Profile: Member of the Board of Governors
Mr. Paul E. Griffin III
(Winter 2006 Newsletter)
Paul E. Griffin III was born in Long Beach, California, and
has lived in Southern California his entire life. A 1979 graduate
of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), he
is a member of the home-building Griffin family that over
five generations has developed an outstanding reputation for
producing quality residential communities.
Mr. Griffin is the President and CEO of Griffin Industries,
a company he founded in 1992. A major force in the residential
home-building market throughout California, Griffin Industries
has expanded in recent years to Georgia and Florida. Mr. Griffin
is soon off to the Gulf state of Dubai where he will open
discussions regarding a 2000-house master plan with schools,
shopping centers, and offices.
In 1997, Paul Griffin was honored as the “Builder of
the Year” by the Building Industry Association. In 2000,
he was similarly honored by the charitable organization Habitat
for Humanity.
When Mr. Griffin was a teenager, his father presented him
with a hammer, a carpenter’s belt, and the notion that
the best way for him to learn the family business was to start
from the ground up. All through his high school and college
years, Paul worked at residential construction sites for his
father’s company, Griffin Homes Company. It was his father’s
goal to show the young Paul what hard work was all about and
to have him learn firsthand the particulars of the building
trade. Paul remembers those years fondly and believes they
taught him very well the importance of doing a job to the
best of one’s ability—and the importance of a good
education.
Upon his graduation from UCLA, things began to change for
Mr. Griffin. First, he traded in his hammer for a briefcase
and began working in the offices of the Griffin Homes Company
instead of at construction sites. Though office work did not
require swinging a hammer under the hot sun, learning to deal
with the legal and financial imperatives that come with the
home-building trade had its own brace of challenges. Mr. Griffin
soon proved particularly adept at meeting these head on.
His life changed in an even more dramatic way soon after
he graduated from college when he met and later married his
wife, Marsha. Mr. and Mrs. Griffin are now the devoted parents
of son Paul Erin (19) and daughter Aurora (15), two children
of note-worthy accomplishments.
Suffering from a form of autism, Paul Erin has had to overcome
many educational challenges during the course of his life.
But with the hands-on attention and extraordinary commitment
of his father—and especially his mother—Paul Erin
has managed to be fully integrated and mainstreamed into every
school system in which he has been enrolled since the time
he was in the fifth grade. He is now essentially an “A”
student, has taken college preparatory classes in high school,
and has become a kind of model in his school district of how
children with disabilities such as autism are capable of great
things when they have dedicated parents like Paul and Marsha
Griffin.
Aurora is an accomplished, internationally-ranked horsewoman.
At the same time, she maintains stellar academic credentials
and is a member of the Johns Hopkins Talented Youth Program,
the result of having achieved outstanding SAT scores when
she was only 12 years old. Though their daughter has several
prestigious Ivy League institutions showing interest in her
as a future student, it is the hope of the Griffins that Aurora
choose Thomas Aquinas College for her undergraduate education.
When he joined Legatus in 1994, Mr. Griffin soon met
fellow member and College president, Dr. Thomas Dillon. Not
longer after, Paul began supporting the College; in 1999,
he was appointed to its Board of Governors. He serves as the
Chair of the Board’s Campus Planning Committee, and he
is a member of its Executive Committee. He also serves on
the Board’s Development Committee. Paul is delighted
to use his industry expertise to help guide the College in
its efforts to complete its Master Plan for its campus, and
he has taken a special interest in the Chapel project.
Mr. Griffin believes that Thomas Aquinas College is an exceptional
training ground for the leaders of tomorrow, a place where
young men and women are stimulated intellectually, formed
spiritually, and prepared well to meet the demands of modern,
twenty-first century society—far better, in fact, than
many of their counterparts who graduate from other institutions.
-- Qtrly Newsletter, Winter 2006
|
