Chamber Annual Dinner
The Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber's Annual Dinner is the premier business event of the year. The event is highlighted by the induction of the newest class of Great Living Cincinnatians, as well as the changing-of-the-guard of the Chamber's key volunteer leaders.The annual dinner, presented by PNC, will be held on Feb. 16 at the Duke Energy Center Grand Ballroom.
The cost of the annual dinner is $150 for an individual, $1,400 for a table of 10 or $2,500 for a Corporate Patron Table of 10. Reservations can be made by visiting cincinnatichamber.com, calling the Customer Focus Center at 513.579.3111 or e-mailing register@cincinnatichamber.com.
Photos and audio from the most recent Annual Dinner
2012 Annual Dinner
Thursday, February 16, 2012
The Duke Energy Center Grand Ballroom
5:30 p.m. Cocktail Reception
7:00 p.m. Dinner and Program
Recognizing:
2011 Chamber Board Chair
George H. Vincent
Managing Partner
Dinsmore & Shohl
2012 Chamber Board Chair
Julie S. Janson
President
Duke Energy Ohio, Inc. and Duke Energy Kentucky, Inc.
2012 Great Living Cincinnatians:
Robert H. Castellini
Nick Clooney
Beatrice C. Lampkin, M.D.
James M. Zimmerman
The Great Living Cincinnatian Award has been presented annually by the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber since 1967. Recipients are chosen by the Chamber’s senior council based on the following criteria: community service, business and civic attainment on a local, state and national or international level; leadership; awareness of the needs of others; and distinctive accomplishments that have brought favorable attention to their community, institution or organization.
Robert H. Castellini
As the principal owner, president and chief executive officer of the Cincinnati Reds, Robert H. Castellini is not only the keeper of one of the community’s most revered institutions, but his success at assembling a winning team has a major influence on determining how we feel about ourselves as a region.
But as well-known as he is in his role with the Reds, many Cincinnatians do not recognize the breadth of his involvement in the business and civic life of our community.
His success is grounded in the way that he grew his family’s business, the Castellini Group of Companies. After receiving an A.B. in Economics from Georgetown University, spending two years as a U.S. Army Officer and completing his MBA at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in 1967, he returned to Cincinnati to work in the family wholesale-produce business.
Through what friend and business partner Tom Williams describes as “extraordinary entrepreneurial efforts,” Bob transformed a relatively small family company into one of the largest fresh-produce distributors in the country and one of the region’s biggest privately-owned companies. And in doing so, he broadened the business to include trucking, private equity and real-estate development.
The skills Castellini honed in business made him a valuable community leader. At no time was this clearer than when leadership was needed to move forward a development on the 18-acre central riverfront. After more than six years of frustrated efforts to jumpstart development, Hamilton County Commissioners turned to Castellini in 2006 to lead the Banks Working Group.
Today, The Banks has moved from dream to plan to hundreds of fully-leased apartments and a growing number of successful restaurants and retail shops.
Castellini is a lifelong baseball fan and had served as a minority investor with several major league baseball teams. But when Carl Lindner, Jr. decided to sell the Reds after the 2005 season, Castellini moved to assemble a Cincinnati-based ownership group.
The effort was “truly a fiduciary endeavor for the benefit of the city and its need for hometown ownership” said Williams. And under his leadership, the Reds have thrived.
Castellini also has assumed a wide variety of other roles. He has chaired many boards including the Cincinnati Business Committee, TriHealth, Good Samaritan Hospital, the Cincinnati Zoo, the Queen City Club, the Commercial and the Commonwealth Clubs of Cincinnati, the Joint Banks Steering Committee, and the Cincinnati Equity Fund. He also has served on the boards of 3CDC, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the Cincinnati Arts & Technology Center, Xavier University, Denison University, Babson College and other organizations.
Nick Clooney
While Nick Clooney’s career has not followed any traditional path, he has made a difference at each stop.
Born in Maysville in 1934, Nick grew up listening to famous journalists like Edward R. Murrow and William Shirer and dreamed of becoming a reporter. He got his first opportunity when he was 16 on a local radio station. The first assignment, appropriately, was to read the news.
But for years, Nick learned broadcasting on the entertainment side of radio and television. By the late 1960s, he hosted his own morning talk and variety show--- first in Columbus and then in Cincinnati on WCPO-TV. In 1974 he was the host of the ABC network game show, Money Maze. When ABC canceled Money Maze, Nick returned to Cincinnati as the news director and anchor of WKRC-TV and, in this role, found his niche.
Clooney built an outstanding staff of reporters and anchors, some of whom still work at the station.
He demanded that the station invest in the latest technology, including the capability to broadcast live from remote sites. Just two days after the technology became operational in 1977, the Beverly Hills Supper Club caught fire resulting in 165 deaths and 200 injuries. Because of Nick’s unrelenting demands, WKRC was the only station that could report live from the scene of what remains one of the region’s major stories. Within five years, WKRC overtook Al Schottelkotte and WCPO, which had dominated the local ratings for almost two decades.
In the late 1980s, Clooney returned to radio and contributed commentaries—often shot in the study of his home in Augusta—on social trends and history for WKRC. And beginning in 1989, he wrote a column for the Cincinnati Post three times a week until the paper closed in 2007. He also gained a reputation as the host of American Movie Classics, for which he won a national Emmy nomination.
Nick’s love of American history, respect for the political process and his deeply-held principles also led him into two high-profile forays into public service. In 2004, he made an unsuccessful bid for Congress in the Kentucky Fourth District. Two years later, he joined forces with his son George in an effort to throw a spotlight on the unfolding tragedy in Darfur.
