Couple’s Giving Is Rooted in Their Passion for the Great Outdoors
By nicole lewis
Contributor
March 3, 2005 | Read Time: 9 minutes
Before proposing to his wife, Leo A. Drey took her canoeing on the Jacks Fork and other scenic rivers that snake
through the Ozarks to see if she shared his passion for the outdoors. The couple’s philanthropy — as well as their 49 years of marriage — stand as testament to the answer.
Last year Leo and Kay K. Drey donated 146,000 acres — an area about the size of Chicago — of forests in the Ozarks to one of their two foundations to ensure that they would never be razed and would be open to the public for recreational activities for generations to come. The land is estimated to be worth $180-million.
When Mr. Drey (pronounced “dry”) began buying the land in 1951, he paid $4 an acre; today the land and its trees are worth an average of $1,500 an acre.
The gift is by far the largest of more than 200 the couple made in 2004, and helped place them at No. 6 on The Chronicle’s list of most generous donors.
Mr. Drey used money he inherited from his family — his father owned the Schram glass company, in St. Louis — to buy the land, which ultimately made him the largest private landowner in Missouri. Despite their wealth, the couple have lived in the same four-bedroom house in University City, a suburb of St. Louis, for their entire marriage, and their three children attended public schools. Mrs. Drey drives a nearly decade-old Ford Escort, and Mr. Drey rides a train to the office he maintains downtown.
Memories of Summer Camps
Mr. Drey says summers he spent
|
||||||||||
hiking, canoeing, and swimming at camps near his home in St. Louis and in Maine and Wisconsin sparked his love of the outdoors. While he doesn’t hike much these days, Mr. Drey, 88, stays close to nature by tending to some small trees and plants in his backyard.
In addition to last year’s land donation, the Dreys have been instrumental in helping preserve other natural areas around the state, as well as parkland in St. Louis. And they have helped start two local environmental charities, and sit on the boards of several other groups.
Through their L-A-D Foundation, which takes its name from Mr. Drey’s initials, and the Ozark Natural Resources Foundation, the Dreys’ second foundation, they distribute about $25,000 annually. The foundations, which are both in St. Louis and have a combined $1.5-million in assets, share the same board and make grants of $2,500 to $5,000 apiece to such groups as Audubon Missouri, in Columbia, and the Ozark Regional Land Trust, in Carthage, Mo.
In addition to grants their foundations distribute, the Dreys write 200 or so personal checks, usually in the range of $50 to $1,000 each, to charities each year.
“Leo says we shouldn’t give to this many groups, but neither of us can divest ourselves,” says Mrs. Drey, 71. “At the end of the year, Leo adds up the contributions on an adding machine. He has taken that piece of paper, held out his arm straight, and it goes down to the floor and keeps on going.”
While the couple does give to some prominent organizations, such as the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, they prefer groups that do not draw wide support, such as the Government Accountability Project, a government and business watchdog group in Washington.
Mrs. Drey says she is drawn to “controversial things,” such as the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, an antinuclear energy group in Washington, where she is a board member. Mrs. Drey, who worked briefly at a local television station before her marriage, often rises at 6 a.m. to write pamphlets and speeches on the hazards of nuclear energy or do other volunteer work aimed at reducing nuclear waste.
She also is eager to help charities that fight discrimination, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, in part because she was one of the few Jewish children in her St. Louis neighborhood. She still recalls the day children threw snowballs at her because they believed she was different.
Since Mrs. Drey found herself in a position to help others, she says, she has felt a strong obligation to make contributions that help others. “You might call me a Marxist: ‘To each according to his needs and from each according to his ability,’” she says.
Mr. Drey supports many environmental preservation charities, including the Open Space Council for the St. Louis Region, a group that works to preserve land around St. Louis, where he is a trustee emeritus. “I’m in a fortunate position to do what I want to do. My interests and priorities haven’t changed much throughout the years,” he says. “There are groups that meet needs in the community, and I continue to support them.” The Dreys declined to name their worth or discuss how much of their money they plan to eventually give away.
26 Acres of Parkland
Born and bred in St. Louis, the Dreys have shown a long-term commitment to charities there.
They have been the largest donor to the Missouri Coalition for the Environment, an advocacy group the couple helped start 36 years ago to enforce environmental-protection laws and lobby on other environmental matters.
