Money can't buy happiness - Money is only a tool -- W. Michigan benefactor & billionaire died Nov. 25, 2011

from Michigan Live website (Saturday, Nov. 26, 2011):

"Fred Meijer, Chairman Emeritus of Meijer Corp., passed away Friday evening, November 25, 2011 at the Spectrum Health System in Grand Rapids, Michigan after suffering a stroke in his home in the early morning hours.  More information on arrangements will be forthcoming. In the meantime, the Meijer family thanks everyone for their thoughts and prayers and requests their privacy be respected at this difficult time."
Mr. Meijer — Fred to most who knew him — will be remembered for his philanthrophy. He invested millions into the West Michigan, including creating the Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park, which quickly became one of the state’s top destinations.  Meijer’s family became one of the richest in the country, yet the patriarch of the Walker-based retail chain once remarked: “Money is only a tool. And money doesn’t buy happiness.“

If that’s true, Mr. Meijer found pleasure in giving much of his away, and the people of West Michigan were the beneficiaries.
Mr. Meijer’s rise in the world of business began simply enough in Greenville during the depths of the Great Depression. When his father, Hendrik, a Dutch immigrant, couldn’t find a tenant for the space above his barber shop, he opened a small grocery there in 1934.
Frederik Gerhard Hendrik Meijer was born Dec. 7, 1919, in the family’s farmhouse on the north edge of Greenville. His surname might have been Meyer or Myer but for a Greenville attorney, who used several variations on the name while filling out legal papers. Fred’s father decided to go with the spelling on his naturalization papers: Meijer.
As a boy, Mr. Meijer worked on the farm and delivered milk door-to-door by horse-drawn wagon, while dreaming of attending college, perhaps studying history. He gave up that dream to help run the store.
In 1942, he and his father opened a second store in Cedar Springs, and a few years later, Mr. Meijer married Lena Rader, a cashier in the Greenville store. In 1949, they opened a third store on Fuller Avenue in Grand Rapids. The chain continued to grow, and, in 1962, father and son considered a venture unprecedented in the retail business: combining a grocery store with a general merchandise discount store.
On the verge of going ahead with it, Mr. Meijer asked his father, “What should we do?“
Hendrik Meijer mulled the question a moment, then said, “Well, I don’t think I’d do it.“
Mr. Meijer was surprised, knowing his father had favored the venture. Why would he back out now?
“If we go broke and I die, I don’t want you to blame me,“ the elder Meijer explained. “I want it to be your decision.“
It was the father’s way of passing command to the son. Mr. Meijer went ahead with the plan, expanding the grocery store on 28th Street and Kalamazoo Avenue into the chain’s first hypermarket — or supercenter — called Meijer’s Thrifty Acres. More stores followed in Lansing, the Detroit area, then into adjacent states. As the chain grew, it caught the attention of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton who tried to meet with Mr. Meijer in the 1970s to talk about buying the Meijer business. Not wanting to offend Walton by saying no, Mr. Meijer said he was too busy.

Had Walton succeeded in buying the Meijer chain, it would have dramatically altered the course of Grand Rapids’ economy, which grew over the following decades with Meijer and other major local companies.