Bob Perry Needs a Hug
The biggest campaign contributor in the country is a reclusive Houston homebuilder who doesn’t cooperate with the press (until now), never poses for photographs (until now), and keeps his personal life top secret (until now). Maybe it’s because so many people blame him for dragging American politics into the gutter.
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Perry did not come from wealth. Not by a long shot. He was born Bobby Jack Perry in a small farmhouse in rural Bosque County in 1932, in a stretch of land northwest of Waco known as the Blackstump Valley. His father, W. C. Perry, was the principal of a small elementary school. In the summers, W. C. picked cotton, labored on construction crews, and pumped gas as he worked his way toward a graduate degree in education from Baylor University. He took a job as principal of Meridian High School in 1943, when his son Bobby was eleven. (W. C. Perry ultimately became dean of men and vice president of student affairs at Baylor, where he had the distinction, in 1967, of expelling his son’s eventual beneficiary, Tom DeLay, for various infractions, including drinking and painting parts of the Texas A&M campus Baylor green.)
Meridian was, by all accounts, a pleasant place to grow up. “Meridian was a farm center, and people did not have a lot of money,” recalls Donna Anderson, a childhood friend of Perry’s, “but it was a friendly town. It was also a very small place. A trip to Waco was a big deal. A trip to Dallas was shooting the moon. Nowadays, Bob and I are world travelers, but the world was a very different place back then.” Though the Perry family was far from wealthy, they owned a trim, modest, stucco house, were the first in town to own a television, and could afford to buy a new car every three years, which they went to Detroit to pick up.
Anderson remembers Perry as a polite kid who was a budding capitalist. “He used to have rabbits,” she says. “My father, who thought the world of him, used to let him have lumber to build rabbit hutches.” Perry raised the rabbits, slaughtered them with a lead pipe, hung them up, skinned them, gutted them, and then sold them. He bought goats and sheep to sell at auctions, hawked melons on the street, and raised and sold banty hens. He also worked at the local hospital and the local food market. He played football and ran track, and friends say he was popular and well liked.
After graduating from high school (his class contained 22 people), Perry attended Baylor, where he majored in history. After graduating, Perry started working as a high school history teacher. He went on to teach and coach football and other sports for the next ten years in San Angelo and the Waco area. During the summers, he toiled on construction crews, and in 1965 he ended up in Houston working for established homebuilders. Two years later he moved to Houston and started Perry Homes.
“Perry told me that he built the business more conservatively than most people build a business,” says spokesman Holm. “He kept his risks very low and kept his equity-to-debt ratio very safe. Perry Homes has always grown in a measured fashion.” It was this fundamental conservatism that allowed Perry to survive the real estate, banking, and homebuilding cataclysm that took place in Texas in the eighties. Companies with any significant debt were wiped out. According to Raymond Palacios, who worked for Perry Homes from 1986 to 1996 and now owns a successful car dealership in El Paso, “Mr. Perry went through very hard times because the mid-eighties were very tough for the housing market. The business really took off with the building of master-planned communities. There was double-digit growth.” The company’s success was spurred in part by the fact that many homebuilders were, by that time, bankrupt, casualties of the real estate bust. Perry’s master-planned communities are now a common sight, especially around Texas’s major cities.
Perhaps because he has made his money off those who can afford to buy their own homes, a significant portion of Perry’s charitable giving has targeted those who cannot. Ten miles across the border from Brownsville, through the teeming, cluttered streets of the booming Mexican city of Matamoros, is a private orphanage called the Matamoros Children’s Home. Also known as Casa Hogar, the home houses 186 orphaned, abused, abandoned, or neglected children from ages four through eighteen. It is run by a doctor named Saul Camacho and his wife, Maria. Its principal benefactor is Bob Perry.
Casa Hogar is not the only orphanage Perry supports outside the United States. There are many more in Mexico, in Reynosa and elsewhere, that I was not invited to tour, or even informed of. He supports another in El Salvador that he does acknowledge. On a tour of Casa Hogar’s brand-new, Perry-donated dining hall in January, I saw a Christmas tree covered with cards the children had made thanking Mr. Perry, as he is known, for his kindness. Perry may be alternately admired, feared, or loathed in Texas political circles, but here, he is loved. He is a frequent visitor, and the kids all know him.
