Father’s Day occurs this year on Sunday, June 17, 2007. For the fifth consecutive year in Nashville, the Council and the ADA will present “Father of the Year” awards to four worthy Nashvillians at its Father of the Year Awards Dinner on Thursday, June 7, 2007, at the Loews Vanderbilt Hotel. The awards dinner attracts Middle Tennessee’s most visible and respected leaders; the fourth annual dinner in June 2006 boasted a crowd of 450 people.

The event will be hosted by local meteorologist, Nancy Van Camp, of WSMV-TV. “This is my first time to be involved, and I’m looking forward to it,” Van Camp says. “We typically recognize men for success in their careers or within their communities, but not for fatherhood, so this is a wonderful and unique event.”

The four honorees are community-minded men who have demonstrated their ability to balance their personal and professional lives while serving as outstanding role models in their respective communities. This year’s outstanding dads include Dan Hogan, president and CEO of Fifth Third Bank, Tennessee; Robert C.H. (Bert) Mathews III, president of The Mathews Company; Bill Lee, president and CEO of Lee Company; and Scott Price, vice president, secretary and general counsel for Eller and Olsen Stone Co.

Diabetes is a disease that affects nearly 21 million Americans. In Tennessee alone, over 500,000 people suffer from diabetes. Even more dangerous, at least 6.2 million Americans are not aware of their condition, making them especially vulnerable to life-threatening complications including heart disease and stroke. Diabetes is the most common chronic childhood disease. One in three Americans born today — and one in two African and Hispanic Americans — will develop the disease.

The cost of diabetes each year in the United States exceeds $130 billion, yet there was no increase in funding for diabetes research and prevention in the 2006 federal budget. The ADA funds cultivates the careers of field researchers and provides funding to 400-plus research projects in 40 states and the District of Columbia.

In addition to the Father of the Year Awards held each year in Nashville, the local ADA office promotes and produces a number of other fundraising activities throughout the year including:

• School Walk for Diabetes — A walk at your school to emphasize the importance of weight management and regular exercise. Schools choose a date and a school coordinator; the ADA provides the materials.
• Step Out to Fight Diabetes (formerly “Walk on the Wild Side”) — A walk through the Nashville Zoo attracts corporate, church, school and family teams, as well as individuals, to raise awareness and money for diabetes programs and research. This event will be held this year on Oct. 13, 2007.
• Tour de Cure 2007 — Cycle some of the most beautiful back roads as you tackle the challenge of peddling from Murfreesboro to Monteagle, Tenn. There is a fully supported 2-day, 150-mile event as well as a shorter, 1-day option. This year’s Tour de Cure was June 2-3, 2007.
• Healthways Golf Challenge — This annual scramble golfing event is best known for the incredible prizes awarded to the top net and gross scoring teams. This year’s event took place on May 7, 2007.

In 1985, Hogan crossed the river into Memphis and joined National Bank of Commerce as a management trainee, quickly moving through several management positions to become the vice president of commercial real estate in 1989. In 1993, Hogan moved to Knoxville as the president of National Bank of Commerce’s president of the East Tennessee region. After ten years, Hogan moved again, to Atlanta, to head up the NBC’s de novo expansion in that region and was named head of the South Region of NBC, covering the Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina markets.

Hogan joined Fifth Third Bank in 2004. In January 2005, he was named president and CEO of Fifth Third Bank, Tennessee, with 27 locations and $2.3 billion in assets. Hogan serves on the boards of a number of civic and community organizations, including TICUA, the Nashville Sports Council, the Nashville Symphony, the Middle Tennessee Council of the Boy Scouts of America and the Greater Nashville Chamber of Commerce. Hogan is a graduate of Leadership Knoxville and Leadership Nashville, and he serves on the Leadership Nashville Alumni Board.

Throughout most of his 22 years in banking, Hogan’s wife, Phyllis, has been by his side. “Phyllis has been a great partner for 20 years,” he says, “and she would be more deserving of ‘Mom of the Year’ [for her role in raising daughter Lizzie and son Garrison] than I am of ‘Father of the Year.’” Hogan is humbled to be in a position to help the ADA’s fundraising efforts, though, citing the annual awards event as a unique way to recognize people and generate interest about diabetes in the community at large. “Diabetes is becoming such a problem in our world today. We need the money for research and education.”

Robert C. H. Mathews III
President, The Mathews Company
Robert “Bert” Mathews has not been personally touched by diabetes, but he has close friends whose lives have been affected by the disease. “It is a disease that is part of everyday life from those who suffer from it,” he says. “You cannot ignore it.” Mathews feels incredibly privileged to play a small role in the fundraising efforts of the ADA’s Father of the Year Awards events.

Mathews graduated with a BA degree with honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before heading to Harvard Business School for a master’s degree in business administration. As president of The Mathews Company, Mathews has used his experience as a highly qualified commercial broker in a number of trend-setting transactions in Nashville, representing clients as a broker, manager and developer. Within the community, Mathews is involved in a number of professional organizations, including the Urban Land Institute and its Small Scale Development Council; the Metropolitan Nashville Airport Authority; University School of Nashville; Adventure Science Center; Cumberland Region Tomorrow; the Downtown Partnership of the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce; BOMA; and past president of the Nashville Chapter of NAIOP.

