled assets of nearly $32 billion and he was routinely listed as one of the richest men in America.
Ever the optimist, Lindner often carried an inch-thick stack of cards with motivational sayings - one was "Only in America! Gee, am I lucky!" - that he handed out to anyone he would meet.
He was a teetotaler, physically unimposing yet with a prominent shock of white hair and a penchant for wearing flashy neckties.
Even to his closest friends and colleagues, he was soft-spoken and rarely confrontational. Yet some business partners complained about unfair treatment and he flashed a harsh temper when confronting reporters who wrote what he perceived as unfriendly stories or criticism of his business dealings.
A devout Baptist and a longtime member of Kenwood Baptist Church, Lindner used his wealth and influence behind the scenes to become Greater Cincinnati's largest benefactor and economic development force. At the height of his personal giving he contributed millions of dollars a year to charitable causes, and brought thousands of high-paying jobs to downtown Cincinnati.
His companies brought thousands of employees to the region, and the annual Christmas party that he threw at Music Hall attracted some of the nation's biggest acts, including Bill Cosby and Frank Sinatra.
At the same time, Lindner thought of himself as an outsider, building his business career outside of Cincinnati's old-money elite. He was never a member of many of the most exclusive business and country clubs and his bar-the-doors business style, starting with a hostile takeover of Provident Bank in the mid-1960s, was out of place in always polite Cincinnati.
Perhaps the most public role of his career was his ownership of the Cincinnati Reds from 1999 to 2005. Lindner owned a minority stake both before and after that period but was the Reds' CEO for six seasons, and each of those years the team lost more games than it won.
He approved the trade for Ken Griffey Jr. in 2000, even sending his private jet to bring Griffey to Cincinnati and then personally driving the hometown star back to Cinergy Field from Lunken Airport in his Rolls-Royce.
But as the Reds' losses mounted, Lindner never spoke publicly to fans and privately bristled at talk-radio criticism.
That period ended in late 2005 when Lindner sold a controlling stake in the Reds to a group headed by Bob Castellini.
Shy and scornful of reporters, Lindner nevertheless became a focus of media attention because of his substantial wealth and his far-flung business dealings.
The controversies included millions of dollars in political contributions as his Chiquita Brands International Inc. was waging a trade war with European countries, a bevy of lawsuits and federal charges over business deals that benefited Lindner and his company more than other shareholders, and a high-profile battle with the Enquirer in 1998 over a series of critical stories on Chiquita.
Lindner built a national reputation in the 1980s as a high-risk trader, becoming a business partner of symbols of the decade's excess such as junk-bond king Michael Milken and Cincinnati's own Charles Keating.
He was the classic "value investor," buying properties few other investors wanted and waiting years, or even decades, to reap the benefits.
That gave him a portfolio including the old Penn Central railroad, Circle K convenience stores and New York City landmark Grand Central Station.
But Lindner spent the two decades before his death shedding assets that didn't deal with insurance and transferring others to his three sons. That left American Financial as mostly an insurance and financial services company.
He lost his stake in Chiquita in 2002 when that company emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In 2004, Lindner, his family and American Financial reaped nearly $1 billion in stock when they sold Cincinnati's Provident Financial Group Inc. to Cleveland-based National City Corp.
The moves consolidated the business around safer insurance businesses. Lindner also transferred tens of millions of dollars to his three sons and their families, solidifying for generations a wealth that he never enjoyed growing up.
Cincinnati financier Carl Lindner Jr., who used his experience running the family dairy store to build a business empire whose reach included baseball, banks and bananas, has died. He was 92.
He died Monday night after being taken gravely ill to a hospital that morning, said a person close to the family who was not authorized to speak until a statement had been issued.
Lindner became controlling partner and chief executive officer of the Cincinnati Reds in a 1999 deal that ended Marge Schott's rocky 15-year reign as owner. In contrast to her grandstanding, Lindner stayed mostly in the background — save for a lasting memory in 2000 when he picked up Ken Griffey Jr. at the airport in his Rolls-Royce following the blockbuster trade.
