UMass Amherst to Give Three Distinguished Achievement Awards at Undergraduate Commencement; Alumnus Earl Stafford is Speaker
May 12, 2009
| Contact: | Patrick J. Callahan 413/545-0444 |
AMHERST, Mass. – The University of Massachusetts Amherst will give three individuals Distinguished Achievement Awards at the Undergraduate Commencement ceremony on Saturday, May 23 at McGuirk Alumni Stadium. Recipient and alumnus Earl W. Stafford (shown at right) will be the featured speaker at the event.
This year’s recipients are Stafford, an alumnus and Virginia businessman; Robert Barker Brack, an alumnus and businessman from Milford, and Aaron D. Spencer, founder, director and chairman emeritus of UNO Chicago Grill pizzerias. Distinguished Achievement Awards honor individuals from outside the immediate UMass Amherst campus community who have made significant contributions within a given profession, industry or creative domain.
BIOGRAPHICAL PROFILES
Earl W. Stafford is the epitome of a self-made man and has found remarkable success while never losing his grace, humility and enormous capacity for hard work. One of 11 children born to a Baptist preacher and a homemaker mother in Holly Park, N.J., Stafford’s early life was materially modest but spiritually rich. He spent 20 years in the U.S. Air Force, rising from enlisted man to the rank of captain. He earned his bachelor's degree from UMass Amherst in 1976. He then earned an MBA from Southern Illinois University in 1984 and completed the OPM Executive Program at Harvard Business School. His ongoing loyalty to the campus is reflected in his service as a founding director of the board of the UMass Amherst Foundation.
After leaving the military, Stafford pursued his dream of starting a successful company. Despite years of setbacks and disappointments, he built Universal Systems and Technology Inc., better known as Unitech, into a success. Over a 22-year period it grew from a one-man shop into a 300-employee business with annual revenues of more than $150 million.
By 2008, Stafford was ready to sell the company and enjoy the company of his wife and three children. A life of ease in retirement, however, was not his style. Instead, he established The Stafford Foundation, dedicated to helping those less fortunate and in need. The foundation’s first act: creating and funding The People’s Inaugural Project, which hosted some 1,000 underserved citizens—including veterans and the poor and homeless—at their own ball in Washington, D.C., celebrating the historic inauguration of President Barak Obama on Jan. 20, 2009.
Robert Barker Brack is a business owner, mentor and philanthropist. He is chairman of the board of Barker Steel, a fourth-generation family business and New England’s largest fabricator of reinforcing bars for general construction. From its nine locations, Barker distributes more than a thousand products found in high-rise buildings throughout the Northeast and in many of the newer structures on the UMass Amherst campus.
Brack earned his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from UMass Amherst in 1960 and has been a generous supporter of the department of civil and environmental engineering ever since. For more than a decade he has served on the department’s advisory board and has established an undergraduate scholarship endowment, graduate student fellowships, and a post-doctoral fellowship in structures and mechanics. Brack is a special champion of the Structural Engineering and Mechanics Group, to which he has donated materials for experimental research and otherwise helped increase its research capabilities and overall strength. He is president of the Concrete Reinforcing Steel Institute Foundation, which funds and administers graduate and undergraduate scholarships for architectural and engineering students and scholarships, or training programs at vocational/technical schools.
Brack has established two philanthropic initiatives in memory of his late wife—the Joan H. Brack Memorial Golf Tournament has raised more than $750,000 for the Jimmy Fund and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and the Joan Brack Adult Learning Center, in Framingham, which graduates between 10 and 15 women each year.
Aaron D. Spencer is best known for creating the Pizzeria Uno restaurant chain (now called UNO Chicago Grill), but this salesman, inventor, entrepreneur and restaurateur is most honored at UMass Amherst as the unofficial “godfather of Commonwealth College.” Spencer, born in 1931, grew up outside Boston in a poor family, and from the first showed an entrepreneurial flair. When he graduated from Boston University he was earning more by selling baby furniture door-to-door than he could at his intended profession, insurance. He soon began accumulating a series of product and mechanical patents.
In 1966, while a national sales manager in the children’s furniture business, Spencer opened Boston’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. He eventually opened 33 in the area, becoming one of KFC’s top franchisees. After sampling deep-dish pizza on a trip to Chicago, Spencer spent three years winning licensing rights to franchise the product nationally. In 1979, he opened the first Pizzeria Uno. Within six years Spencer sold his KFC restaurants to become the new venture’s full-time developer. Today, it has over 200 restaurants worldwide.
In 1996, the first of his eight years on the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, Spencer proposed a public honors college for the state. He felt it should attract some of the state’s best students by matching the quality of the finest private liberal arts colleges while offering the opportunities of a large research university. The board unanimously chose UMass Amherst to house the new initiative, and Commonwealth College has gone on to exceed expectations in drawing exceptional students to this campus.
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