Pubdate: Fri, 28 Jun 2013
Source: Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH)
Copyright: 2013 The Plain Dealer
Contact: http://www.cleveland.com/plaindealer/letter-to-editor/
Website: http://www.cleveland.com/plaindealer/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/342
Note: priority given to local letter writers
Author: Steven Litt, The Plain Dealer
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?168 (Lewis, Peter)

INSURANCE EXECUTIVE PETER B. LEWIS DIES AT AGE 80

Peter B. Lewis, the brash, iconoclastic and philanthropically 
generous chairman of Progressive Corp. died Saturday at his home in 
Coconut Grove, Fla.

Jennifer Frutchy, Lewis's philanthropic adviser, said Lewis died 
between 3 and 4 p.m., apparently of natural causes. He was 80.

During a career that lasted more than half a century, Lewis grew 
Mayfield-based Progressive Corp. from a tiny 100-person firm to the 
fourth-largest auto insurance company in the U.S., with $17 billion 
in premiums and 26,000 employees nationwide.

He was an important patron of architect Frank Gehry, whom he 
recommended to design the Peter B. Lewis Building at Case Western 
Reserve University.

Glenn Renwick, whom Lewis identified in 1999 as his successor at 
Progressive, said Saturday night, "I'm devastated."

"He [Lewis] was a huge part of my life," Renwick said. "I don't think 
there are any words that can necessarily sum that up. Frankly, I got 
to follow in his footsteps, and they were big footsteps, and he 
encouraged me to do as well as I could."

Renwick said that Lewis spent the morning Saturday receiving a visit 
from his grandchildren, who were visiting before celebrating Thanksgiving.

"He had a really good day and was preparing to go out for the 
evening," Renwick said. "It was quite sudden and unexpected."

Gehry, speaking by phone Saturday night from Los Angeles, said that 
losing Lewis was like losing a brother.

"He was a risk-taker, he was open-minded, generous, quixotic, fun to 
be with - all of those things," Gehry said. "He was sort of an icon 
for the world, for my world anyway."

A funeral is being planned for Tuesday in Cleveland, but details are 
not yet settled, Frutchy said.

Lewis is survived by Rosel and by his brother, Daniel Lewis, of 
Coconut Grove; daughter Ivy Lewis, of Princeton, N.J.; sons Adam 
Joseph Lewis, of Aspen, Col. and Jonathan Lewis of Coconut Grove; his 
ex-wife, Toby Devan Lewis; and five grandchildren.

Lewis was one of the most successful business leaders in postwar 
Cleveland, with a personal fortune estimated at $1.6 billion in 2005 
by Forbes magazine. At the time of his death, Lewis' net worth 
hovered around $1 billion, Frutchy said. Over his lifetime, he 
donated roughly $500 million to various causes, she said.

Lewis built a significant art collection, bought homes in Aspen, 
Colorado and New York, and cruised the world's oceans aboard a 
255-foot motor yacht. He named the boat "Lone Ranger" after the 
fictional TV hero he saw as a gun-slinging alter ego.

Lewis also used his money to promote causes ranging from the 
legalization of marijuana and the unsuccessful 2004 presidential 
candidacy of then Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, now the U.S. 
secretary of state.

Lewis supported the American Civil Liberties Union and helped launch 
Media Matters, the Center for American Progress, Third Way, Citizens 
for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington and other causes he 
viewed as progressive.

Lewis donated several million dollars to the recent successful 
marijuana legalization campaign in Washington state, making him the 
largest individual supporter of the effort, said lawyer Graham Boyd 
of Santa Cruz, Calif., Lewis's political strategist. Lewis also 
backed the Colorado legalization effort.

"The role that Peter has played in marijuana reform is that of 
leading this movement to the very brink of success," Boyd said 
Saturday night. "We've won two important states and I think just in 
the very near future there's going to be a cascade of victories that 
will be attributable to him and I do wish he had lived to see that success."

Lewis made no secret of his enjoyment of pot. Known for his 
flamboyant, freewheeling lifestyle, he was profiled in 1995 by 
Fortune magazine under the headline, "Sex, Reefer and Auto Insurance?"

Lewis played a key role in the career of Gehry, the world famous Los 
Angeles architect. By spending more than $5 million over a dozen 
years on plans for a house by Gehry that he decided not to build, 
Lewis bankrolled experiments with computer technology that enabled 
Gehry to design the widely acclaimed Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

Lewis donated $77 million to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the 
parent of the Bilbao branch, and served as chairman of the museum's 
board of trustees from 1998 to 2005, until highly public falling out 
with the museum's director, Thomas Krens, over the museum's financial 
management. Krens survived the confrontation and continued to expand 
the Guggenheim as a global franchise with branches around the world. 
Lewis held honorary degrees from Case Western Reserve University and 
the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Despite having built his business in Cleveland, Lewis had a love-hate 
relationship with his hometown. He felt powerfully attached to 
Northeast Ohio and never forgot his closest childhood friends here.

