U.S Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) is coming to St. Louis on May 11 for his first public event in town since he officially hit the campaign trail for U.S. president, and no one is working harder to make this visit a success, financially, than Bob Clark and Todd Weaver.
Clark, president of Clayco, is Obama’s local fundraising chairman, and Weaver, president of Legacy Building Group, is Clark’s son and protégé and a member of the fundraising committee.
“I think he can win,” Clark said of Obama.
Other fundraisers and funding sources across the country have agreed with Clark, whose company does $500 million in annual sales. Obama’s reported first-quarter fundraising efforts netted $25 million, nearly as much as U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), with more of his early funds available for the primary race than Clinton.
“We’re out-raising her in the primary,” Clark said, though the local fundraising committee that he chairs will make its first significant contribution with proceeds from the May 11 event. Clark also serves on the campaign’s national finance committee.
Clark previously co-chaired a capital campaign for Central Institute for the Deaf that raised $30 million.
Clark, who has met with Obama several times, committed to his campaign after a private meeting with the candidate in February at a residence in the Central West End.
“He’s got enough energy and he’s in good enough shape,” Clark concluded. “It’s a huge, huge endeavor, a tremendous sacrifice.”
Clarks consider both himself (age 48) and Obama (age 45) to be of “the Kennedy generation,” and there is something of the infectious positive energy of a new Camelot in his pitch for his candidate.
“Our fundraising committee met the other day, and I was pleased to look around and see that it looked like America,” Clark said.
“There were blacks, whites, women. It was a really nice mix. It was like America in the room.”
Clark sees a similar mix every Sunday when he looks around his family dinner table, given that he and his wife Ellen, both of whom are white, helped to raise Todd Weaver, who is black, from his early teen years.
Indeed, the one personal exchange Weaver has had with Obama thus far concerned his unique relationship with the Clarks and Clayco.
Clark and Weaver had met with the senator in Washington, D.C. on March 12 after an emotional tour through national sites, including a long look at the Lincoln Monument and a father-son discussion of the legacies of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. Then they joined an intimate group of 250 Obama activists, with each table, in turn, getting extended face time with the candidate.
At their table, Weaver said, “He talked about health care, Iraq, minority issues in terms of business.” Clark and Weaver’s ears perked up at that last topic. Clayco is a local leader in minority business inclusion in private sector development, and Clark groomed Weaver in the trade from his early teen years. Now Weaver heads his own minority business enterprise.
“He had concerns with minority inclusion in jobs with public financing, like the reconstruction of New Orleans,” Weaver recalled the table talk. “He talked about how there is a shortage of minority companies, yet many existing minority companies don’t have opportunities.”
Though this topic connects directly with Weaver’s professional concerns, Obama struck a personal note when Weaver approached him as the group was breaking up.
“He said he had talked to my father in St. Louis at the Claire McCaskill fundraiser (in March 2006),” Weaver said of Obama.
“He said he wanted to learn more about my life and what Bob did for me. He was very impressed at what Bob did and the risks he took.”
What Bob did
This is “what Bob did and the risks he took.”
He moved his business, Clayco, to a low-income neighborhood in Hazelwood, where he was stopped one day by a young black boy who had responded to a friend’s dare by asking the white man who owned the new business on the block for a job.
“I told him I couldn’t give him a job, because he wasn’t old enough,” Clark remembered. The boy, Weaver, was only 11, but already he was the main breadwinner in a single-parent family in which the mother had fallen ill and food was scarce.
“I asked why he wasn’t in school. I asked about his family,” Clark said.
“He started coming around after school, to do odd jobs. It didn’t take long for us to make a bigger commitment to each other.”
In addition to joining the Clark family, Weaver worked his way up through the ranks at Clayco and in the construction trade, after Clark helped him get a union card. In high school, the father insisted that education become the focus. (Clark himself worked his way up in construction, completing only five weeks of college courses.)
After graduating from UMSL in 1997, Weaver underwent an internship in the executive aspects of the trade, both within Clayco and on outside jobs. This included a disappointing experience attempting to foster minority inclusion in development deals.
“The companies that could do the jobs weren’t there,” Weaver said. “They either knew the business in the field or in the office – most minority firms had only one or the other. You need both to bid the job and complete it within the time frame.”
Finally, in May 2002, Weaver decided to address the shortage of viable minority business firms by creating his own, Legacy Building Group, according to the successful model established by Clayco. Last year it did $36 million in sales.
Now, Weaver wants to parlay his new foothold in the business community into bucks for Obama.
“I’m going to knock on every door I can,” Weaver said.
“Around the country, he has been having these big rallies that impact young people. That’s what I want for us to do here.”
