Speaker 1: And we continue with our American stories, and up next
Speaker 1: the story of Maelan Burnham, a business leader in San
Speaker 1: Diego who's made a massive impact on his city, as
Speaker 1: so many business leaders do. By the way, I spent
Speaker 1: quite a bit of time with Maelan and it was
Speaker 1: a real pleasure, a gift actually for me. And he
Speaker 1: talked a lot about pivot points in his life, and
Speaker 1: there were several. So when you hear the word pivots,
Speaker 1: think about your own life and those moments were a
Speaker 1: turn one way or the other. Here's our own Monty
Speaker 1: Montgomery with the story of a man who truly put
Speaker 1: his community before himself. Mayland Burnham is a philanthropist, a sailor,
Speaker 1: and known as mister San Diego, which makes perfect sense.
Speaker 1: He's lived there his whole life. A lot of people say, well,
Speaker 1: why wouldn't you want to move around and see more country,
Speaker 1: line said, because I've got the best place in the
Speaker 1: world to live. My first pivot that I can imagine
Speaker 1: or think about was aged seventeen in August of nineteen
Speaker 1: forty five. My dad was His sport was golf, and
Speaker 1: he played business golf. That is on Wednesday afternoon and
Speaker 1: Saturday mornings, he'd take a client out and play golf.
Speaker 1: My mother, her recreation was beach, swimming, suntan and those
Speaker 1: type of things. So she took my brother and I
Speaker 1: to these little private beaches, not private, but public beaches,
Speaker 1: but you had to go between two houses to find them.
Speaker 1: In this area of Point Limit. We'd go several times
Speaker 1: a week. I guess my brother in line, and we
Speaker 1: would see these little junior sailboats, sixteen foot sailboats called
Speaker 1: a starlet, and they were all from the Samuel Yacht Club.
Speaker 1: These little junior boats that they practiced and raced in,
Speaker 1: sailed back and forth in front of our beach. Never
Speaker 1: once in a while, I want him to say, hey, kids,
Speaker 1: you want to go for a ride. And we'd swim
Speaker 1: out and climb on these little boats. After a couple
Speaker 1: of summers are doing that. My mother taught my dad
Speaker 1: in the joining the Sanniel Yacht Club and they didn't
Speaker 1: know one another boat from another. But that's how I
Speaker 1: got started in the sport or sailboat racing. So fast
Speaker 1: forward to nineteen forty five, I just graduated from Point
Speaker 1: him All High School. As soon as our graduation in June,
Speaker 1: most of my buddies signed up for the Navy, and
Speaker 1: I was prepared to do that after the Summer Hawai
Speaker 1: Navy because we were a navy town and that's what
Speaker 1: we knew, and the people and so one's little Ford.
Speaker 1: But as Mainland mentioned earlier, he was only seventeen, so
Speaker 1: while his older friends could join the Navy, he couldn't.
Speaker 1: So Mainland's parents helped him and his sailboat crew do
Speaker 1: something else. My folks sponsored my crew to send us
Speaker 1: on the train to Stanford, Connecticut. Darry Yochler was hosting
Speaker 1: the international competition for the championship of the Star Class
Speaker 1: International World Championship, which was now a twenty two foot
Speaker 1: boat that I had acquired or my folks acquired for me. Anyway,
Speaker 1: we ended up winning that we got it, and we
Speaker 1: came back home on the train. And about halfway between
Speaker 1: New York City and Los Angeles on the train, it
Speaker 1: stopped in the middle of nowhere. We didn't know why.
Speaker 1: It turned out that it was VJ Day. Everybody was
Speaker 1: celebrating the war's over. So when we get to Los
Speaker 1: Angeles get off the train, my mother and father came
Speaker 1: up to big us up in the car and the
Speaker 1: first thing, they said, well, congratulations song. And next thing,
Speaker 1: my dad said, son, you're going to Stanford and said, no, Dad,
Speaker 1: I'm going in the Navy with all my buddies. You
Speaker 1: know that. And he said, know the war is over,
Speaker 1: you know that, and the draft is going to stop
Speaker 1: sooner or later. And he says, I've already got you
Speaker 1: a role. And that was my number one pivot that
Speaker 1: I did. I decided that I would go into industrial
Speaker 1: engineering because even though my dad said, son, you know
Speaker 1: you're in a great position. You get in ato being
Speaker 1: the CEO of General Motors or Westinghouse someday, and the
Speaker 1: morning I thought about that, I don't think I want
Speaker 1: to do that. And so anyway, I took industrial engineering
Speaker 1: and that was the best thing I've ever done as
Speaker 1: far as education is concerned. So I graduated with a
Speaker 1: Bachelor of Science degree and industrial engineering, and a week
Speaker 1: later I was employee bought my father in John Burnham
Speaker 1: and Company. The name of the company was after my grandfather,
Speaker 1: who had passed away before I was born. I never
Speaker 1: knew him. At that time, I was the eleventh employee
Speaker 1: and about half of the business was in real estate brokerage.