Lindner was chairman of Cincinnati-based American Financial Group, a publicly traded financial holding company that had more than $17 billion in assets. In 2009, Forbes magazine estimated Lindner's personal wealth at $1.75 billion, placing him among the 400 richest Americans.
Lindner ruled over a complex maze of corporations with nearly 70,000 employees worldwide.
American Financial Group owned, or held substantial investments in, Charter Co., marketer of fuel to electric utilities; Chiquita Brands International Inc., one of the world's largest food producers, and Great American Insurance Co.
His financial support for the University of Cincinnati, which named its business administration building after him, and various charities earned him a reputation as a philanthropist.
Tributes from current and former business school students poured onto Twitter early Tuesday. They thanked Lindner for championing the city and the university and sharing his wealth with them.
"He's got to be one of the most generous guys in Cincinnati," friend Richard Farmer, chairman of Cincinnati uniform maker Cintas Corp., said in 1993. "I don't know of any positive thing that's happened in Cincinnati that Carl has not been a part of."
In the business world, some critics considered him a ruthless takeover artist. He made millions in the 1970s and 1980s by investing, then retreating, from companies.
An alleged attempt by Lindner to take over Gannett Co. prompted former chairman Al Neuharth to call him a "shark in sheep's clothing."
Lindner made a name for himself by becoming one of Michael Milken's earliest and most prominent junk-bond players. But he also showed his investment smarts by predicting a decline in the junk-bond market in the late 1980s.
"Of course, Carl was always a couple years ahead of the pack," said James Dahl, a former bond seller for Milken.
Lindner had a reputation for working long hours in pursuit of the next great deal.
"I'm working over 80 hours a week and have to keep on track," he once told areporter in explaining why he usually refused interview requests. Even in his later years, he showed no signs of slowing down.
He was publicity-shy, yet he held a fundraiser for presidential candidate George H.W. Bush at his home in 1988. He also played host to Bush and Francois Mitterrand, at the time the president of France, at his vacation home in Ocean Reef, Fla., later that month.
Lindner paid his staff handsomely and threw lavish annual parties for them. At his 70th birthday party, Frank Sinatra entertained.
Lindner's fortunes began to slide in the late 1980s with the acquisition of Taft Broadcasting, a Cincinnati television and radio company.
The $1.5 billion takeover in 1987 left the new company, Great American Communications, mired in debt. The company was forced to sell several key assets in a short time, including cartoon creator Hanna-Barbera Productions.
In 1992, Lindner suffered losses of $560 million at Great American Communications and $284 million at Chiquita, leading to a $77 million loss at American Financial. In 1993, Lindner filed for "prepackaged" bankruptcy to restructure debts of Great American Communications.
Carl Henry Lindner Jr. was born in Dayton in 1919 but spent much of his youth in Norwood, a blue-collar suburb of Cincinnati. As he made his wealth, he moved to Indian Hill, where most of Cincinnati's rich and famous live.
Lindner, along with brothers Robert and Richard and sister Dorothy, helped his parents in a succession of dairy businesses, first in Dayton, and then in Cincinnati. He never finished high school because he was so busy.
In 1940, Lindner's father opened one of the nation's first cash-and-carry milk and dairy stores, in Norwood. That launched what became the United Dairy Farmers convenience store chain.
During World War II, with his father's health failing and his brothers being called into military service, Lindner began to direct UDF. By the mid-1960s, when Lindner left UDF to Robert's direction, the chain had more than 100 stores. That number has since more than doubled.
Lindner founded the cornerstone of his financial empire, American Financial Corp. (later American Financial Group), in 1959. From 1961 until the company went private in 1980, American Financial's portfolio made more than 60 times its original investment as Lindner diversified into banks, insurance and assorted industries.
Lindner had three sons with his second wife, Edyth Bailey: Carl H. Lindner III, 58, president of Great American Insurance Co.; S. Craig Lindner, 56, president of American Annuity Group and senior executive vice president of American Money Management; and Keith Lindner, 52, a former official at Chiquita.
∼LINDNER, CARL HENRY JR.
