The Art of Giving Broadly

Oregon’s Pamplins donate quietly, but their generosity speaks volumes

As the nation commemorated its slain soldiers over Memorial Day weekend, Robert B. Pamplin, Jr., and his family were paying homage by dedicating the Civil War park they had financed in southern Virginia.

The non-profit, 363-acre park, which includes a battlefield, a 19th-century plantation home, and two high-technology Civil War museums, has received $30-million from the Pamplins, and they expect to give $30-million more to it in the future. The donation is just the latest gesture by one of the more generous — yet little-known — philanthropic families in America today. The Pamplins have given away at least $150-million and say they have helped charities raise at least $500-million.

Among the Oregon-based family’s other philanthropic acts:

* Each year, the Pamplins’ private business — R. B. Pamplin Corporation, a textile and holding company that is ranked No. 259 on Forbes magazine’s list of the wealthiest private companies — gives at least 10 per cent of its pretax profits to charities that employees help select. That far exceeds the national average for corporate giving, which was less than 1 per cent of pretax profits in 1997, according to the Conference Board. Last year, the company gave about $10-million.

* The Pamplin family, worth about $560-million, annually gives an additional $3-million or so from its personal fortune to Oregon-based charities. The family’s foundation has $26-million in assets.

* Through its Columbia Empire Farms, which raises cattle and grows hazelnuts, berries, and other products, the family supplies about $750,000 worth of food a year to a Pamplin-founded food pantry that feeds approximately 1,000 Oregonians a day.

* The family is a major supporter of higher education. Last month, the Pamplins announced a $10.8-million gift to the University of Portland, in Oregon. They have also given more than $30-million to Virginia Tech, in Blacksburg, Va., where both Robert B. Pamplin, Jr., 57, and his 87-year-old father attended college. The younger Pamplin transferred after two years at Virginia Tech to Lewis and Clark College, in Portland, to which he has given more than $13-million.

* Robert Pamplin, Jr., an avid collector of Chinese and American Indian artifacts, has lent the rarest pieces from his collection to museums such as the Portland Art Museum for exhibitions and public viewing.

The Pamplins also serve on numerous charity boards and volunteer to help other non-profit groups. From 1984 to 1987, father and son were co-chairmen of Virginia Tech’s first comprehensive capital campaign, which raised $118-million. A consultant had estimated that the university could only expect to raise $25-million, since this was the college’s first big campaign, but the Pamplins felt sure they could raise more and set the goal at $50-million.

The elder Robert Pamplin was born into a poor farming family in Virginia’s rural Dinwiddie County. He began to lift his family out of poverty in the 1930s when he took an accounting job at a lumber company that would become Georgia-Pacific. As the company grew, Mr. Pamplin worked his way up to chief executive officer, relocating his wife and son here when the company moved its headquarters.

After he retired from the company in 1976, he and his son founded the textile company, which controls 18 textile mills and a sand-and-gravel mine. They also run several other corporations, including a Christian-communications company and a burial-vault business. Father and son say they intend to leave a significant portion of their shares in the business to their family foundation when they die. But they also plan to leave large stakes to the younger Mr. Pamplin’s two daughters, who are now in their 20s.

Despite the breadth of their philanthropy and businesses, the Pamplins are not household names to most people — even here, in their hometown.

“If you took a poll of Oregonians,” says Wendy Lane, a native Oregonian whom the Pamplins recently hired to help publicize their philanthropic work, “most would not know that the Pamplins feed 1,000 people a day. They would have no idea.”

The younger Mr. Pamplin has recently been persuaded to step out publicly, in part by Bill Halamandaris, president of the Heart of America Foundation, a District of Columbia group that recruits young people who are actively involved in community service to serve as role models for their peers. Mr. Halamandaris met Mr. Pamplin through mutual friends in 1990. Mr. Pamplin expressed an interest in Mr. Halamandaris’s idea for a charity, and helped provide the money and advice needed to found the non-profit organization in 1996.

But Mr. Halamandaris pushed Mr. Pamplin to do more: “I told him that another service he could provide was that he could be a role model himself,” Mr. Halamandaris says.

The idea of serving as a role model does not necessarily come naturally to Robert B. Pamplin, Jr. While he exhibits the Southern gentility he learned as a child — insisting on opening doors for luncheon guests at his Columbia Empire Farms and pouring tea for them — he also displays a sense of reserve. As he answers questions about philanthropy, he often slips into the universal “you,” rather than using the personal “I,” and he relies heavily on veiled parables to explain himself.

On why he feels compelled to give, he says: “If you do what is right — I can’t overrestimate this, especially in philanthropy — the right thing is going to happen to you,” he says. “Like a farmer who takes a perfectly good piece of corn and throws it into the ground, but has faith that it’s going to grow and become a harvest.”

A turning point in his philanthropy came when he was 32, and a brush with skin cancer deepened his commitment to helping others. After learning that his right leg harbored a malignant melanoma, he faced surgery and five years of follow-up tests to insure that the cancer was gone.

The cancer has been in remission for more than 20 years, he says, but “being told that you have cancer is a wonderful thing that makes you recognize the vulnerability of life and not lose sight of what you need to contribute to make life important.”

He says he realized from his cancer bout that, even though his business career had been successful, his life lacked greater meaning, and he needed to come up with new notions about what success truly meant.

