William S. Dietrich II: Changing the Face of Philanthropy in Pittsburgh
Kenneth Dietrich stands at the steel mill, distracted. He is supposed to be here to fix a problem the mill—his customer—had with an order they had placed through his lumber company, but he notices something that perplexes him.
After he works out the details of the lumber issue with his customer, Dietrich goes back to what had caught his eye—steel workers are discarding dozens of galvanized steel scraps.
He asks a foreman what is wrong with the steel.
Oh, nothing, the man replies, but it’s just a few sheets—nothing worth doing with that.
But, Dietrich cannot get the thought of the wasted steel scraps out of his head. There’s got to be a market for it.
Dietrich ends up buying the unwanted steel pieces from plants around Pittsburgh, paying higher than scrap prices, but less than the cost of prime steel. He finds a market for his steel by selling it to manufacturers who needed smaller pieces of unexposed steel for their products (stove bottoms, refrigerator backs, the insides of car doors).
After a stretch of business ventures that never quite clicked, Dietrich is ready for a home run. (He had launched a Pittsburgh chemical company that sold detergent, owned and operated the Iroquois Hotel in Conneaut Lake, Pennsylvania, and now moved back to his hometown to open a lumber business.) Yet, it is the steel-scrap idea that allows Kenneth Dietrich entrée to the big time. His small lumber business is transformed into a major company, Dietrich Industries, Inc.
As luck would have it, Kenneth’s son, William S. Dietrich II (A&S, G’80, G’84), has graduated from Princeton University and is in the market for a job around this time. Despite his Ivy-League studies and a brief stint in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve, the younger Dietrich is still unsure what he wants to do.
Like his dad, though, he has a keen desire to succeed, so Kenneth Dietrich hires him as a salesman for the new Dietrich light steel company. Within a few years, William Dietrich takes over the company’s day-to-day operations.
He has found his calling.
***
Fast-forward 50-plus years. It is a sunny September afternoon at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh—September 24, 2011. The stadium is filled with 65,000 screaming Pitt Panther fans. They are all on their feet. Yes, they are excited about the Notre Dame game today, but that is not what the standing ovation is about. It is about the tall, silver-haired, bespectacled man standing out on the field.
Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg just announced that this man—William Dietrich—has given the University a historic $125 million gift, the largest in Pitt’s history and one of the 10 largest gifts in the entire United States given by an individual to a public university.
Dietrich, a longtime Pitt trustee, former chair of the board, and an alumnus (he earned both an MA and a PhD in political science here) has been part of the University community for years now, and is, as Chancellor Nordenberg notes, “one of Pitt’s favorite people.”
As Dietrich, the chancellor, and other University officials stand on the turf, smiling and waving, they see banners and signs throughout the stands.
Pitt Thanks Bill Dietrich.
Thanks Bill!
Pitt Students Thank Mr. Dietrich.
But, the biggest sign is yet to come. On the jumbo screen, a 10-story-tall, Pitt blue-and-gold banner unfurls along the face of the Cathedral of Learning. “Home of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences,” it announces, signifying that, in recognition of Dietrich’s gift, the University renamed the School of Arts and Sciences in honor of Dietrich’s father, Kenneth.
Dietrich remembers his father, who passed away in 1984 at the age of 77, as an all-round good man—an astute businessman; a first-rate golfer, card player, and dancer; and a good person. He had a great sense of humor, played the ukulele, and even appeared in amateur theater productions.
His dad was also the person who made this day possible.
By 1966, Kenneth was ready to retire and felt that his son was more than capable to take over the successful Dietrich Industries, which had by now grown into quite a presence in the industry. But, little did either Dietrich know of the rocky times ahead. When the economy fell into a recession in the 1970s, the company teetered on the brink of bankruptcy.
