Jerry Alan Damerow
Of all of his travels, Jerry Damerow found a home in Little Rock. After retiring, he has committed to UALR and his community in Central Arkansas.
Jerry Damerow wasn’t born or raised in Arkansas. Some years ago, he and his wife, Sherri, were residents of New York state’s affluent Westchester County, thanks to Jerry’s work as a managing partner in the major accounting firm Ernst & Young. The Damerows had already spent five successful years for the company in Indonesia.
The company had another important assignment at another location in mind for Damerow.
“I got called in to the chairman’s office and they said, ‘We want to send you to Little Rock to help us with a merger,’” Damerow says.
Damerow’s New York friends were alarmed and advised him to turn down the assignment. Arkansas was just part of that vast uncultured land across the Hudson River. Why go there?
A dutiful employee, Damerow felt he owed Ernst & Young at least a visit to Arkansas before making a commitment.
“It was night and so it was dark when I flew into Little Rock,” Damerow recalls. “I remember waking up the next morning. I look out my hotel window, there was a sign across the street that said ‘Camelot’ and there was this beautiful, winding river. I thought, ‘Um, this looks pretty good.’ I called my wife and said, ‘You need to come down here and see this place.’”
Damerow accepted the transfer to Little Rock and the couple lived here for several years. Another transfer found the Damerows in Puerto Rico before retiring and coming back to the place that felt like home.
“We came back to Little Rock and it just felt right,” Damerow says. “The people here are fabulous. We have treasured our time here. It’s such a great place.”
The Damerows aren’t content to soak up the good life in Arkansas and leave it at that. Even though retired, Jerry is involved in the community in several ways including being on the board of Southern Bancorp. College education is a particular passion for the pair.
The Damerows have donated $1 million to support science majors at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The gift will benefit the Jerry and Sherri Damerow Endowed Science Scholarship, which provides scholarships for students majoring in astronomy, biology, chemistry, mathematics, physics, and earth science. The scholarship will provide assistance for education-related expenses including tuition, fees, books, and room and board.
“Jerry Damerow is the kind of person who blossoms wherever he’s planted,” says UALR Chancellor Christina S. Drale. “To Jerry, that means getting
involved in causes that improve lives and build toward a better future. I’m thrilled that he chose to engage with [UALR] and support our mission; he’s an ideal booster. He leads by example, he is willing to help wherever he’s needed, and he spends time getting to know the cause and the people behind it so he can be an effective ambassador. Jerry’s confidence in us and his steady support supercharges our efforts every day.”
SOAPBOX DERBY RACER
Suburban Akron, Ohio, was the setting for the first 18 years of Damerow’s life. An older brother was his only sibling. His father worked for B.F. Goodrich and his mother was a secretary for a Lutheran church in downtown Akron.
Akron was a city of notable size, but Damerow and his family lived out on the edge of town.
“Where we lived was on the verge of being country,” Damerow says. “We were close to farms and would see farmers with their horses.”
The highlight of Damerow’s early life was a particular Akron obsession — the soapbox derby. Garages all over that part of Ohio were alive with construction of non-motorized race cars.
“These [soapbox derby cars] were the ones that you sit in,” Damerow says. “We had to build these from scratch. We had to go to the lumberyard and get these big pieces of lumber. It was a great father-son experience. It was absolutely wonderful.”
While he remembers winning soapbox derby heats, Damerow never raised the championship trophy. It didn’t matter as the experience left him with great memories along with “working with tools, and I continue to enjoy that to this day.”
The idea of moving on after high school to get a college education was a firm one in Damerow’s house. However, there wasn’t a lot of spare money sitting around to pay for tuition.
“My parents weren’t wealthy but they were committed to me and my brother going to college,” Damerow says. “I had wonderful parents but both of my parents had to work. While I was in high school, I had three jobs. By the time I was finished, I had enough put aside to pay for the first year and half of my college.”
Damerow says his family couldn’t afford to send him to Ohio State and so he enrolled in nearby Kent State. He remembers his mother trying to soften the blow by saying Kent State was better than the larger university because “it was better to be a big fish in a small pond.”
At Kent State, Damerow was interested in architecture due to a mechanical drawing class that captured his imagination. It didn’t take Damerow long to realize that the world of accounting, and not architecture, was where he belonged.
“It was apparent the world would be better off if I did something else other than architecture,” Damerow says.
