Bill Summers looks like any other retiree as he greets me in the driveway of his suburban West Side colonial. So it’s easy to assume that the welcoming, vital man in the half-zip pullover and jeans lives the stereotypical life of post-career leisure — particularly after he describes his tenure heading McDonald Investments as a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week job that frequently kept him from wife, Pam, and their three children, along with his daughter from a previous marriage.
He’s still bothered by the fact that he couldn’t accompany now-grown daughter Clare to a Doughnuts with Dad grade-school event because he was at a meeting in New York City.
“When you’re a CEO or a senior leader of a major company, you’re running if you want to be successful,” says the 65-year-old, who “functionally retired” as McDonald Investments’ CEO in 2000 and officially retired as its chairman in 2006. “It’s quite a nice shift from overdrive to idle.”
But never-ending days on a golf course or in a beach chair, as Summers puts it with a chuckle, “were never in the program.” The longtime Cleveland resident has spent the years since he left the C-suite continuing to chair and serve on a long list of nonprofit boards and committees that increasingly reflect his passions and the city’s interests.
He attributes his desire to give back to civic-minded parents, a McDonald Investments culture that stressed commitment to clients, co-workers and community, and his admiration of “lion kings” such as Jones Day partner Dick Pogue and Albert Ratner, who is co-chairman emeritus of Forest City’s board of directors.
Summers’ love of Cleveland is what prompted him to join a half-dozen individuals, along with the corporate community that is mainly pledging the $32 million “down payment” required at the time the city submitted its successful bid to the Republican National Committee to host the 2016 Republican National Convention. As co-chair of the convention host committee’s finance committee, he’s been working the phone in his home office, helping raise the approximately $10 million still needed on this March day to fund the convention’s $67 million budget in cash and in-kind services.
“It’s critically important we pull this off in a fashion that projects Cleveland as a great place for young and old,” he says. “It’s literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to show the world that Cleveland is somewhat hip.”
The Destination Cleveland trustee and rock-music fan expresses similar sentiments about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, where he’s been a trustee since before it opened in 1995. (He became a member on the board of directors of the rock hall’s parent entity, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, three years ago.) “It’s our most important icon,” he states matter-of-factly. He sees his alma mater, Baldwin Wallace University, as another major asset, one that he’s served as a trustee for almost three decades. He talks about helping to plan the school’s next capital campaign.
“We need a state-of-the-art math and computer-science facility,” he says.
It was a sense of duty, however, that prompted him last year to become a trustee of the U.S. Army War College Foundation, which supports advanced training for the military branches’ best and brightest at the Carlisle, Pennsylvania, school. Summers, who heads the foundation’s investment committee, explains he was drafted during the Vietnam War but failed his physical because he suffered from severe asthma as a child.
“I haven’t had an asthma attack since I was, like, 17,” he says. “But they wouldn’t take me. I’d always felt this hole. When I had this chance, I said, ‘I’m getting the chance to fill that hole up.’ ”
Summers sits on a handful of corporate boards, including Medina-based coatings-and-sealants manufacturer RPM International, Ashtabula-based Molded Fiberglass Companies and Dallas-based medical-device-maker Greatbatch Inc. One friend describes him as “an ideal board member,” citing his experience as a former director of the New York Stock Exchange and past chairman of NASDAQ. But Summers insists that he doesn’t have to be in charge to be involved.
“I’m a foot soldier,” he declares. “I’m not trying to be a general.”