As Clooney has lived a lifetime in the public eye, two primary themes emerge. First, no matter where his work takes him, Nick is rooted in Ohio River Valley. Nick and his wife Nina could never imagine straying too far, for too long, from their home in Augusta, just a few blocks from the ferry that connects them to the world.
Second, Clooney’s greatest asset has always been his ability to connect with people. Whether it is reporting a story on the evening news or speaking to a room full of people, Nick communicates that he cares deeply about people. And the people, in turn, respond and reciprocate.
Beatrice C. Lampkin, M.D.
Beatrice Lampkin has always been a pioneer. Born in Alabama in 1934, she was stricken by polio in 1940. For three weeks, she was quarantined in her home in Tuscaloosa and then underwent treatment-- including multiple trips to Warm Springs, Georgia where President Roosevelt also sought relief. That experience “made me more empathetic and sympathetic when children are sick,” Lampkin said.
The granddaughter of a doctor, she was determined to become a physician herself. In the 1950s, a woman in medical school, especially a woman on crutches, was unusual, but she completed her M.D. in 1960 at the Medical College of Alabama.
Lampkin pursued her residency at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in 1963 and became the director of the Division of Hematology/Oncology in the Department of Pediatrics in 1973. She was the only pediatric hematologist/oncologist in Cincinnati and cared for 173 children.
By the time she retired as director 18 years later, the division had 13 full-time faculty members, six fellows, four specialty centers and two specialty clinics with the capacity to care for 1,500 children and adolescents a year.
In addition to her clinical and research work, in 1978 Dr. Lampkin and Dr. Paul McEnery met with a group of parents who had seriously ill children at Children’s Hospital and had difficulty finding an affordable place to live while their children were treated.
The plan-- to create a “home away from home”-- inspired a successful $1.3 million fundraising effort which Dr. Lampkin helped lead. In 1982, it resulted in the opening of the Children’s Family House. Later renamed the Ronald McDonald House, the facility has provided a convenient, supportive home for 22,000 families over the last 20 years.
“We are the third-largest of 310 Ronald McDonald Houses worldwide, thanks in large part to Dr. Lampkin’s vision and early leadership,” commented Jennifer Goodin, the executive director of the Ronald McDonald House who, through no coincidence, named her youngest daughter Beatrice.
In 1993, Dr. Lampkin led a group committed to doing something for children impacted by parental substance abuse. Their commitment grew into the creation of GLAD House (Giving Life a Dream), where Dr. Lampkin served as the first president. After years of planning and fundraising, GLAD House opened in 1998 in a revitalized building on the grounds of St. Aloysius Orphanage in Bond Hill.
The program targets children between 5 and 12 years old, when they “are still at an age that you can mold and motivate their behavior” said Dr. Lampkin. Each day, the staff and volunteers empower the children by teaching them “The Seven C’s”—I didn’t cause it; I can’t cure it; I can’t control it, but I can help take care of myself by communicating my feelings, making healthy choices and by celebrating myself.
Through her work at Children’s and her passion and commitment to the region, the children of Cincinnati have benefitted from the care and leadership of Beatrice Lampkin since 1963.
James M. Zimmerman
Over the course of 39 years, James Zimmerman worked his way to the top leadership of his company and, at the same time, became a leader in his adopted home of Cincinnati.
Zimmerman first moved to Cincinnati and the Federated headquarters in 1968 and, after serving in a wide variety of leadership positions across the country, returned to Cincinnati in 1988 as president and chief operating officer of Federated.
After a century of dominating American retailing, traditional department stores faced growing competition—both from discount stores and specialty stores. Losing electronics, toys, books and furniture forced traditional department stores to focus increasingly on clothing, a sector in which sales did not maintain pace with the rest of the economy. Federated had to adapt.
Fellow Great Living Cincinnatian John Pepper has characterized the situation Zimmerman faced as fraught with “massive challenges.”
In 1990, Zimmerman helped steer the company through bankruptcy. The acquisition of the high profile Macy’s Department Stores in 1994 and Broadway Stores in 1995 set the backdrop for Zimmerman being named chairman and chief executive officer in 1997.
Over the next seven years, Zimmerman oversaw the rationalization of the many different Federated components, closing unproductive stores and rebranding others under the Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s banners. At the same time, the company navigated the transition from traditional catalogue sales to the new world of online retailing.
Between 1997 and 2004, Zimmerman “laid the foundation for Macy’s emergence today as the single strongest department store chain in America,” according to Pepper.
While with Federated, Zimmerman was always active in community affairs, whether supporting the United Way of Greater Cincinnati, serving on the Cincinnati Business Committee or helping found 3CDC. But no effort has been more important or yielded more fruit than his leadership in the field of early childhood education.
In the months after the 2001 riots, the Cincinnati Community Action Now Commission (CAN) identified a core concern of improving the prospects of at-risk, pre-school children. Recognizing that 80-90 percent of all brain development occurs before a person reaches six years of age, James Zimmerman volunteered to chair Success By 6 although he began with admittedly very little knowledge about early-childhood development.
Sallie Westheimer, the president of 4C for Children, praises Zimmerman’s ability to move things forward. “Jim has little patience for the never-ending process that often characterizes community planning efforts, and frequently says something to the effect of, ‘have we got it 90 percent right? Then let’s go.’ Much of the progress of Success By 6 over the years has been because of Jim’s just-do-it attitude.”
When faced with massive challenges, whether in the business or civic arenas, James Zimmerman has revealed the leadership skills that make good things happen.
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