Yet he said he felt stung and "cut to my face" by snubs and slights 
he felt he suffered at the hands of the city's establishment during 
his rise in business, some of which he said were anti-Semitic in nature.

"I have felt marginalized, disdained, laughed at," Lewis said in an 
interview in 2002.

He once considered building a skyscraper headquarters and art museum 
on the Cleveland lakefront designed by Gehry with a dream team of 
famous contemporary artists, including Richard Serra and Claes Oldenburg.

Lewis was generous to Cleveland causes and donated $36.9 million to 
build the Gehry-designed Peter B. Lewis Building for the Weatherhead 
School of Management at Case Western Reserve University.

But when Lewis felt the building project was mismanaged, he lashed 
out, imposing a yearlong personal boycott against Cleveland 
philanthropies to protest what he saw as an incestuous old-boy 
network of interlocking board members on local charities, including CWRU.

He resumed making local donations a year later, but was far more 
generous elsewhere, at one point donating $101 million to Princeton 
University for expanded arts programming, while letting it be known 
he was fundamentally disappointed with Cleveland.

"Cleveland is not high on my list because it's all palaver," Lewis 
said in 2006 after making his gift to Princeton.

But Lewis never gave up his apartment in Beachwood and continued to 
visit the city to hear proposals from those seeking his largesse and 
to keep on eye on Progressive, where he remained chairman until his death.

Those who knew Lewis said he'd never sever ties with Cleveland, no 
matter how rocky the relationship became.

"I think he'll die a Clevelander," former U.S. Sen. Robert Kerrey, a 
friend of Lewis, said in 2002. "You may not get as much of his money 
as you'd like, but you won't lose him."

Kerrey's words proved prophetic.

In 2012, Lewis donated $5 million to the Cleveland Institute of Art, 
his biggest philanthropic gift in his hometown in a decade. After he 
ended his boycott in 2003, he made locals gifts only up to $1 million 
until the art institute donation.

Lewis said in an interview in Beachwood in July, 2012, that he made 
the donation to recognize that the $150-million-plus Uptown 
development in University Circle, of which the art institute is part, 
has met the high hopes he articulated for the project in 2004.

"It's the first time in a long time I've been impressed by 
Cleveland," he said. "I'm impressed by the achievement and 
accomplishment, I'm impressed all around."

In May, Lewis publicly buried the hatchet with CWRU. Speaking at the 
university's commencement, Lewis urged thousands of freshly minted 
graduates "love and support Case Western Reserve University" and to 
"cherish your alma mater."

In his personal and professional life, Lewis believed in being 
searingly honest. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, amid corporate 
accounting scandals that toppled CEOs including Ken Lay of Enron, 
Lewis was proud that Progressive issued monthly financial statements. 
It was a way, he said, to emphasize that Progressive was committed to 
complete transparency in reporting financial information.

Lewis made no secret of his ambition to make Progressive the best 
company in the world, a desire so deeply rooted he event related it 
to his own virility.

At one company gathering, he said he planned to keep working until 
the "oeRockefeller event," a reference to reports of Nelson 
Rockefeller dying in the arms of a 25-year-old lover.

Lewis's own success confirmed his conviction that his unconventional 
style and iconoclastic methods made fundamental good sense. It also 
confirmed his belief that Cleveland would be better off if the city 
had more entrepreneurs than lawyers in positions of power.

"Lawyers are functionaries hired by the people who do something," he 
said, "but we've got a situation where they're running the town. It's 
absurd. Those aren'TMt the people who drive creativity. Their whole 
job is to keep people from doing things."

Born on Nov. 11, 1933, Lewis grew up as the oldest of four children 
in a middle class Jewish family in Cleveland Heights. He started 
working part time at age 12 for Progressive, the small auto insurance 
company co-founded by his father, Joseph Lewis, and business partner, 
Jack Green.

Earning good grades, Lewis gained admission to Princeton University, 
where he excelled. But Lewis' family life was shattered during his 
sophomore year when his younger brother, Jonathan, was killed in a 
car accident. Two years later, Lewis' father was diagnosed with a 
malignant brain tumor and told he had two weeks to live.

After graduating from Princeton in 1955, Lewis started working at 
Progressive as an accountant, though without the assurances his 
father had given him that he would rise in the firm.