Carl Henry Lindner Jr, of Indian Hill (Cincinnati) died on Monday, 17 October 2011. Carl was born on 22 April 1919 in Dayton, Ohio. Carl Henry Lindner Jr. was the firstborn of a modest dairyman and his wife, Clara.
Lindner quit high school to help in his father's Norwood dairy store. Along with his father, he and his brothers Robert and Richard, and sister Dorothy, built it into United Dairy Farmers, a chain of dairy and convenience stores.
When the family founded what now is UDF on Montgomery Road in Norwood in 1940, the first day's sales amounted to $8.28.
Lindner often talked about the modest surroundings of his childhood, noting more than once that he picked up dates in an ice-cream truck.
Robert Lindner's family eventually took control of UDF, and Richard Lindner became sole owner of the Thriftway supermarket chain before selling it to Winn-Dixie Stores.
Lindner married the former Ruth Wiggeringloh of Norwood in 1942. They divorced seven years later with no children. He then married the former Edyth Bailey in 1951, and they have three sons who all went into the family business: Carl III, Craig and Keith.
Lindner cautiously entered the savings-and-loan and insurance business, founding his flagship company American Financial Corp. in 1959. In the early 1970s the company gained control of Great American Insurance, which would become its chief operating business.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the company bought and sold companies in a variety of industries. Lindner took the company private in 1981 and released little financial information to the public, but in 1995 the company sold stock to public shareholders under the new umbrella of American Financial Group Inc.
In 2003, Keith Lindner left American Financial to concentrate on the family's charitable pursuits. In 2004 Carl and Craig Lindner were named co-CEOs of the company while Carl Lindner Jr. remained chairman.
Lindner was a conservative icon, lobbying against Robert Mapplethorpe's 1990 exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center here and funding the Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy.
But he was pragmatic as well, contributing more than $1 million to Democratic President Bill Clinton during Chiquita Brands' battle over European banana quotas. He was well known as one of the biggest givers in the country to both political parties.
From humble beginnings running his father's dairy store in Norwood, Carl Henry Lindner Jr. grew into a billionaire, a friend of U.S. presidents and Greater Cincinnati's most successful entrepreneur.
The former Reds owner never shed the fierce competitiveness and loyalty that made him a hometown icon.
His influence ran to every corner of Greater Cincinnati. The high-school dropout bought and sold Kings Island, the Reds, Provident Bank and the Enquirer. His name is on buildings from the University of Cincinnati's business school to the tennis center at Lunken Playfield.
But it was the banking and insurance business that made him a billionaire. At his death, his American Financial Group Inc. controlled assets of nearly $32 billion and he was routinely listed as one of the richest men in America.
Ever the optimist, Lindner often carried an inch-thick stack of cards with motivational sayings - one was "Only in America! Gee, am I lucky!" - that he handed out to anyone he would meet.
He was a teetotaler, physically unimposing yet with a prominent shock of white hair and a penchant for wearing flashy neckties.
Even to his closest friends and colleagues, he was soft-spoken and rarely confrontational. Yet some business partners complained about unfair treatment and he flashed a harsh temper when confronting reporters who wrote what he perceived as unfriendly stories or criticism of his business dealings.
A devout Baptist and a longtime member of Kenwood Baptist Church, Lindner used his wealth and influence behind the scenes to become Greater Cincinnati's largest benefactor and economic development force. At the height of his personal giving he contributed millions of dollars a year to charitable causes, and brought thousands of high-paying jobs to downtown Cincinnati.
His companies brought thousands of employees to the region, and the annual Christmas party that he threw at Music Hall attracted some of the nation's biggest acts, including Bill Cosby and Frank Sinatra.
At the same time, Lindner thought of himself as an outsider, building his business career outside of Cincinnati's old-money elite. He was never a member of many of the most exclusive business and country clubs and his bar-the-doors business style, starting with a hostile takeover of Provident Bank in the mid-1960s, was out of place in always polite Cincinnati.
Perhaps the most public role of his career was his ownership of the Cincinnati Reds from 1999 to 2005. Lindner owned a minority stake both before and after that period but was the Reds' CEO for six seasons, and each of those years the team lost more games than it won.