Speaker 1: So I decided and my dad decided probably that how
Speaker 1: to be started out in the mortgage business and learned
Speaker 1: a little bit about not only about real estate, but
Speaker 1: how to praise a property and engineering. If you think
Speaker 1: about it has to do with structures. Well, real estate
Speaker 1: has to do with structures. I got so that I
Speaker 1: could if I had a potential buyer client that wanted
Speaker 1: to spend a million dollars buying an apartment house, in
Speaker 1: a moment or two, I could figure out the size
Speaker 1: of the put that department house ought to be, you know,
Speaker 1: for a million dollars or is the numbers grew five
Speaker 1: million or ten million in that So I could walk
Speaker 1: down the street here and look at the building and say,
Speaker 1: would you that one would work for Oscar? But that
Speaker 1: one over there wouldn't. So that's how I got started,
Speaker 1: and along the way you would learn many lessons his father.
Speaker 1: What I learned from my dad was disciplined. Son. We've
Speaker 1: got office hours, we've got business hours. We expect you
Speaker 1: to be here, we expect you to do this, we
Speaker 1: expect you to do that. So there I was disciplined
Speaker 1: or top discipline as to what business was all about.
Speaker 1: My dad also taught me the makeup of the company
Speaker 1: was that we were all working together. We didn't allow
Speaker 1: any one person to dominate a client by themselves exclusively.
Speaker 1: We wanted people to work together as partnerships and that
Speaker 1: type of thing. So I learned that from day one.
Speaker 1: Interesting when my brother was older, but he was in
Speaker 1: the military, So I got into the business a year
Speaker 1: before he did. His attitude grew up to be he
Speaker 1: wanted to be responsible entirely for his client. He didn't
Speaker 1: want somebody else to be part of it. And that
Speaker 1: was okay, but it wasn't the feel of my father,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't the way I was feeling. So all
Speaker 1: a lee, my father and the company bought my brother
Speaker 1: out and we helped him set up his own internance agency.
Speaker 1: So I've always been a team player in sailing. We
Speaker 1: got eleven people on the crew. If I'm a skipper,
Speaker 1: the guy on the bow is just as important as
Speaker 1: a guy that's steering the boat, because if he frews up,
Speaker 1: you lose a race. Anybody on the team screwp So
Speaker 1: I've always been oriented to that type of thing, and
Speaker 1: I don't want to be in a rut. I don't
Speaker 1: want to just say my way is the best way.
Speaker 1: And soon this team player would be in charge of
Speaker 1: his father's company at a unique time in business history
Speaker 1: that would present interesting challenges to mainland challenges he would
Speaker 1: tackle in a way that would change his life. While
Speaker 1: my dad didn't say early on when I got into
Speaker 1: the business that he was going to retire at any
Speaker 1: particular age, once he would had confidence in my steerage
Speaker 1: of the company, after the first probably six or eight
Speaker 1: years that we were together, he did. It was a surprise,
Speaker 1: and it was a pleasant surprise, because, yeah, I anticipated
Speaker 1: i'd take over the business sometimes and I had enough confidence,
Speaker 1: I guess in enough experience after a few years that
Speaker 1: when he announced, I was happy for him, and he
Speaker 1: was happy for me. And this was in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen sixties when large real estate broke reage firms like
Speaker 1: Cold Banker in Cushman Wakefield were coming out of their
Speaker 1: headquarters and putting offices satellite offices in different places of
Speaker 1: the United States, including San Diego. And after one or
Speaker 1: two of those came in not just but in real estate,
Speaker 1: but also in the insurance industry in which we were in.
Speaker 1: So when two of my three specialties in John Burnaman Company,
Speaker 1: I got a little concern because our family attitude, and
Speaker 1: it was my grandfather's and my father's attitude, that we
Speaker 1: didn't need to be the biggest, We wanted to be
Speaker 1: the best. So that meant that we were very satisfied
Speaker 1: being a regional company. But I said to myself in
Speaker 1: the mid sixties, you know, I'm seeing these big companies
Speaker 1: put in satellite offices. How am I going to survive?