According to Perry’s friends, the lesson I should draw from my tour of the orphanage is this: While it is typical of his philanthropic work, it is also just a small sample of the activities in which he has long been involved. “He has dozens and dozens of these things going at a time,” says Michael Stevens, a Houston developer who chairs the Governor’s Business Council and is one of Perry’s closest friends. “I have never called him to do something for people that he has not done. His charitable giving is far larger than what you have seen in the political arena.” He does not even tell his friends the full scope of what he does, according to Weekley. “I consider Bob a good friend, and I had no knowledge of the orphanages,” he says.
By all accounts, Perry is extraordinarily, and spontaneously, generous in his giving. It is driven by what Holm terms “the multiplier effect, the idea that he can go and help someone who is a net drain on society and turn him into a net plus. It is a version of ‘Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.’ ” Though Stevens, like Perry, does not like to acknowledge his charitable gifts, he offers two examples of projects he and Perry have developed together. One aims to give jobs to soldiers who have lost limbs in the war in Iraq. Stevens says the two men have sunk “hundreds of thousands of dollars” into the project. “We plan to roll it out in six months,” he says. “The plan is to get corporations throughout the U.S. to employ injured veterans.” The other project is typical of what friends say is the more personal side of Perry’s giving. When former U. S. attorney Michael Shelby, a man Perry and Stevens admired greatly, died after a long struggle with cancer, the two men made sizable donations to a college scholarship fund for his children. “This kind of thing happens all of the time,” says Stevens. Indeed, one of Perry’s classmates from Meridian High School says that this sort of private, personal charity extends to his old hometown. “Over the years, any of the people we went to high school with who had money problems, he helped them,” says Hiram Woosley, who played in the backfield with Perry for the Meridian High Yellow Jackets.
The list goes on: $100,000 to the United Negro College Fund, $1 million for a YMCA in League City, more than $1 million to fund scholarships for the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Houston. “A lot of people are surprised to learn that we are friends,” says Tatcho Mindiola, the sociology professor who directs the center. “He knows that I am a liberal Democrat, and we have candid discussions and discuss our views. I discovered that he is a strong supporter of affirmative action, and that would surprise a lot of people in the Republican party. He knows that discrimination is real, and he thinks there should be special outreach to get Hispanics involved in education. He is not a rabid right-winger. Simply not.”
THOUGH HE NOW GIVES MASSIVELY to national campaigns, it was in his home state of Texas that the intensely private Perry first entered the brawling, public, intemperate world of politics. He was not always a Republican. Prior to 1978, he was a Democrat and gave money primarily to Democrats. That year he supported incumbent Dolph Briscoe in the Democratic primary for governor. Briscoe, a conservative Democrat, lost to the liberal John Hill. Republican candidate Bill Clements then called on Perry, who was already wealthy enough to appear on politicians’ radar screens. Clements laid out his pro-business, pro-jobs agenda and asked for Perry’s support. The result was that Perry ended up heading Democrats for Clements and co-chairing his winning campaign. Three years later fellow Houstonian James Baker, who was then White House chief of staff under Reagan and who knew Perry from the local political circuit, said to Perry, in effect, “You believe everything that we believe, or even more so. You should switch sides.” Baker converted him, and Perry was soon swept up in the Reagan revolution as a newly minted conservative Republican. (It is an interesting coincidence that 1978 was also the year Karl Rove went to work for Clements, launching a career that, like Perry’s, has been instrumental in transforming Texas from a Democratic to a Republican stronghold.)
Throughout the eighties and nineties, the political cause Perry was most passionate about was tort reform, the campaign to rein in huge, multimillion-dollar jury verdicts in favor of plaintiffs. Over the past 25 years, he could usually be counted on to support any candidate for the House or Senate who was opposed by either a trial lawyer or by someone funded by a trial lawyer. He has given millions to Texans for Lawsuit Reform. “He is a patriot, and as a patriot he believes that there are major public policy issues that are very important for the country, like tort reform,” says Weekley. “Without it, he thinks our civil justice system is not on solid ground. If people lose faith in the ability to get a fair trial, then it is a threat to our civil society, and he literally sees it that way.”
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