Zanvyl Krieger is 85 now, a quiet man who has led a quiet life. Yet he has managed to leave a considerably more lasting imprint on the world than some people who go through life much more noisily.
"The bottom line in life is satisfaction," he says reflectively. "People get it in different ways."
He admits to satisfaction as he looks around Baltimore and sees his name on some of the city's enduring institutions. There's the Krieger Building on the corner of Maryland Avenue and Mount Royal, constructed with money he donated to the Associated Jewish Charities. There's the Krieger Mind/Brain Institute at Johns Hopkins University. The Krieger Eye Institute at Sinai Hospital.
And beginning officially at midnight Tuesday, the Kennedy Institute, one of the region's most renowned health facilities, will become the Kennedy Krieger Institute -- a permanent and very public thank you to Zanvyl Krieger for $5 million he recently donated and for years of service to the institute.
There are many other less prominent examples of Mr. Krieger's philanthropy around town. He helped establish the Jewish Heritage Center, a cultural museum on Lloyd Street. Chizuk Amuno Congregation, where he is a longtime member, can thank him for its gymnasium, auditorium and day school. He funds scholarships for the learning disabled at the Jemicy School. He is a contributor to the National Holocaust Memorial, the Baltimore Community Foundation, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Peabody Institute, the Jewish Theological Seminary.
"If we could do one thing to make Baltimore a better place, it would be to clone Zan Krieger," says Dr. Guy McKhann, director of the Mind/Brain Institute, which has benefited from Mr. Kreiger's generosity to the tune of $7.5 million.
Yet the public profile that Mr. Krieger does have has little to do with any of these worthy causes. A lawyer who still comes into his downtown office at Weinberg & Green five days a week, he is best-known as an investor in Baltimore's sports teams, the man who helped bring major league baseball and football to the city and was once part-owner of both the Colts and the Orioles.
In that characteristically muted way of his, Mr. Krieger explains .. his interest in professional sports in the context of what he thought was best for the city of Baltimore.
"It adds to the prestige of the city, it establishes the city as big league," he says of his efforts that began in the late 1940s and peaked in 1958 when the Colts won their first National Football League championship and again in 1966 when the Orioles won their first World Series. "In this country if a town doesn't have a big-league team it's not a big-league city. It does a lot for the city. It creates interest, it just rounds out the city's activities."
Sitting in the board room of his law firm, he stares down at his hands folded on the table in front of him as he speaks. On his right ring finger shines the gold of the 1958 football championship ring, inscribed with "23-17," the score by which the Colts beat the Giants that thrilling sudden death year. On his left middle finger is the gleaming onyx and diamond of the 1966 World Series ring, the series in which the underdog Orioles beat the cocky L.A. Dodgers in four straight games.
All these years and all these good works later, and Zanvyl Krieger smiles with delight as he shows off his rings. "I've got about three or four more rings at home, football and baseball and all that," he says. But these are the ones he wears all the time. "They bring about a lot of pleasant memories."
Not that dwelling on memories is a major preoccupation for this octogenarian. He remains dedicated to the future. Just a few months ago he got a call from Leonard "Boogie" Weinglass recruiting his help in the effort to bring a football franchise to Baltimore. "Boogie, I've been around the track and I don't feel like going around the track again," he told Mr. Weinglass, but ultimately agreed to lend his name, if not his checkbook, to the cause.
Clearly, though, it is philanthropy rather than sports that consumes Mr. Krieger's interest these days, and it is frequently a beneficence linked to the interests he has developed in the workings of the brain. "It's intriguing to me because it's virgin territory, it's pioneering," he explains. "I like to plant seeds, to get involved from the outside."
"He's interested in the new and the developmental," says Robert Hiller, director of the Zanvyl and Isabelle Krieger Fund (named for Mr. Krieger and his late wife), which operates out of an office at the Associated. "Simply to understand what the Mind/Brain Institute is requires a mind looking at the future."
"He has a vision hooked to advancing knowledge, particularly knowledge about how the brain works," Dr. Gary Goldstein, president of the Kennedy Institute, has found.
But Dr. Goldstein added that it doesn't hurt to throw in a few sports metaphors when asking Mr. Krieger for a donation.
"I tell him, 'We want to create a winning team here,' and that appeals to him."
Unlike other donors whose egos play into their contributions, it was not Mr. Krieger's idea to attach his name to anything, Dr. Goldstein said. "With other donors that can be part of the contract. But that was never the case with Zanvyl."
Mr. Krieger has been on the board of directors of the Kennedy Institute for 25 years and explains his interest on a basic, emotional level. "There's nothing more enticing and worthwhile than working with handicapped kids and retarded children," he says. "That's a very appealing thing to do and I was intrigued by it. All you have to do is walk through Kennedy and see those kids; to feel that you're helping them is a great satisfaction."
