San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Helped families dealing with illness
When Stephen Grand was undergoing cancer treatment at UCSF Parnassus in 2006, his wife, Nancy, would curl up in a foldout chair and sleep beside him.
During the night, she’d walk down the hall to stretch and see other patients’ family members sleeping on the floor of the waiting room.
After one of her rounds, she told her husband, “when you get better, we are going to do something about this,” she recalled. “It was so wrong.”
Ten years later, he had recovered to witness the opening of the $40 million Nancy and Stephen Grand Family House a few blocks from UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital in Mission Bay. The house provides free lodging and meals to people with children receiving care at the hospital, just four blocks away. Grand was known to drive in from his home in Belvedere to greet families staying there.
For Grand, multiple myeloma was eventually supplanted by pancreatic cancer, which he was able to beat back until he was weakened by chemotherapy and developed leukemia. He died March 21 after a week in home hospice. He was 77.
“His heart was really into helping people in a significant and important way,” said Alexandra Morgan, CEO of Family House. “There is absolutely no way the Family House would have been built without the Grands’ support as name donor.”
Stephen Michael Grand was born Oct. 29, 1943, in Detroit, where his family lived in the Northwest section. His father, Salman Grand, had been born in Constantinople, Turkey, and emigrated from Ukraine to escape pogroms. Once in Detroit, he started Grand Machining Co. to build precision auto components and assemblies for diesel engines to supply the big Detroit manufacturers, Ford and General Motors. His mom, Evelyn, was a homemaker.
Starting at age 12, “Steve was in the management training program at Grand Machining,” his younger sister, Diana Grand of San Francisco, said jokingly.
After earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering, Grand delayed the inevitable of turning his management training into a career by taking a short trip to Israel that turned into a year.
“He was totally into the culture,” Nancy said. “He got a job and learned to speak Hebrew.”
Back in Detroit, Grand went to work for the family business, succeeding his father as the company’s president. He later veered from auto parts into real estate development by starting Grand/Sakwa Properties, a major builder of residential and retail properties in southeastern Michigan.
In 1983, he met Nancy Spilker, who also grew up in Detroit, on a setup dinner date at a restaurant called Jim’s Garage.
“We just laughed the whole time. We cracked up,” Nancy recalled. “And we never stopped. Literally every day there was something we both found amusing.”
They were married the year
they met, and after 20 years in Michigan they moved to San Francisco, where Grand’s two sisters had already relocated. The Grands lived in Pacific Heights before decamping to a house on the hill in Belvedere.
Grand continued running his businesses through his bout with multiple myeloma, a painful blood cancer that destroys the bones. After three months of treatment at UCSF, he went to Little Rock, Ark., for further treatment at the UAMS Myeloma Center. Checking into their hotel, the Grands noticed everyone was there for the same purpose. There was even a free shuttle bus to the hospital.
On the spot, Nancy started singing “Welcome to the Hotel Myeloma,” to the tune of the Eagles’ “Hotel California.” Grand beat the myeloma, but the Hotel Myeloma joke lived on for 15 years.
Along the way, Grand started giving away his fortune, donating to the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation in Norwalk, Conn., and a variety of other causes in the interests of renewable energy, arts and culture, and job training for the homeless. In 2013, he made a gift of $50 million to start the Nancy and Stephen Grand Israel National Center for Personalized Medicine at the
Weisman Institute of Science near Tel Aviv.
He was always looking for more philanthropy, but it found him by accident during a couples dinner at Zuni with attorney Sue Diamond, who served on the board of the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco with Nancy Grand. During small talk, she happened to mention that she was doing pro bono work to help construct a home for the families of kids getting treatment at UCSF Mission Bay.
“I was not thinking this was a pitch,” said Diamond, now a San Francisco planning commissioner. “It was just friends discussing what we were interested in.”
Still, the discussion worked a subliminal magic on the Grands by reminding them of families they’d seen sleeping on the floor at UCSF during Stephen’s treatments. It also reminded them of their pledge to do something about it. “We know that when cancer hits a family, it’s the worst time in your life,” Nancy said, “and when cancer hits children, it rocks the whole family structure.” The Grands did their own field research by visiting Koret Family House, a much smaller facility near the Parnassus campus.
A few weeks after that dinner at Zuni, Diamond got a call from Morgan, CEO of Family House.
“She was jumping up and down and yelling through the phone about this amazing gift they’d gotten from the Grands,” Diamond recalled.
The fivestory Nancy and Stephen Grand Family House opened on March 2, 2016, across the street from what is now Chase Center.
Three years later, Grand was hit with his second malignancy and returned to UCSF for treatment, this time at the Mission Bay campus. He was too sick to laugh at much, but he always managed a laugh when Nancy launched into “Hotel Myeloma.” He’d even sing along. And he’d always beam at the mention of the Family House.
“He was proud and so happy to be able to touch people’s lives in this way,” his wife said. Grand was buried March 23 at Mount Tamalpais Cemetery.
Survivors include his wife of 38 years, Nancy Grand of Belvedere; stepchildren, Russell Maddin of Traverse City, Mich., and Lauren Gaver of Santa Monica; and sisters, Diana Grand and Betsy Marcus, both of San Francisco.