Speaker 1: So what I did, and I don't know how it happened,
Speaker 1: but I decided to go talk to some of my peers.
Speaker 1: And I went to probably five or six of them
Speaker 1: in one at a time, independently, and I said, look,
Speaker 1: what do I have to do to survive against these
Speaker 1: big boys coming in here and we're dropping an office
Speaker 1: in and bringing a season manager in. And they said, Maelan,
Speaker 1: get to know the community better then the person they
Speaker 1: send in to run their office. That's what I started
Speaker 1: doing more of Mainland Burnham's life story here on our
Speaker 1: American stories, and we returned to our American stories and
Speaker 1: with Maelan Burnham and in a way the story of
Speaker 1: his own town San Diego, because he could have traveled
Speaker 1: and moved a lot, but he thought, why not just
Speaker 1: concentrate on this little batch of earth and grow my
Speaker 1: business as the city itself rode. When we last left off,
Speaker 1: Maelan had taken over his father's real estate business during
Speaker 1: a perilous time in his industry. Ultimately, Maelan would keep
Speaker 1: his father's business and decided that he wanted to follow
Speaker 1: in his dad's footsteps and retire early as well. Let's
Speaker 1: continue with Maelan's story. Retirement as not in my vocabulary.
Speaker 1: Let's start there well. At age fifty four, I wrote
Speaker 1: a letter to my five managers in my business and
Speaker 1: I told them that it was my plan that within
Speaker 1: five years I wanted to retire from business. And I
Speaker 1: just arbitrarily picked those numbers at age fifty nine and
Speaker 1: five years from the time I wrote them this letter,
Speaker 1: and I said, I would then like to sell this
Speaker 1: business to you people. I didn't put a promise, I
Speaker 1: didn't put a price, I didn't put an exact date,
Speaker 1: but sometime within five years. The end of five years
Speaker 1: was in December of eighty six, when I was in
Speaker 1: the middle of the America's Cup in Perth, Australia and
Speaker 1: sold a business to these five chaps. And there was
Speaker 1: really back then, especially, there were not many people there
Speaker 1: were full time at my age in the nonprofit world.
Speaker 1: It just wasn't being done. So I said, why not
Speaker 1: Mainland would turn entirely to community oriented projects to make
Speaker 1: his city even greater. And it wasn't long before a
Speaker 1: massive project came his way courtesy if Alan Uk, a
Speaker 1: local San Diego businessman and politician. I was sitting in
Speaker 1: my downtown office one day when I got a telephone
Speaker 1: call when Bob licked. I had already had sold the business.
Speaker 1: Bob was one of the buyers. I picked up the phone. Bobs,
Speaker 1: he said, man, I got this crazy guy and he
Speaker 1: said it run in front of him, but he got
Speaker 1: this crazy idea of bringing the USS Midway aircraft here
Speaker 1: to San Diego, making a museum out of it. And
Speaker 1: Bob says, you know, I don't know anything about the navy,
Speaker 1: or about the water, or about boats or ships. Would
Speaker 1: you mind talking to it? So I said sure, and
Speaker 1: I helped him put a group together. So that's how
Speaker 1: it got started. It was up in Bremerton, Washington, in
Speaker 1: the Navy yard and the trash yard, and showed to speak.
Speaker 1: It was out of commission. Is still the Navy ship.
Speaker 1: It took eleven years of this team to get the
Speaker 1: letter of use. Navy is kind of crazy. The reason
Speaker 1: that they won't give it to us or anybody else
Speaker 1: is they may want to put it back in service.
Speaker 1: So there was a lot of planning that we have
Speaker 1: lifetime until they want to get it back. All of
Speaker 1: this eleven year time, we had opposition, public opposition from
Speaker 1: what is known as the California Coastal Commission. California Coastal
Speaker 1: Commission is probably fifty years in existence and they have
Speaker 1: jurisdiction over what happens within a thousand feet of the
Speaker 1: coastline of the Pacific Ocean and waterways that come out
Speaker 1: the Coastal Commission. Their problem was that the midway was
Speaker 1: going to block the view. The Coastal Commission want people
Speaker 1: to have access to the water and the beaches and
Speaker 1: the coastline, but they said, if we park it here,
Speaker 1: it's going to block the view. Whither or nuts because
Speaker 1: can't we move fifty feet or one hundred feet and
Speaker 1: get the view back? Was sure he can't, and the
Speaker 1: team would have to present in front of the Commission
Speaker 1: to get final approval for the USS Midway project. So
Speaker 1: halfway through our presentation, somebody got up to the mic
Speaker 1: and said, the Midway. We got this backwards, the midway,
Speaker 1: not get to block the view. The midway will be
Speaker 1: the view, and the whole audience erupted in chairs. Finally
Speaker 1: we got one hundred percent approval and open the Midway
Speaker 1: in two thousand and four, twelve years after the project
Speaker 1: initially started. The museum would open and beat nearly all
Speaker 1: the expectations people had for it. Two years before we
Speaker 1: got the ship, I picked up the phone one day
Speaker 1: and I got a call from one of the riders
Speaker 1: for the art newspaper Union Tribute. I picked up the
Speaker 1: phone and he says, hey, man, this is So and So.
