Charles C. Gates
Years ago, Charles Gates began talking with his children – Diane Gates Wallach, 52, of Denver, and John Gates, 49, of Aspen, about the benefits stem cell research promised for so many people despite the risks and uncertainties of frontier medicine.
So ‘it was natural’ for his children to donate $6 million to the University of Colorado School of Medicine in memory of the Denver businessman. The gift, the largest of its kind to the school, established the Charles C. Gates Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Biology Program, which will focus on research that could cure debilitating diseases.
A generous philanthropist, Mr. Gates believed in transformational giving as an investment in a community and a cause. He liked to make gifts big enough to fundamentally change an organization, but gifts that wouldn’t create new burdens for those organizations. All across Denver, his family’s gifts – often capital gifts – attest to that philosophy.
‘My dad was the sort of man who took risks when he felt they might reap great rewards,” says his daughter, Diane. She tells one of her father’s favorite stories to illustrate this philosophy.
When wagon trains headed West and came to a challenging creek, a “real man” tossed his hat to the other side. Since no real man would leave his hat behind, tossing it across committed him to ford the creek to retrieve it and carry on. Wallach says that to her father, tossing the hat symbolized a commitment to take the risks necessary to keep moving toward a goal.
Charles C. Gates, former chairman of the board and CEO of the Gates Corporation and Gates Rubber Company, died on August 28, 2005, at his home in Denver. He was 84.
Mr. Gates was appointed vice president of the Gates Rubber Company in 1951. He became president and chairman of the board in 1961, upon the death of his father, and subsequently led the company to international prominence by the time it was sold to Tomkins plc in 1996. Many credit Mr. Gates’ engineering innovations and forward thinking business tactics with transforming the company from a regional manufacturing company into one of the largest automotive and industrial hose and belt manufacturing firms in the world.