Success, he says, is so often connected to wealth. “But if we just followed that notion of success, we would be at a loss to explain a Mother Teresa or an Albert Schweitzer.”

While he had given money away before he became ill — inspired, in part, by his father, who regularly tithed more than 10 per cent of his income and once set up 75 trust funds for each of his poor cousins so that they could attend college — he admits his philanthropy was not always rooted in altruism.

“I had participated in a lot of fund-raising campaigns,” he says. But “you did it because it was just a another thing that you could chalk up that you completed, another thing that you could put on your resume.”

Soon after his cancer went into remission, Mr. Pamplin enrolled in a Baptist seminary program while continuing to work full time at R. B. Pamplin Corporation — and became an ordained minister in 1982. He added his doctorate in ministry studies to seven other degrees, including a doctorate in business administration and three master’s degrees (most of which he earned taking night classes).

He is not a practicing minister, but he founded the non-denominational Christ Community Church, in Newberg, Ore., in 1988. He has hired three pastors to run the church and the family’s food pantry, Christ Community Food Ministries, which is connected to the church.

The food ministry requires those who use it to contact a local charity that can help them solve the problems that led them to the food pantry. The ministry works with about 60 Oregon charities, from job-search groups to drug-counseling organizations.

Mr. Pamplin explains, “We say, ‘We will feed you, so you don’t have to worry about that need. But you have to be responsible about trying to feed yourself and trying to do something constructive with your life.’”

Unless food-recipients prove that they have been taking steps — “and we’re not very strict about what those steps are,” says Mr. Pamplin — they are cut off from receiving more food.

The desire to encourage people to take responsibility for their lives runs through much of the Pamplins’ recent philanthropy. The family has, for example, endowed a fund that annually pays $1,000 to each of 15 to 30 Pamplin Fellows, who receive college scholarships administered by Self Enhancement Inc., a Portland charity that tries to turn inner-city youngsters away from drugs and violence and toward education and work. In order to win scholarships, Pamplin Fellows must do community service and serve as mentors to others during their junior and senior years in high school.

While the younger Mr. Pamplin has been broadening the scope of his family’s philanthropy in recent years, he has also been extending its business holdings.

Besides R. B. Pamplin Corporation and Columbia Empire Farms — which sells gourmet foods for profit as well as supplying the food ministry — the family runs Pamplin Communications Corporation, which operates a Christian-bookstore chain, a family-entertainment video company, and a Christian-music recording business and broadcasting station. The Pamplins also operate or partly own Oregon Wilbert Vault Company, which makes burial vaults and caskets, and United Tile Company, a tile wholesaler.

The younger Pamplin serves as chief executive officer for all the enterprises, and chief operating officer of R. B. Pamplin Corporation, where his father holds the chief executive spot.

The scope of activity wins praise from many, but it may also be the younger Mr. Pamplin’s greatest weakness. Some say that Mr. Pamplin can be standoffish and remote — perhaps a byproduct of having delegated responsibilities to others because he is involved in so many activities.

One charity leader, who asked not to be named, said he had hoped that Mr. Pamplin would have been more of a mentor, but quickly realized that would be impossible given the philanthropist’s whirlwind of activities.

Donald Jenkins, who as chief curator at the Portland Art Museum, oversaw the museum’s current exhibition, “Glimpses of Immortality,” which is entirely made up of Mr. Pamplin’s Chinese artifacts, says he deeply admires a man who can juggle business and serious collecting. But he says he sensed a dispassionate, almost institutional approach to Mr. Pamplin’s hobby. Most art lovers, he notes, would never dream of delegating responsibility for their collection, as Mr. Pamplin has done by hiring his own private curator to oversee new purchases. “It’s a fascinating and different way of collecting,” Mr. Jenkins says. “He’s the only person I know who has collected in this way.”

Mr. Pamplin himself admits that his desire to get involved in many activities is sometimes a liability. “I think that I’m probably too driven,” he says. “That can be a flaw. You get too intense, and maybe it’s not comfortable for other people.”

He adds: “I think people are born with certain abilities. I’ve always been one to try to give encouragement to people, to help them cause things to happen.”

The Pamplin Historical Park, in Petersburg, Va., is a case in point. Mr. Pamplin says that his family decided to put $60-million into the park after A. Wilson Greene, a battlefield preservationist, approached them with the idea five years ago. Mr. Greene had learned that a Dinwiddie County battlefield, once part of a plantation owned by a Pamplin ancestor, was on the auction block — and at risk of being destroyed.

The Pamplins agreed to purchase the battlefield, along with a family home that later went up for sale.

Today, Mr. Greene is executive director of the park and reports to Mr. Pamplin about its activities. While Mr. Pamplin makes the big decisions and maintains the vision for the park — which he hopes will eventually include a travel agency and hotel, and become a one-stop tourist destination for history buffs — it is Mr. Greene and his staff who carry out the day-to-day operations.

In a moment of lightheartedness, Mr. Pamplin says of his endeavors, which range from battlefields to food pantries, from bookstores to tile companies: “It’s kind of like getting a big box of chocolate candies, and they’re all covered in tinfoil. You don’t know what’s at the center of any of them. So you bite into all of them to find out what’s in the center before you find the one you really like.”

“I’m just like that kid that’s got the box of candy, and I’ve got to bite into all of them.”