He approved the trade for Ken Griffey Jr. in 2000, even sending his private jet to bring Griffey to Cincinnati and then personally driving the hometown star back to Cinergy Field from Lunken Airport in his Rolls-Royce.
But as the Reds' losses mounted, Lindner never spoke publicly to fans and privately bristled at talk-radio criticism.
That period ended in late 2005 when Lindner sold a controlling stake in the Reds to a group headed by Bob Castellini.
Shy and scornful of reporters, Lindner nevertheless became a focus of media attention because of his substantial wealth and his far-flung business dealings.
The controversies included millions of dollars in political contributions as his Chiquita Brands International Inc. was waging a trade war with European countries, a bevy of lawsuits and federal charges over business deals that benefited Lindner and his company more than other shareholders, and a high-profile battle with the Enquirer in 1998 over a series of critical stories on Chiquita.
Lindner built a national reputation in the 1980s as a high-risk trader, becoming a business partner of symbols of the decade's excess such as junk-bond king Michael Milken and Cincinnati's own Charles Keating.
He was the classic "value investor," buying properties few other investors wanted and waiting years, or even decades, to reap the benefits.
That gave him a portfolio including the old Penn Central railroad, Circle K convenience stores and New York City landmark Grand Central Station.
But Lindner spent the two decades before his death shedding assets that didn't deal with insurance and transferring others to his three sons. That left American Financial as mostly an insurance and financial services company.
He lost his stake in Chiquita in 2002 when that company emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In 2004, Lindner, his family and American Financial reaped nearly $1 billion in stock when they sold Cincinnati's Provident Financial Group Inc. to Cleveland-based National City Corp.
The moves consolidated the business around safer insurance businesses. Lindner also transferred tens of millions of dollars to his three sons and their families, solidifying for generations a wealth that he never enjoyed growing up.
He died Monday night after being taken gravely ill to a hospital that morning, said a person close to the family who was not authorized to speak until a statement had been issued.
Lindner became controlling partner and chief executive officer of the Cincinnati Reds in a 1999 deal that ended Marge Schott's rocky 15-year reign as owner. In contrast to her grandstanding, Lindner stayed mostly in the background — save for a lasting memory in 2000 when he picked up Ken Griffey Jr. at the airport in his Rolls-Royce following the blockbuster trade.
Lindner was chairman of Cincinnati-based American Financial Group, a publicly traded financial holding company that had more than $17 billion in assets. In 2009, Forbes magazine estimated Lindner's personal wealth at $1.75 billion, placing him among the 400 richest Americans.
Lindner ruled over a complex maze of corporations with nearly 70,000 employees worldwide.
American Financial Group owned, or held substantial investments in, Charter Co., marketer of fuel to electric utilities; Chiquita Brands International Inc., one of the world's largest food producers, and Great American Insurance Co.
His financial support for the University of Cincinnati, which named its business administration building after him, and various charities earned him a reputation as a philanthropist.
Tributes from current and former business school students poured onto Twitter early Tuesday. They thanked Lindner for championing the city and the university and sharing his wealth with them.
"He's got to be one of the most generous guys in Cincinnati," friend Richard Farmer, chairman of Cincinnati uniform maker Cintas Corp., said in 1993. "I don't know of any positive thing that's happened in Cincinnati that Carl has not been a part of."
In the business world, some critics considered him a ruthless takeover artist. He made millions in the 1970s and 1980s by investing, then retreating, from companies.
An alleged attempt by Lindner to take over Gannett Co. prompted former chairman Al Neuharth to call him a "shark in sheep's clothing."
Lindner made a name for himself by becoming one of Michael Milken's earliest and most prominent junk-bond players. But he also showed his investment smarts by predicting a decline in the junk-bond market in the late 1980s.
"Of course, Carl was always a couple years ahead of the pack," said James Dahl, a former bond seller for Milken.
Lindner had a reputation for working long hours in pursuit of the next great deal.
"I'm working over 80 hours a week and have to keep on track," he once told areporter in explaining why he usually refused interview requests. Even in his later years, he showed no signs of slowing down.
