Ira Hall, arts supporter, Arsht board chair and ‘corporate game-changer,’ dies at 78
At Ira D. Hall’s memorial service at Antioch Missionary Baptist Church of Miami Gardens, Hall’s family called the Wall Street executive a “corporate game-changer.”
Among Hall’s many accomplishments, he became IBM’s first African-American corporate officer and held leadership roles with Texaco and L.F. Rothschild, Unterberg, Towbin. Hall served as president and CEO of UCM, a Wall Street investment-management firm that had more than $2 billion in assets under his management.
And when he retired from the New York position in 2004 to move with his wife, Carole, to Miami a year later it wasn’t to rest. Instead, Hall got busy. He helped reshape the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, where he continued a youth-mentoring role that seemed ingrained in his persona before he started high school.
Hall died in Miami Beach at 78 on Jan. 11, his family said.
Carole Hall told the Miami Herald that her husband was “vast” for his myriad interests and pioneering roles.
Among them: in his youth, growing up in Oklahoma City, Hall participated in early sit-ins at restaurants and hotel restaurants and other public facilities before the hidden movement was known nationally, she said. “It was being pioneered in Oklahoma City by an NAACP youth leader,” she said of these early civil-rights movements in the United States.
That youth leader? Hall. “He was a splendid, spectacular human being,” Carole said.
Hall, even as an adolescent, “was already fully realized as a moral, courageous, audacious thinker and mover in the world,” Hall’s wife said. “He was fully self-possessed and pouring all of that light into the direction of being all of that. He would not be repressed.”
Carole recounts how a teenage Hall was mentored by teacher Clara Luper, a seminal figure in the 1950s for staging sit-ins during the nascent civil-rights movement. Luper had mentored members of the NAACP Youth Council from 1958 to 1964. Hall was one of those those teens. He would remain committed to national service, racial justice, diversity and equity, his family said.
In her 1979 memoir, “Behold the Walls,” Luper devoted several pages to a young Ira Hall. She called him “our prince.”
In 1970, four years after earning his bachelor’s in electrical engineering in 1966 from Stanford University, Hall became the first African American — and youngest member at 26 — of Stanford University’s board of trustees, according to an interview that Hall gave to The History Makers in 2022.
In 2020, Hall earned the Stanford Graduate School of Business’ highest honor, the Ernest C. Arbuckle Award for Excellence. The distinction recognized Hall’s commitment to managerial excellence and addressing the changing needs of society.
He earned his master’s in business administration from Stanford in 1976. As Hall led executives at Wall Street firms, he came to the attention of several U.S. presidents.
In 1987, Hall was nominated by President Ronald Reagan and confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate to serve as a governor of the United States Postal Service and chair its audit committee. In 1993, he served as a chair on the ClintonGore presidential transition team.
During his tenure on the Arsht Center’s board, a period lasting from
2013 to 2020, Hall touted the venue’s “wonderfully diverse” programming and audiences to a reporter from Miami Today.
But to obtain and maintain true diversity one must do more than talk, Hall insisted.
Local leaders, he told Miami Today, “shouldn’t just talk about problems, but go do something, because if you do it, you’ll get all the debate you can handle, but if you just set out to debate, you’ll never get to action.”
PROMOTING DIVERSE PROGRAMMING
At the Arsht, Hall, who took an active role in supporting Alvin Ailey’s AileyCamp Miami summer program, told Miami Today that the venue’s “wonderfully diverse” programming and its audiences should never be taken for granted. “The fact that you are good at diversity today is no guarantee that you’ll be anywhere close to good tomorrow. It takes constant attention, a commitment to continuous improvement, a statement at the top, policies and practices in the middle and results at the ground.”
Hall led by championing performing-arts programs aimed at young people.
“Ira was unashamedly clear about his love for the AileyCamp Miami,” said Johann Zeitsman, the Arsht Center’s president and CEO.
HALL’S BACKGROUND
Hall was born the fourth of six children on Aug. 23, 1944, in Oklahoma City to parents who were educators in the segregated Oklahoma state school system. Hall’s activism was fueled early as he swooped in, alongside his siblings, to help desegregate Oklahoma City’s Northeast High School.