In 1965, Lewis and his mother, Helen Lewis, borrowed $2.5 million to 
undertake a leveraged buyout of the company, then called Progressive 
Mutual Insurance Co., pledging their majority stake as collateral.

Progressive at the time had 100 employees and $19.3 million in 
written premiums.

 From that point, Lewis positioned the company for rapid growth by 
focusing on insuring high risk drivers, by creating an innovative 
pricing system with free quotes on competitors' rates, and by 
offering instant claims service.

Lewis met his future wife, Toby Devan, while he was at Princeton. 
They married soon after he graduated and raised three children: 
Jonathan, Ivy and Adam Joseph.

The Lewises divorced in 1981 after peter decided he no longer wanted 
to be monogamous. But he and Toby remained close after parting. In 
1985, Lewis hired Toby to manage the Progressive art collection, 
which became a cornerstone of the company's corporate identity and 
one of the largest and most admired collections of its kind in the 
nation, with more than 6,000 objects.

As a corporate leader, Lewis viewed contemporary art as a model of 
creativity he felt he could apply to business. He was proud that 
hanging Andy Warhol's "Mao" portraits angered some Progressive 
employees. His goal was to shock them out of complacency and to make 
them view the world through fresh eyes - something he felt artists do 
every day.

Through Lewis' involvement with the Museum of Contemporary Art 
Cleveland, then the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, Lewis met 
Gehry at a lecture in 1985 and immediately asked him to design a 
house for him in Lyndhurst. Over the next decade, the design evolved 
through more than a dozen iterations, attracting the attention of 
architecture critics including Paul Goldberger, who wrote a lengthy 
article about it in The New York Times magazine.

Lewis finally cancelled the project in the late 1990s after the 
budget had reached $80 million. But Gehry said the $5 million in fees 
Lewis paid for the unbuilt project enabled the him to achieve a 
career breakthrough in Bilbao and in other world-famous buildings.

"He kept me trying things, exploring things," Gehry said Saturday of 
Lewis and the house project. "I think he never intended to build the 
house. He didn't need it. He didn't live like a rich guy, except for 
the boat and his plane, but that was later."

In 1998, Lewis had to have his left leg amputated below the knee 
after a congenital vascular problem led to an infection that would 
not heal. He later stepped down as Progressive president and CEO 
while retaining the office of chairman.

Two years later, Lewis' widely known affection for marijuana landed 
him in trouble with new Zealand authorities. After taking a 
commercial flight from the U.S. to watch the America's Cup races from 
aboard his yacht, Lewis was arrested at Auckland airport after 
drug-sniffing dogs helped police find pot in his briefcase.

After spending a night in jail, Lewis was released after admitting 
guilt and donating money to a local charity.

He later called the event "a crisis in my life," in which he said he 
learned, "I have the capacity to be stupid and arrogant."

Even so, Lewis never tired of funding campaigns to legalize 
marijuana, and joined billionaires George Soros and John Sperling in 
supporting a series of state initiatives to replace mandatory 
sentences with treatment for some nonviolent drug offenders.

Lewis was reviled by conservative commentators including Fox 
Network's Bill O'Reilly. But Lewis considered himself a libertarian 
first and foremost. He wanted drugs legalized and regulated, like alcohol.

"As long as you're not hurting somebody else, who the hell cares?" 
Lewis said. "Kill yourself. God bless you."

Princeton, with $220 million in gifts, remained the biggest 
beneficiary of a generosity that made Lewis the biggest individual 
donor in the university's history, according to Progressive.

His gifts included $60 million for a Gehry-designed science library 
and an endowment for the Lewis-Sigler Genomics Institute.

But his biggest Princeton donation, the $101 million gift in 2006, 
focused on a cause that for Lewis became an abiding passion, second 
only to his love of insurance - the arts.

Renwick, Progressive's president and CEO, said that Lewis remained 
closely involved in the company's business in recent years.

"Peter was by far the best chair-leader Progressive could ever have," 
he said. "He was very involved with the board. We spoke every Sunday."

During those conversations, Renwick, 58, said his relationship with 
Lewis bloomed into a friendship, and a mentorship.

"He was more than happy [with Progressive in recent years] and, if 
I'm being less than humble, he was proud to see how things had moved 
on from what he had started."

Renwick said that Lewis was especially pleased with the Progressive 
advertising campaign built around "Flo," a ditzy-smart redhead who 
dresses somewhat like a nurse and who plays the part of a cashier in 
a bright white setting meant to evoke a Progressive superstore.

"Peter loved Flo," Renwick said, because the campaign built around 
the character helped Progressive build its brand nationally.

"The fact that it's a household name, made him sit back and think, 
'that's what I always envisioned,' " Renwick said.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom