Allen & Deanna Alevy

Beaten almost daily as the only Jewish boy in his school, he answered a Charles Atlas ad at ten, taught himself to box, and the next time the taunting started, he ended it himself. He never ran again — not from a creditor, a rival, or a fight worth having.

He kept a quiet definition of hell: standing one day before the man he could have become, and facing the distance between them. It left no room for blaming circumstances — only for closing the gap himself, while there was still time.

They married quietly in Mexico at twenty-one and renewed the vow each decade since. For seventy years Deanna has been his sharpest adviser and his softest landing — sitting in on his toughest negotiations, raising four children on a carnival lot, and steadying the home through every storm. The "We" he credits for every "Me."

The rule never changed from the first gift to the largest: the ten percent is set aside before anything else, because it was never his to begin with. Build the room first, he says, and the people will always have somewhere to belong.

He measures a gift not by what it provides but by what it makes possible. Scholarships, schools, and campus houses aren't charity to him — they're the machinery that lets the next generation stand on its own, and then reach back for the one behind it.

He once smuggled Judaica past the KGB to Refuseniks in Soviet Russia, for the same reason the family moved within days of October 7th: when one Jew is in danger, there is no "over there." The help goes where the need is, immediately.

He built a home across five adjoining lots so that children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren would always have a reason to gather in one place. What he wants for his own family, he funds for others: the conditions that let families begin and endure.

The 1992 riots destroyed nearly everything he owned, uninsured. He didn't flinch and he didn't fold — he rebuilt on a single bank's trust and repaid every dollar within five years. Obstacles, he says, only feel impossible until you're already in the water.

When he handed the company to his grandson, he was blunt about who it really belongs to: people not yet born. Every decision is weighed on a three-hundred-year horizon — which is precisely why none of it is for sale.