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~The Hawaii Nature Center inMakikiis now named for the Weinber~j
HARRY WEINBERG AMASSED A FORTUNE IN LOCAL REAL ESTATE AND W~ØRE1~iôWNED
for.i~eing a financially savvy guy, who c~.joled and exas perated the top executives of comp~n~es~he invested in. i~i~iever, what most surprised Kit Si~ñith, who covered,’~’ him for decades as a Honolulu Advertiser business re porter, ~.vas his,di~dain for the trappings of wealth. “By no means your~ averagE billionaire,” Smith says. ¶ Weinberg. wa~ a brilliant guy who came from the streets and didn’t. have a. formal e~i~ation’, says Walter Dods, retired CEO and chaii~an àf First Hawaiian Bank. “He always felt he could find a better way to do~things,” Dods says. ~‘He ~as v~ry controversial in his daSr and a reall~r tough guy. But..a lot of the things he said turned out to be correct. ¶ “I always tell people the irony is all the soãiety people in Hawaii pretty much disliked him at the time and today all ofthé societypeo~le in Hawaii whb run major charitable organizations go oh thefr hands and knees to the Wein b~rg~Foundationfdrdonations, ~o it~’s kind of like a full circle. I find it’prett~ humorous.” 138 JANUARY 2017
HAWAII BUSINESS
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Dods recalls when his former boss, then-First Hawaiian CEO John Bellinger, and Bobby Pfeiffer, then CEO of Alexan der .& Baldwin Inc., co-chaired a com mitte•ë in the 198 Os to raise money for a ne~ building for ~Palama Settlement. Back then, Dods says, weinberg did not give a lo~ ‘ofmone~’to the community. However, Palama Settlement served the poor and that touched Weinberg’s heart. “They kept pushing and pushing him, • and he finally screamed at the two of them, ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll give a hun dred-thousand dollars,’ which in those days was a big gift, and he said, ‘And you go around town and you tell everybody else if a Jew can give a hundred-thousand dollars, you, Amfac, and A&B, and all the major companies better do better than that.’ That was a famous quote at the time that everybody laughed about, but that was kind of Harry Weinberg style.”
ALWAYS AN ENTREPRE EUR Weinberg was a hard worker and suc cessful entrepreneur from a young age. He and his brothers worked at their fa ther’s car repair shop in Baltimore, but Harry also sold newspapers, American flags and whatever else he could to make money and provide for his family. Later, he built a transportation empire and owned bus lines in Honolulu, New
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