Hall believed he could fly. And so he did.
The plane and pilot’s license would come later.
“I believe that most people kind of put Ira on a pedestal and feel he never made a mistake. And he did make one mistake in his life that I know,” his younger brother, John Hall, told the Miami Herald.
That one mistake — which may or may not have been a blunder, depending on what one makes of Hall’s life achievements — begins in a setting that should prove familiar to millions of Americans who grew up in the 1950s or who watched reruns for decades afterward.
A living room, in this case in Oklahoma City. A black-and-white television set tuned to the syndicated “Adventures of Superman.” Two enraptured boys.
John saw the 30-minute TV series for what it was, a superhero story. A fantasy. Ira saw it as a blueprint.
“Our favorite television program, like most kids, was ‘Superman’ and Ira actually thought he could fly,” his brother said. John recounts Bill Kennedy’s familiar opening sequence narration and visual.
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!
Except John said his brother Ira heard it as “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Ira!” And he was going to show the world that he, too, could keep pace with Clark Kent’s alter ego Superman.
“I tried to warn him but he went on to our roof with a big towel around his neck and he took a perfect swan dive into our backyard. We did not have a pool,” John said.
“And obviously Ira, although he was injured, he recovered. But fast forward a few years, Ira never gives up on a goal. And he bought his own plane. Got a pilot’s license and learned how to fly,” John said.
“It’s just emblematic of Ira that once he sets a goal, he never gives up on it. And you know, in my own mind, I believe that psychologically he learned to fly without wings. He would look down on Earth and find problems that needed to be fixed and he would swoop down and fix them. Ira was always taking on some incredible challenge and executing all these efforts out,” his brother said.
That fearlessness fueled his career development with executive positions in California, New York and Connecticut, at companies that included HewlettPackard and Morgan Stanley.
Those he mentored didn’t forget Hall’s example.
Drew Valentine, vice president of people and culture for IBM Systems in New York, met Hall when he first joined IBM out of graduate school.
“I couldn’t help but think that this brother was ‘cool as the other side of the pillow’ and began modeling my own corporate career after his, taking chances outside the box they put you in,” U.S. Black Engineer reported, along with Valentine’s tribute to Hall on LinkedIn.
CHOOSING MIAMI
In 2005, Hall and his wife moved from New York to Miami Beach.
They were drawn to South Florida, she said, by Miami’s culture, its communities, food, music, vitality and accessibility.
Hall loved sailing and named one of his favorite boats that he had docked in Newport, Rhode Island, the Belle Aurore, after the café in Paris that was featured in the film, “Casablanca.” He was a scuba diver, golfer, played the saxophone — sometimes on the Arsht stage to help raise funds for the center on Give Miami Day. Hall also skied until he was 70, his wife said.
“We didn’t want to retire away from the world. We wanted to retire into the world, a world that we enjoy. We chose Miami and went about getting involved,” Carole said. The couple also supported The Pérez Art Museum Miami.
One of Hall’s lasting legacies in his adopted hometown was guiding the Arsht as chairman of the board. When former CEO and President John Richard announced his retirement in 2018 after leading the performingarts center for 10 years, Hall led the search to hire his replacement, Zeitsman.
“The loss of Ira is very personal to me,” Zeitsman told the Herald. “He was the chair that appointed me to this job, and the first chair I worked with during the first years at the Arsht when everything was very new to me. He was supportive in the kindest way and a mentor in a subtle, humble way.
“But most of all, he led by his example,” said Zeitsman. “He was an achiever all of his life, and he inspired me and all those who worked with him at the Arsht Center to aim high.”
SURVIVORS, SERVICES
Hall’s survivors include his wife, Carole F. Hall; daughters Alicia Hall Moran and Stephanie Elaine Hall; brother John A. Hall; and sister Jessilyn A. Hall Head. Services were held. Donations in Hall’s memory can be made to AileyCamp Miami at the Arsht or the Jackie Robinson Foundation.
Howard Cohen: 305-376-3619, @HowardCohen