William Dietrich kept things together, and when the economy rebounded by 1975, he was ready with a new product line—steel wall studs for builders, an idea Dietrich came up with after seeing the long, narrow scraps left after the company cut customers’ steel. Like his father’s game-changing insight years ago at the steel mill, William Dietrich’s scrap-metal moment ended up redefining Dietrich Industries once again. The company eventually shifted their entire product line to building materials (as those steel builders’ studs became a larger and larger chunk of sales), allowing Dietrich to guide the business to annual sales of $350 million by 1996.
***
N. John Cooper sits outside the office, waiting to meet William Dietrich for the first time. It’s an early spring day in 1998, Cooper has recently been named dean of the University’s School of Arts and Sciences; today, he, the vice chancellor for institutional advancement, and the chair of Pitt’s capital campaign have come to ask Bill Dietrich a little favor.
They want him to co-chair the school's volunteer committee during the capital campaign’s first phase. It is not a big stretch. Dietrich has been a University trustee for the past seven years and is known throughout the city of Pittsburgh for his generous civic involvement. Everyone is expecting an easy “yes.”
But, they get a very gracious “no.”
However, Dietrich takes time to talk to the Pitt contingent and give them some advice.
“The insights he provided completely re-defined how to think about the volunteer committee,” recalls Cooper. “We came out of that meeting with a totally different approach in mind. And, that was the first gift from Mr. Dietrich to Arts and Sciences.”
What Cooper and his colleagues did not realize at the time, but came to understand later, was that Dietrich already had big plans for Pitt—something far beyond the scope of volunteer efforts.
He had recently sold his company to steel-processing giant Worthington Industries for $178 million. Before Dietrich sold the business, he placed his stock into a charitable annuity trust (which stipulated that when he died, the funds would go into The Dietrich Foundation, which would annually distribute money to nonprofits around Pittsburgh). He began to become more and more involved with managing the investments of Dietrich Charitable Trusts, realizing that the best way to ensure his legacy reached its maximum impact was to take charge himself. As he jockeyed for coveted access to premier private equity funds, Dietrich often ended his pitch with the slogan: “It’s not about Bill Dietrich getting richer, it’s about charitable good works in Pittsburgh.”
***
On October 7, William S. Dietrich II died after an extended illness at age 73. He had just announced his ground-breaking gifts to the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University (which named the Marianna Brown Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences in honor of Dietrich’s mother) two weeks earlier.
“Bill Dietrich’s passing is a tremendous loss not only to Pitt’s board, where he was known for his determined commitment to academic excellence, but also within the broader business and civic community,” says University Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg.
In addition to serving as Pitt’s board chair, Dietrich had chaired the boards of the Pittsburgh Chamber of Commerce, Greater Pittsburgh Council of the Boy Scouts of America, and the Southwestern Pennsylvania Growth Alliance. He was a member of multiple other area boards, ranging from the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh to the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre. When he was not managing his businesses or taking on leadership volunteer roles, Dietrich also found time to put his scholarly training to good use, writing In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: The Political Roots of American Economic Decline (Penn State University Press, 1991), Eminent Pittsburghers: Profiles of the City’s Founding Industrialists (Taylor Trade, 2011), and was working on a new book, American Recessional: The U.S. Decline and the Rise of China.
Dietrich remained involved with managing the Dietrich Charitable Trusts up until his death.
“He was tireless in his efforts to contribute to the betterment of the Southwestern Pennsylvania region,” says the chancellor. “The impact of his extraordinary generosity will be felt by faculty and students throughout this University for countless generations to come.”
N. John Cooper, Bettye J. and Ralph E. Bailey Dean of the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences, agrees.
“With his gift, Mr. Dietrich re-established the Andrew Carnegie model in Western Pennsylvania—creating a highly leveraged way of giving back. In the long term, this gift will strengthen our faculty, help recruit, and ensure that the best and most deserving students are in their classrooms,” he says. “But, in the short term, this is an opportunity to consolidate recognition of the Dietrich School as a core component of the University, central to its undergraduate and graduate education, mission, and its research and scholarly profile.”
Or, in other words, the dividends from Bill Dietrich’s last investment will impact scholars and scholarship at the Dietrich School for generations to come.