Joseph Babin has made annual gifts to the College of Arts and Sciences for more than 40 years. In addition, he endowed a scholarship fund named for himself and his wife, Geraldine. Photo by Mike Sands.
Joseph Babin (ADL ’38, LAW ’40) has always believed that education comes first. He conveyed this idea to his children, and he has acted on it by showing exceptional generosity toward the university where he earned his undergraduate degree almost eight decades ago.
Babin, who turned 101 in September, has made annual gifts to the College of Arts and Sciences at Case Western Reserve for more than 40 years. And in 1995, he established the Joseph and Geraldine Babin Endowment Fund, which to date has provided scholarships to 33 students pursuing majors in the college.
This history of support is in keeping with Babin’s character, says his son, Larry, a co-chief investment officer and senior portfolio manager at Victory Capital Management in Brooklyn, Ohio. One of Joseph Babin’s most impressive qualities, Larry says, “is the consistency with which he’s lived his life.”
Babin was born at Cleveland’s Mount Sinai Hospital in 1916. That same year, his father, Isidore, founded his own company, Babin Sash & Door. The Babins lived in East Cleveland, and Joseph graduated from Shaw High School in May 1934. He recalls that Western Reserve University, where he enrolled that fall, “was exactly two miles west from my home.”
“I went there because of the Depression,” Babin recalls. Going to a local college made financial sense; he could save money by living at home. “We weren’t starving and never worried about the next meal,” he adds. “But I knew I wasn’t going to go out and buy some fancy thing or whatever I saw advertised, because I couldn’t afford it.”
Babin thrived at Adelbert College, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration. He recalls his participation in the Jewish fraternity Zeta Beta Tau with special fondness.
“I enjoyed that part of school,” he says. “The friendships I made were long-lasting. Most of those friends are gone now, but I had them for many a year, and I did enjoy the fact that I was a member and also the president for a year.”
It was at a fraternity dance that Babin met Geraldine Geller, his wife-to-be and the love of his life. “I had another young lady that was my date, and I saw her from across the room,” he says. “I already knew her brother. She won my heart.” They married in 1941, once Babin finished his law degree at Western Reserve.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor that year, Babin enlisted in the Air Force and served in back-office positions in England and Egypt until the war ended. When he returned to civilian life, jobs were scarce for young lawyers, so he joined the family business. After his father’s death in 1953, he took it over. But prosperity did not come quickly.
“My father had a meager business for many, many years when we were growing up,” says Babin’s daughter, Emily Bellock, a retired elementary school teacher who lives in Ann Arbor, Mich. “I, of course, did not know that; we were a very happy family. He didn’t have a lot of money, and he worked until he was 80 years old. Between 65 and 80 is when he made his fortune, and he never changed the person he was except for the day he bought himself a BMW.”
A pivotal moment in Babin’s career occurred in the early 1980s, when his firm, then called Babin Building Centers, merged with its biggest competitor and became Forest City Babin. By the time he retired in 1996, on his 80th birthday, he was the CEO of a flourishing company with 80 to 100 employees.
Babin played tennis well into his 90s and has remained healthy even after a double bypass operation in 2012. The only sorrow he speaks of is the death of his wife in 2013, at age 94, after 72 years of marriage.
“He’s a very content, happy person; I’ve never seen him in a bad mood,” says Larry Babin, who spends time with his father every week. Each visit, he says, is “a joyous event. He’s always upbeat. It’s remarkable.”
Like her brother, Emily Bellock admires Babin for holding fast to his principles and commitments all his life. “People at his retirement party talked over and over again about what an honest man he was, and that is just who he has always been,” she says. “Some people make their fortune and move to a huge house and set their wife up with new diamonds and act differently. He just never did. I think he became more philanthropic, but outwardly, what people saw in Joe Babin was the same Joe Babin they probably knew at Western Reserve.”
Carlo Wolff is a freelance writer in South Euclid.
Photo by Mike Sands
Dalton Hennes (right) was awarded a scholarship from the Joseph and Geraldine Babin Endowment Fund in 2016, at the start of his sophomore year at Case Western Reserve. He had the opportunity to thank Babin in person this past summer.
A first-generation college student from southern Ohio, Hennes is majoring in both philosophy and cognitive science, with a minor in ethics. He has conducted research combining psychology, ethics and neuroscience in the lab of Anthony Jack, associate professor in the Department of Philosophy, and he plans to attend law school after he graduates from CWRU.
In a letter he sent to Babin last spring, Hennes wrote: “My experience at Case Western Reserve has given me so much, and I wouldn’t have gotten any of it if it weren’t for generosity like yours…. Everything I achieve, every barrier I break through and every life I impact is because of people like you in my life.”