More recently, the couple in 1998 helped found the Green Center, a charity that maintains 26 acres of parkland in their neighborhood and runs educational programs there.
“There are some children who don’t even know the word ‘hike,’” says Mrs. Drey, who is on the group’s board. “We bring them in and introduce them to the outdoors.”
Mrs. Drey also serves on the board of the Great Rivers Environmental Law Center, in St. Louis. Mr. Drey is on the board of the Missouri Parks Association, in Columbia.
Pushing a New Approach
With their largest donation, the Ozark land called Pioneer Forest, the Dreys hope to provide a model to other conservationists. While the name Pioneer Forest comes from the company that used to own part of the land, Pioneer Cooperage Company, Mr. Drey says it has added meaning because he is “trying to pioneer proper land management.”
The forest earns about $100,000 a year — money that will now be funneled into the L-A-D Foundation — through a practice known as uneven-aged management, in which only the poorest quality trees are harvested in a careful way that does the least damage to surrounding vegetation and soil. Sawmills that win contracts agree to cut down only the trees marked by forest employees.
No area of the forest is ever entirely denuded, which preserves the habitat of local wildlife, as well as provides the public with areas in which to hunt, fish, hike, and ride horseback.The felling of select trees also makes room for sunlight to reach younger trees and help them grow, ensuring the continuity of the forest.
“Mr. Drey feels the forest should be run like a business and make a profit,” says Clinton E. Trammel, who has been managing Pioneer Forest since 1970. “At the same time we don’t want to destroy the forest in the process of doing that. We have to protect a lot of things that make the forest a real place.”
Researchers from local universities have studied the forest’s migrant birds, insects, and arthropods, as well as its management system, which was unusual when Mr. Drey started buying land.
Local environmental groups, many of which count the Dreys as members, like the way the forest is managed, and John A. Karel, the L-A-D Foundation’s president, reports no complaints from activists pushing for the land to be completely left alone.
However, at least one environmental charity outside the state would halt the commerce in the forest. “My choice would be to not continue the logging and try to allow some of these natural processes that create forest diversity to function and play their natural role,” says Bryan Bird, the forest program coordinator at Forest Guardians, in Santa Fe, N.M.
However, Mr. Karel says that “unless as a society we decide we are going to do without wood products,” the management of Pioneer Forest stands as a way to simultaneously harvest trees and protect the land’s integrity.
By contrast, other Ozark landowners allow companies to raze all the trees on their property for profit, destroying parts of the forest for years to come.
“The timber industry is a renewal industry if you do it right, and on Pioneer Forest, they do it right,” says Roy Hengerson, a member of the executive committee of the Sierra Club’s Ozark Chapter, in Columbia, Mo. “If we can hold that out as an example, it is more valuable to keep it that way than to keep it as a total wilderness.”
On other tracts of land owned by the L-A-D Foundation, however, no logging occurs.
The foundation owns about 3,500 such acres populated with centuries-old white oak, natural bridges, glades, a mill, and Indian carvings on sandstone-bluff cave walls. The foundation leases most of these areas for $1 a year to the Missouri Department of Conservation and the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, which manage them as state parks or historic areas.
With the transfer of Pioneer Forest to the foundation, the Dreys have greatly reduced their personal land ownership. “I am down to the house and lot I am living in,” says Mr. Drey.
Property-Tax Puzzle
Mr. Karel says the Dreys spent years planning for the $180-million land gift before signing the papers last year. A key consideration was to find a way not to harm the counties in which the land resides, since so many acres would become tax-exempt once owned by the foundation.
The solution: The foundation will continue to pay the same sum it paid in taxes to each county in which the forest grows. For example, in Shannon County, where the foundation owns the most land — 93,218 acres — the county will receive $44,840.
“We made an early decision that this transition was not going to come at the expense of these counties and their funding,” says Mr. Karel. “Many have strained resources to begin with.”
Mr. Drey also spent the past several years ensuring that the L-A-D Foundation’s 12-member board learned about land management by giving them an advisory role in the forest’s operations. For example, last year the board met with members of the Missouri Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism to discuss how to limit the public’s access to a cave where endangered bats live.
While he has preferred until now to keep direct control over the land, Mr. Drey, who is in good health, recognizes that he will not be able to preserve the land forever on his own. “No one is immortal,” he says.
