He Grew a Company, a Cause
Horace Hagedorn, who co-founded Miracle-Gro and was noted philanthropist on LI, dies at age 89

BY RHODA AMON
STAFF WRITER

February 1, 2005

Horace Hagedorn, the Long Island philanthropist who built a fortune in garden products and then spent the last part of his life giving it away had an often-repeated slogan: "You can't keep taking the good stuff out of the earth, you have to keep putting something back."

Hagedorn, who co-founded the Miracle-Gro plant food company in 1950, died in his sleep in his Sands Point home early yesterday. He was 89.

Though failing health had curtailed his outside activities since November, he held frequent meetings in his home, including one on Sunday, with representatives of the causes he passionately supported. "He admired people in the nonprofit world and wanted to keep in touch with their work," said his wife, Amy Maiello Hagedorn, his partner in philanthropy.

The Horace and Amy Hagedorn Fund contributed more than $26.4 million to 330 nonprofit organizations since 1996 through the Long Island Community Foundation, which distributes charitable donations.

"Horace was so loved by so many people, not just for the money. He was a great guy and lived a rich, full life," said Suzy Sonenberg, executive director of the foundation. "He was a happy man who truly loved people."

In the mid-1980s Hagedorn and his six children created a family charitable fund. The family's major effort in 1991 was to pluck 50 children from the fifth grade in a low-income Brooklyn school and guarantee their college education if they stayed with the program. Forty "Miracle-Gro Kids," as they were called, got high school diplomas and went on to college.

The next great charitable effort began in 1995 after the Port Washington-based Miracle-Gro merged with the Scotts Co. of Marysville, Ohio, and Hagedorn became a full-time philanthropist.

"He made a difference in this world," said his son, James Hagedorn of Sands Point, now president and chairman of the board of Scotts. He said he remembered his father as "a hard-nosed, very competitive guy."

One of Hagedorn's last visitors was media producer Ron Rudaitis, with whom he was working on a documentary on helping the deaf. Aided by Hagedorn's daughter, Susan, Rudaitis produced a film on Hagedorn's life called "Meet Mr. Miracle-Gro," which helped raise more than $500,000 at a program last June to benefit Sustainable Long Island, a smart-growth organization co-founded by Amy Hagedorn. The amount was matched by Horace Hagedorn.

As a result of this close-to-home philanthropy, the Long Island landscape is peppered with the Hagedorn name, including the Hagedorn Hall of Enterprise at Adelphi University, the Hagedorn Hall at Hofstra University, the Hagedorn Family Resource Center in Hempstead and others.

He was born to Alfred and Blanch Rosenfelt Hagedorn in Manhattan. Horace attended the Columbia Grammar School in Manhattan and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1932.

While working in advertising in radio and early TV, he met Otto Stern, a client who owned a plant nursery in upstate New York. Together they launched Miracle-Gro and Hagedorn used his remarkable marketing skills and the growth of suburban gardens to turn a profit.

He married Margaret O'Keefe in Manhasset in 1941. His first wife died in 1984 and he married Amy Maiello in 1986.

Besides his wife and son James, he is survived by three other sons, Peter of Glen Cove, Robert of Mercer Island, Wash., and Paul of Atlanta; two daughters, Susan of Boulder, Colo., and Kate of Skillman, N.J.; 21 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.

The body will be cremated. A memorial celebration of his life is planned for March.

Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.
 

The following editorial appeared in Newsday on February 2, 2005:

A role model for LI
Hagedorn generosity kept the lights on

NEWSDAY EDITORIAL

Miracle-Gro co-founder Horace Hagedorn, who died Monday, gave almost $27 million to 330 organizations since the 1995 creation of the Amy and Horace Hagedorn Fund at the Long Island Community Foundation.

The amounts ranged from $100 to several million dollars. And 90 percent of Hagedorn's philanthropy stayed on Long Island, where more than 120 local groups, from Montauk to Elmont, received checks year after year after year and a note, "Here's to your work in the community. Keep it up."

A list of the fund's gifts fills 14 typewritten pages; there's no space here to name them all. But the breadth of Hagedorn's giving is extraordinary. He built playgrounds, funded day care, camp and health care for children; he put money into arts and justice organizations; he supported farmworkers, immigrants and efforts to ERASE Racism. He gave to Momma's Inc. in Wantagh, the Crohns & Colitis Foundation in Garden City, Hospice Care in Westbury; the John Philip Sousa Memorial Band Shell in Port Washington and the Lost at Sea Memorial Fund in Montauk. He funded Long Island Cares, whose trucks, bearing Hagedorn's name, deliver food across the region to those who need it. And that's to start.

Hagedorn also gave local not-for-profits something precious and rare - so-called general support money, which bought office space and covered other expenses they needed, no questions asked. For them - indeed, for us all - Hagedorn tendered his greatest gift: He kept the lights on, so the groups, in turn, could do the same for our neighbors.

He cut a path others should be to proud to follow.

Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.

Additional biographical material about Horace Hagedorn can be found at Networking Magazine's online web site at this address:
http://www.networkwomen.com/0104/david_2004/hagedorn.htm