Personal satisfaction is a recurring theme as Mr. Krieger speaks of his life, but his satisfaction seems to come not from self-interest or financial return, but from the smile on the face of a bTC handicapped child or the knowledge that a city is improving because of his efforts. With sports, for example, "I never regarded it as a commercial venture," he says. "I regarded it as a sports venture that was important to the city."
He acknowledges that he came out on the plus side when he eventually sold his interests in the sports teams, but maintains that financial gain had nothing to do with his motivation. His friends describe his lifestyle as frugal. Until last year -- when weakness in his legs caused by a progressive spinal condition forced him to give up driving -- he pumped his own gasoline, and he explains his current need for a chauffeur apologetically.
His favorite form of entertainment has always been a baseball game, and for years he was a fixture at Orioles home games in his seat behind third base (not in the owners' box, where he was entitled to sit) with his wife and his almost constant companion, the late Milton Eisenhower, president of Johns Hopkins University.
The wealth that fuels his current philanthropies has come from a family fortune and from profits on the sports teams, but the primary source of the millions he has accumulated -- and he declines to specify how many millions -- is the result of a visionary business deal.
In 1964 Mr. Krieger was involved with the start-up of the United States Surgical Corp., a company that began manufacturing and selling surgical staples that would become a widespread replacement for more traditional sutures. Through the years U.S. Surgical has expanded its focus, become a pioneer with non-invasive surgical techniques, turned into one of the most active stocks on the New York Stock Exchange and earned millions for its founders.
But this is no rags to riches story. Mr. Krieger's father -- an immigrant from Austria who settled in Baltimore -- did well with a wholesale liquor business. Young Zanvyl was only 4 when his father died of a heart attack, but his four older brothers were adults and continued the family business, switching to investment banking during Prohibition. One brother, Abraham, later bought the Gunther Brewery, and the family also owned the Baltimore Pure Rye Distillery.
Zanvyl chose not to go into family business, but to pursue law as a career. But even in high school -- City College, class of 1924 -- his financial aptitude was apparent. "Clear the way for a sky-scraper; clean up the banks," the yearbook -- of which he was financial manager -- warned. "Staid bankers you are due for a shock. Our little wizard of finance will soon fare forth to seek his fortune."
His mother died when he was still a teen-ager and he lived with his much older sister, sharing a room with a nephew almost his age, Herman Goldberg, who would go on to become a prominent Baltimore ophthalmologist and help inspire some of his uncle's donations to eye care facilities.
"He was always ambitious," Dr. Goldberg remembers now, and attributes some of his uncle's motivation in life to lack of physical stature: "He always felt a desire to be a big-league ballplayer, but he was always the water boy on the team because he never got to be more than 5 feet 2. Since he couldn't make the team, he bought it."
Zan Krieger went from undergraduate studies at Hopkins to Harvard Law School "because I considered it the pre-eminent law school in the country." Back in Baltimore after graduation he began a career in commercial law, serving for a time as assistant attorney general for the state. During World War II he rose to the rank of major in the Army Air Force, working in legal and intelligence operations around the United States.
He met Isabelle Lowenthal at a Catskills resort after the war. They married in 1947 and had two daughters, Jean and Betsy. He has three grandchildren and a fourth expected soon. Mrs. Krieger died five years ago, soon after the couple moved from their longtime home on Bancroft Road in Northwest Baltimore to an apartment at One Slade Avenue.
And though his business interests have taken him around the country, Mr. Krieger has never considered living anywhere else but his hometown.
"I was born and bred and drug up here, might as well finish out here," he says with a laugh. "Baltimore has all the advantages a person would like to have during his lifetime, in the way of diversions, and at the same time it's not too big to cause you to lose your identity. It's just a good city to live in."
THE KRIEGER FILE
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Born: April 1, 1906, in Baltimore.
Education: Baltimore City College, class of 1924; Johns Hopkins University, class of 1928; Harvard Law School, class of 1931.
Family: Youngest of eight children of Betty and Herman Krieger. Married for 40 years to the late Isabelle Lowenthal Krieger. Father of two daughters, Jean Kahn and Betsy Kandel. Grandfather of three.
Career: Lawyer, entrepreneur, sports team owner, philanthropist.
Feelings about current generation of sports team owners: "The game now has become completely commercialized. There used to be a time when you got into sports for the fun of it."
Thoughts on Oriole Park at Camden Yards: "It's going to be a beautiful place, it's going to be outstanding. It will probably be the best ballpark in the country."