Businessman
After Safer graduated from Harvard Law School in 1949 his fascination with the emerging technology and promise of television prompted him to take a job as a handyman at WXEL in Cleveland, Ohio. He quickly rose to the position of program director. During this time his innovations led the new independent station to "beat the ratings of all the network affiliates."
In 1953 Safer's father became terminally ill and he returned to Washington, D.C. to take over his father's affairs. Although Safer successfully parlayed these into a major real estate development business he did not find his commercial life a rewarding one.
In 1974 Safer entered the world of banking, becoming Chairman of the Executive Committee of Financial General Bankshares, and in 1981 the Chairman of the Board of DC National Bank which later became part of Bank of America.
In 1999 Safer became Chairman of the Board of Materia, Inc. Materia specializes in Olefin metathesis, and is noted for its Nobel Prize winning Green chemistry.
Read more about this topic: John Safer
Famous quotes containing the word businessman:
“If when a businessman speaks of minority employment, or air pollution, or poverty, he speaks in the language of a certified public accountant analyzing a corporate balance sheet, who is to know that he understands the human problems behind the statistical ones? If the businessman would stop talking like a computer printout or a page from the corporate annual report, other people would stop thinking he had a cash register for a heart. It is as simple as that—but that isn’t simple.”
—Louis B. Lundborg (1906–1981)
“A good businessman never makes a contract unless he’s sure he can carry it through, yet every fool on earth is perfectly willing to sign a marriage contract without considering whether he can live up to it or not.”
—Dalton Trumbo (1905–1976)
“The businessman who assumes that his life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth.... No; truth, being alive ... was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)