Domino’s Pizza franchise founder Tom Monaghan is a man of passions, an all-or-nothing kind of guy. When he was building up the pizza franchise chain Domino’s, he lived in a trailer and put in 100-hour workweeks. When he had money, he bought a fleet of high-end cars, an island, and the Detroit Tigers.
But when Monaghan, a Catholic, decided in midlife that he wasn’t being Catholic enough, he turned his zeal away from earthly goods -- and sold them off, often at a loss -- to focus on one thing: “To get as many people into Heaven as possible,” as he told the Wall Street Journal in 2006.
It could be called an obsession. Giving to extant Catholic charities wasn’t going to do it -- he wanted big numbers. And the best way to do that, he told the Wall Street Journal, was to produce the teachers, priests, and administrators who could form pliable young Catholic minds.
The road has been anything but smooth. After establishing Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti in 1998, and then a Catholic law school, the Ave Maria School of Law, in Ann Arbor in 2000, Monaghan’s plans hit a speed bump. The town of Ann Arbor decided that it wouldn't change its zoning laws to allow the school to expand to a full-size campus on Monaghan’s property called, appropriately enough, Domino Farms (you knew pizzas grew on farms, right?). Not one to be put off a grand plan, Monaghan signed a deal in 2002 with developer Barron Collier Companies to partner in building an entire town -- a Catholic town -- in Florida. Barron Collier offered up the land, and Monaghan committed $100 million to the partnership deal and brought the university that would be a centerpiece of the new town. They officially broke ground in February 2006.
0 comments:
Post a Comment