Mathews has been married to his wife, Brooks, for fifteen years. When they married, Brooks brought three children into the marriage, Harding, Alex and Walter. “I took them on, gladly,” Mathews says. “It was an incredible opportunity for me to learn as a stepparent.” In time, the couple added two additional children to their family, Ella and Hop. “Without a doubt, my wife is the strength of our family,” Mathews says. “Everything that she takes care of allows me to be a success in every other area of my life.” The Mathews pride themselves on the number of nights they sit down to a home-cooked meal together. “Besides being an incredible design talent, Brooks is an extraordinary chef,” he says.

Also crediting his parents, Mathews says, “I’m standing on the shoulders of what my parents taught me. Dad and Mom both gave me a great foundation.” Of his father, Mathews shares, “If I’m half the dad that he is, I’m a proud man.”

Bill Lee
President & CEO, Lee Company
Bill Lee has lived on the same farm in Franklin, Tenn., for most all of his life, and, in part, he credits that farm and the work involved in running it for the great relationship he had with his father, and the opportunities it has provided for him to spend time with his own children. “It’s a working farm,” he says, “so we do a lot of the work together.” Lee left the farm to attend college at Auburn University, where he met his late wife, Carol Ann Person. Lee earned his BS in mechanical engineering at Auburn. When Carol began working in Nashville, Lee decided to work with his father at the family business while he figured out what he wanted to do. He says he was lucky because he fell in love with the girl and the job.

In 1981, he joined the business his grandfather had begun in 1944 as a refrigeration company — Lee Refrigeration Co. Lee’s father had taken over the company in the 1960s, and in the 1980s, the name was changed to Lee Company. In 1992, Bill Lee became the president of Lee Company, which had revenues of $20 million. Today, he serves as the CEO of this $80 million mechanical services company with 600 employees. Lee is humbled and honored to have been chosen as a “father of the year,” and his family is excited and proud for him. “This type of recognition reminds us all of what it means to be a family,” Lee says. Lee has been fathering on his own for six years, since the death of his wife, Carol, and he shares that while it was certainly a tragic situation, her untimely death created a scenario where he grew closer to his children than ever before. “Most dads don’t have that privilege of being both mother and father,” he says. “but we’ve moved through it all and into great relationships with each other.”

An avid outdoorsman, Lee enjoys hunting and fishing with his sons, twins Caleb and Jacob, and horseback riding with his daughters, Jessica and Sarah Kate. In addition to his family time, Lee is involved in his church, Grace Center in Franklin, and counts faith as the most important part of his life. He serves on a number of boards for faith-based and community organizations.

Scott Price
Vice President, Secretary and General Counsel, Eller and Olsen Stone Company
This award certainly has given me the opportunity to stop and think about the influences in life that have helped me become a better father,” Scott Price says of his “Father of the Year” award. “And I’ve had terrific influences — specifically my parents and my paternal grandfather.”

Price’s grandfather was Samuel Jones Price, but he was known by one and all as “Sunny Jim” because of his beaming smile and radiant personality. Sunny Jim sold the family home to his son, Price’s father, for what he’d paid for it, and then lived with the family. “We all benefited from his influence,” Price says. “He was a great storyteller, a successful businessman and a giving volunteer.”

From Birmingham, Ala., where Price attended high school, he came to Nashville to attend Vanderbilt University. After receiving his BA in history there, he received his law degree at the Cumberland School of Law at Samford University, and a master of laws in taxation degree at the National Law Center at George Washington University. He met his wife, Ann — the number one player on the college tennis team — while attending Vanderbilt. The two married while still undergraduates, and Ann taught tennis while Price attended law school. “I was drawn to Ann’s great spirit,” Price says. “She has certainly made me a better man.”

Price served in the Marines after law school, and the couple lived in Baltimore while Ann attended medical school there. When Price began his job search after serving in the Marines, John C. Tune interviewed him for a position in his firm. Tune told Price, “Nashville is a great place for raising a family.” Price remembers Tune’s words and though he took a position with Cornelius Collins Higgins and White, it was Tune’s enthusiasm about Nashville that swayed him. Since 1983, Price has been with Eller and Olsen Stone Co. in Nashville, and serves as the vice president, secretary and general counsel for the company.

Within the community, Price is a member of several professional organizations and serves as a board member on a number of community organizations as well, including the Spina Bifida Foundation, of which he is a founding member; the Tennessee Easter Seals; the Mental Health Association of Middle Tennessee; the Tennessee Highway Contractors Political Action Committee; the Municipal Planning Commission; and the Lipscomb University Business Advisory Council and its Board of Trust. He is a member and an elder of the Hillsboro Congregation Church of Christ.

“I’m a fortunate man,” Price says of his family. “My children, Patrick and Rachel, are the nicest children any parent could hope to have — they’ve made my job easy.”

Feedback: ruble@businesstn.com

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