Warren Alpert, who donated $100 million to the medical school now named for him, is a self-made millionaire whose ties to Providence led him to support medical education at Brown.
Alpert was born in 1920 to Goodman and Tena Alpert, both immigrants from Lithuania. He grew up in the economically depressed town of Chelsea, Mass.
"He was the poor kid in the poor city," said Herbert Kaplan, Alpert's nephew and president of the nonprofit Warren Alpert Foundation.
After high school, Alpert attended Boston University and received a bachelor of science degree in 1942. He joined the U.S. Army shortly after graduating and served in military intelligence during World War II. Alpert landed in Normandy on D-Day, Kaplan said. He was awarded the Purple Heart in 1945.
When Alpert had fulfilled his military service, he enrolled in Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program. "He heard it was a place to make money," Kaplan said. Alpert successfully completed the program, and with the help of the GI Bill of 1944, which provided educational funding for veterans, received his master's degree in business administration in 1947.
In 1950, Alpert came to Providence and started his own business, a small oil-marketing company with limited capital and an office on Eddy Street. Warren Equities Inc. quickly flourished and became one of the largest independent gasoline and convenience store marketers and one of the leading independent wholesale petroleum marketers in the Northeast. The company's products are sold at over 400 Xtra Mart stores.
"He worked very hard, and he put pressure on the people he worked with," Kaplan said of Alpert.
"He never took a vacation," said Bevin Kaplan, Kaplan's daughter and Alpert's great niece.
Alpert is still the chairman of the company he founded. Warren Equities currently grosses over $1 billion in annual sales, employs more than 2,000 people and is ranked by Forbes as one of the 400 largest privately owned companies.
In 1986, Alpert founded the Warren Alpert Foundation, a philanthropic effort funded solely by Alpert himself. The Foundation's original purpose was to grant an annual $150,000 award, known as the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize, to a leading scientist or researcher in the field of medicine.
Since 1986, the foundation has enabled Alpert to make many donations supporting medical education, research and practice. Among the most significant are a $20 million gift to Harvard University in 1993 to name a research center at its medical school and a $15 million gift to Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City.
According to Kaplan, Alpert chose Brown as the recipient of his largest donation because he wanted a way to give back to the Providence and Rhode Island communities.
"His relationship was with Providence," Kaplan said. "He wanted to motivate science and health care in this state." He said Alpert has made several small donations over the years but otherwise had no prior connections to the University.
"There's a sort of beautiful harmony with him having his business here and now knowing his legacy will be wedded with Brown," Bevin Kaplan said. "He thought the best way to better mankind was through medicine, and in that way this gift makes a great deal of sense."
Neil Steinberg '75, vice president for development and director of the Campaign for Academic Enrichment, first met Alpert 25 years ago when Steinberg was a banker at what used to be Independent National Bank, and Alpert was his client.
He said Alpert was a "very dynamic man" whose gift would be "transformative" for the Med School. "It was a great opportunity for them, a great opportunity for us," Steinberg said.
Making a major donation to health care was "the kind of thing he wanted to do as he contemplated his immortality," said Ronald Vanden Dorpel MA'71, senior vice president for University advancement, of the aging and infirm Alpert. Vanden Dorpel said the University would reap many benefits from a gift large enough to name the Med School after Alpert. Beyond providing ready resources for improvement, the gift would boost the Med School's visibility and "catapult us up" in national ratings, Vanden Dorpel said.
"There's a lesson with these self-made men: They give back," Steinberg said.