TURBULENT TIMES
In the early- to mid-’60s, violent conflicts coming from the civil rights movement and the protests about the expanding Vietnam War seemed almost daily occurrences in the United States. As a young man freshly graduated from Kent State, Damerow had a front row seat for the turmoil.
“Society really looked as if it was coming unglued,” Damerow says. “President Kennedy was killed. Then Martin Luther King. It was really a frightening period of time.”
Damerow became a member of the Ohio National Guard. His unit was the one called in to quell student protests at Kent State. The infamous confrontation between students and the guard left four dead and nine others wounded.
“My section of the line was close to one of the students that was shot and killed,” Damerow says. “That was a painful experience.”
Not liking to focus on what is done, Damerow points to what he sees as a positive aspect. The troubled past “has good news for us today. We had a lot of disharmony then but we were able to get through it and come together. Of course we have a lot of division now.”
A college fraternity brother was responsible for Damerow meeting the woman who would later become his wife.
“It was after college,” Damerow says. “We were both 28 years old when we got married. She is knock down gorgeous. I was scared to death to ask her out. I can’t remember what we did for our first date. But for our second, I took her to see the Cleveland Orchestra. I thought I better impress her.”
FIRST STOP: INDONESIA
The general idea of an accountant working an accounting job doesn’t include ritzy overseas travel to exotic locales. Damerow’s hiring by Arthur Young & Co., an international company with offices all over the world, put a pretty quick lie to that cliche. First overseas stop for Damerow and his wife? Indonesia.
“Back then, there were a lot of oil and gas companies there and we did the accounting work for those companies,” Damerow says. “It was a pretty important place for our company. My wife and I were both interested in that kind of experience. That part of the world is so different from Akron, Ohio.”
While there, Damerow didn’t let the culture shock affect his work. One of his proudest moments at his accounting firm came at the Indonesia office.
I found out our Indonesian workers weren’t being paid the same as our expatriates,” Damerow says. “These different set of workers were equally skilled. I constructed a package of equal pay for equal work. At my going away party, there was genuine affection showed by my Indonesian colleagues. I will never forget that.”
Now able to look back on his long career, Damerow accounts his working days as a “rich, rewarding experience.”
“Some of the work ethic that I picked up as a young boy pushed me along,” Damerow says. “When I got into the profession, it was changing. The belief in my business when I started was that you had to do good work and more work would come to you. Then it was understood that you had to go out and get business for the company. What I was good at was selling, bringing in new clients. For me, it was a lot fun.”
FOR THE COMMUNITY
It seems only when Damerow fully retired from accounting did he really get to work. He didn’t have a company to work for as much as an overall goal — improve and promote life in Central Arkansas.
He served as a member and past director of the Rotary Club of Little Rock, past board chair of the EAST Initiative, chair of CareLink’s board of directors, member of UALR’s Business Advisory Council and College of Science and Mathematics Advisory Council.
Sherri Damerow volunteers with Literacy Action of Central Arkansas and the Humane Society of Pulaski County. It is easy to recognize that the couple works together to contribute to the community.
“The Damerows have been active in promoting our community for a long time, and this generous [donation to UALR] aligns well with their continuing gift of time in impacting our community for the better both now and in the future,” said Dr. Lawrence Whitman, dean of the Donaghey College of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.
The Damerows’ advocacy of and sizable donation for UALR is easy to explain. However, Jerry doesn’t think a college education is a one-size-fits-all solution.
“I do not believe that college is right for everybody,” Damerow says. “I have seen kids [at UALR] that come from families like mine that don’t have a lot of money. We need to support these young scientists and engineers that are going to build the economy.”
Damerow says the administration at UALR has the school on the right track.
“The leadership over there is pretty outstanding,” Damerow says. “The chancellor is a fine academic but she is also a great strategic thinker. Instead of cutting programs across the board, she looked at the whole university and said, ‘Where can we excel?’ The more I see, the more I am impressed.”
The Damerows might be transplants but even native Arkansans have to salute what the pair has accomplished.
“We love Arkansas and this is home,” Damerow says. “From our standpoint, it’s time to say thank you, not in words, but deeds.”
“We came back to Little Rock and it just felt right. The people here are fabulous. We have treasured our time here. It’s such a great place.” (Special to the Democrat-Gazette/Benjamin Krain)