Speaker 1: He said, I want to talk to you about the Midway.
Speaker 1: AND said, oh. And he says, you know I cover
Speaker 1: all the museums in San Diego for all these years,
Speaker 1: mister Burnham, if you are fortunate enough to get the
Speaker 1: Midway here, it's going to be the biggest mistake of
Speaker 1: your life. And I said, well, why do you say that?
Speaker 1: And he says, well, you know I cover all the
Speaker 1: museums and so and he says, so I know all
Speaker 1: of the attendance reads. I said, okay, and he says,
Speaker 1: you're proposing that in the first year, you're going to
Speaker 1: get four hundred thousand paid attendee and he howls. He said,
Speaker 1: you're crazy. You're never going to get that. After he
Speaker 1: howled about the four hundred thousand, said well, hold on,
Speaker 1: excuse me, publicly said that we had mentioned our business
Speaker 1: plan four hundred thousands. What we canlo I said, before
Speaker 1: we got to that point, our consultants came back and
Speaker 1: said they thought we'd do six hundred thousand. Well, this
Speaker 1: guy gave another howl on the phone. You know, Oh,
Speaker 1: you guys are out of your mind. The first year
Speaker 1: we did eight hundred thousand and has grown every year
Speaker 1: since then. We are the fifth largest paid attendee museum
Speaker 1: in the country. This is an icon for San Diego.
Speaker 1: The USS Midway is also part of Mainland's legacy in
Speaker 1: the town he's lived his entire life in, loves so much.
Speaker 1: Legacy is more than a career. If you think about
Speaker 1: your career, I want to be the best X, then
Speaker 1: in my opinion, you're too limited. I'm a multi tasket
Speaker 1: interested person, not necessarily an one that's an expert in
Speaker 1: all these things, but I never wanted to be a
Speaker 1: single type interested person. When I think about career, I'm
Speaker 1: thinking about more than especially I'm thinking about the nonprofit
Speaker 1: world and what San Diego was all about community before. So,
Speaker 1: by the way, I read a lot of book but
Speaker 1: they're I don't read novels, I don't read personalities. I
Speaker 1: read it. I try to read about the future. Everything
Speaker 1: I do, I try to think about the future and
Speaker 1: anyway or this book it was entitled the Why, the What,
Speaker 1: and the How, and they explain those questions in sequence.
Speaker 1: So I've adopted that. So when I think about doing something,
Speaker 1: I use those three questions why why do I want
Speaker 1: to get involved? And if I can't figure that out,
Speaker 1: then don't do don't spend any more time. Well, mostly
Speaker 1: when I answer that question is because I want to
Speaker 1: helpmate San Diego a better place to live, work and play. Okay,
Speaker 1: then go to the second question, the what what are
Speaker 1: you going to do to help do that? How are
Speaker 1: you going to do that? What are you going to propose?
Speaker 1: And so on? And if I can't answer that question,
Speaker 1: I tear it up and go do something else, and
Speaker 1: then I finally get down, Okay, how how are you
Speaker 1: going to do the what And you know, I think
Speaker 1: because I'm I'm a joiner, because I'm a team player.
Speaker 1: I try to think not of me, but I try
Speaker 1: to think of the team. When I look back on
Speaker 1: the mighty skyline of my hometown, I can still see
Speaker 1: beneath the skyscrapers, the great ships, and the stadium, the
Speaker 1: San Diego that was, that is, and that will be.
Speaker 1: I'm humbled by the site, by the fact that I
Speaker 1: was given the chance to be part of that history
Speaker 1: for longer than I could ever have imagined, that I
Speaker 1: am still part of the story. And think, what a
Speaker 1: lucky guy I am. And great job by Monty Montgomery
Speaker 1: on the production, and what a lucky guy I was
Speaker 1: to spend some real time with maelanm Burnham. MAELM Burnham's story,
Speaker 1: in a way, a story of the city he loves,
Speaker 1: San Diego. Here on our American Stories