He was publicity-shy, yet he held a fundraiser for presidential candidate George H.W. Bush at his home in 1988. He also played host to Bush and Francois Mitterrand, at the time the president of France, at his vacation home in Ocean Reef, Fla., later that month.
Lindner paid his staff handsomely and threw lavish annual parties for them. At his 70th birthday party, Frank Sinatra entertained.
Lindner's fortunes began to slide in the late 1980s with the acquisition of Taft Broadcasting, a Cincinnati television and radio company.
The $1.5 billion takeover in 1987 left the new company, Great American Communications, mired in debt. The company was forced to sell several key assets in a short time, including cartoon creator Hanna-Barbera Productions.
In 1992, Lindner suffered losses of $560 million at Great American Communications and $284 million at Chiquita, leading to a $77 million loss at American Financial. In 1993, Lindner filed for "prepackaged" bankruptcy to restructure debts of Great American Communications.
Carl Henry Lindner Jr. was born in Dayton in 1919 but spent much of his youth in Norwood, a blue-collar suburb of Cincinnati. As he made his wealth, he moved to Indian Hill, where most of Cincinnati's rich and famous live.
Lindner, along with brothers Robert and Richard and sister Dorothy, helped his parents in a succession of dairy businesses, first in Dayton, and then in Cincinnati. He never finished high school because he was so busy.
In 1940, Lindner's father opened one of the nation's first cash-and-carry milk and dairy stores, in Norwood. That launched what became the United Dairy Farmers convenience store chain.
During World War II, with his father's health failing and his brothers being called into military service, Lindner began to direct UDF. By the mid-1960s, when Lindner left UDF to Robert's direction, the chain had more than 100 stores. That number has since more than doubled.
Lindner founded the cornerstone of his financial empire, American Financial Corp. (later American Financial Group), in 1959. From 1961 until the company went private in 1980, American Financial's portfolio made more than 60 times its original investment as Lindner diversified into banks, insurance and assorted industries.
Lindner had three sons with his second wife, Edyth Bailey: Carl H. Lindner III, 58, president of Great American Insurance Co.; S. Craig Lindner, 56, president of American Annuity Group and senior executive vice president of American Money Management; and Keith Lindner, 52, a former official at Chiquita.
∼LINDNER, CARL HENRY JR.
Carl Henry Lindner Jr, of Indian Hill (Cincinnati) died on Monday, 17 October 2011. Carl was born on 22 April 1919 in Dayton, Ohio. Carl Henry Lindner Jr. was the firstborn of a modest dairyman and his wife, Clara.
Lindner quit high school to help in his father's Norwood dairy store. Along with his father, he and his brothers Robert and Richard, and sister Dorothy, built it into United Dairy Farmers, a chain of dairy and convenience stores.
When the family founded what now is UDF on Montgomery Road in Norwood in 1940, the first day's sales amounted to $8.28.
Lindner often talked about the modest surroundings of his childhood, noting more than once that he picked up dates in an ice-cream truck.
Robert Lindner's family eventually took control of UDF, and Richard Lindner became sole owner of the Thriftway supermarket chain before selling it to Winn-Dixie Stores.
Lindner married the former Ruth Wiggeringloh of Norwood in 1942. They divorced seven years later with no children. He then married the former Edyth Bailey in 1951, and they have three sons who all went into the family business: Carl III, Craig and Keith.
Lindner cautiously entered the savings-and-loan and insurance business, founding his flagship company American Financial Corp. in 1959. In the early 1970s the company gained control of Great American Insurance, which would become its chief operating business.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s the company bought and sold companies in a variety of industries. Lindner took the company private in 1981 and released little financial information to the public, but in 1995 the company sold stock to public shareholders under the new umbrella of American Financial Group Inc.
In 2003, Keith Lindner left American Financial to concentrate on the family's charitable pursuits. In 2004 Carl and Craig Lindner were named co-CEOs of the company while Carl Lindner Jr. remained chairman.
Lindner was a conservative icon, lobbying against Robert Mapplethorpe's 1990 exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Center here and funding the Cincinnati Hills Christian Academy.
But he was pragmatic as well, contributing more than $1 million to Democratic President Bill Clinton during Chiquita Brands' battle over European banana quotas. He was well known as one of the biggest givers in the country to both political parties.
From humble beginnings running his father's dairy store in Norwood, Carl Henry Lindner Jr. grew into a billionaire, a friend of U.S. presidents and Greater Cincinnati's most successful entrepreneur.
The former Reds owner never shed the fierce competitiveness and loyalty that made him a hometown icon.
His influence ran to every corner of Greater Cincinnati. The high-school dropout bought and sold Kings Island, the Reds, Provident Bank and the Enquirer. His name is on buildings from the University of Cincinnati's business school to the tennis center at Lunken Playfield.
But it was the banking and insurance business that made him a billionaire. At his death, his American Financial Group Inc. controlled assets of nearly $32 billion and he was routinely listed as one of the richest men in America.
Ever the optimist, Lindner often carried an inch-thick stack of cards with motivational sayings - one was "Only in America! Gee, am I lucky!" - that he handed out to anyone he would meet.
He was a teetotaler, physically unimposing yet with a prominent shock of white hair and a penchant for wearing flashy neckties.
Even to his closest friends and colleagues, he was soft-spoken and rarely confrontational. Yet some business partners complained about unfair treatment and he flashed a harsh temper when confronting reporters who wrote what he perceived as unfriendly stories or criticism of his business dealings.
A devout Baptist and a longtime member of Kenwood Baptist Church, Lindner used his wealth and influence behind the scenes to become Greater Cincinnati's largest benefactor and economic development force. At the height of his personal giving he contributed millions of dollars a year to charitable causes, and brought thousands of high-paying jobs to downtown Cincinnati.
His companies brought thousands of employees to the region, and the annual Christmas party that he threw at Music Hall attracted some of the nation's biggest acts, including Bill Cosby and Frank Sinatra.
At the same time, Lindner thought of himself as an outsider, building his business career outside of Cincinnati's old-money elite. He was never a member of many of the most exclusive business and country clubs and his bar-the-doors business style, starting with a hostile takeover of Provident Bank in the mid-1960s, was out of place in always polite Cincinnati.
Perhaps the most public role of his career was his ownership of the Cincinnati Reds from 1999 to 2005. Lindner owned a minority stake both before and after that period but was the Reds' CEO for six seasons, and each of those years the team lost more games than it won.
He approved the trade for Ken Griffey Jr. in 2000, even sending his private jet to bring Griffey to Cincinnati and then personally driving the hometown star back to Cinergy Field from Lunken Airport in his Rolls-Royce.
But as the Reds' losses mounted, Lindner never spoke publicly to fans and privately bristled at talk-radio criticism.
That period ended in late 2005 when Lindner sold a controlling stake in the Reds to a group headed by Bob Castellini.
Shy and scornful of reporters, Lindner nevertheless became a focus of media attention because of his substantial wealth and his far-flung business dealings.
The controversies included millions of dollars in political contributions as his Chiquita Brands International Inc. was waging a trade war with European countries, a bevy of lawsuits and federal charges over business deals that benefited Lindner and his company more than other shareholders, and a high-profile battle with the Enquirer in 1998 over a series of critical stories on Chiquita.
Lindner built a national reputation in the 1980s as a high-risk trader, becoming a business partner of symbols of the decade's excess such as junk-bond king Michael Milken and Cincinnati's own Charles Keating.
He was the classic "value investor," buying properties few other investors wanted and waiting years, or even decades, to reap the benefits.
That gave him a portfolio including the old Penn Central railroad, Circle K convenience stores and New York City landmark Grand Central Station.
But Lindner spent the two decades before his death shedding assets that didn't deal with insurance and transferring others to his three sons. That left American Financial as mostly an insurance and financial services company.
He lost his stake in Chiquita in 2002 when that company emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy. In 2004, Lindner, his family and American Financial reaped nearly $1 billion in stock when they sold Cincinnati's Provident Financial Group Inc. to Cleveland-based National City Corp.
The moves consolidated the business around safer insurance businesses. Lindner also transferred tens of millions of dollars to his three sons and their families, solidifying for generations a wealth that he never enjoyed growing up.
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