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July 12, a week after his youngest daughter’s wedding was held in the house. On moving day, two vans left for Montreal, where Mr. Overmyer’s wife, Shirley, is living (and ostensibly running the Overmyer Canadian warehousing opera tion), and one van went to Mr. Overmyer’s rented house in Katonah, N.Y., a little farther out on the commuter line but still in an exclusive section. The new owners of Weatbervane Farm say the house had been allowed to deteriorate to the point that it has a leaking roof and needs a new boiler and new paint One day in December, old owner and new owner both were working on the house. Mr. Overmyer was there hauling away the last of his personal belongings, and work crews hired by the bank were taking up old carpeting and getting the place ready for the neces sary refurbishing. E VEN WHILE growing up in Ottawa Hills, on Darlington Road, Dan Overmyer began acquiring a reputation for being obnoxious. “He would take the trouble to go across the street to beat up a smaller kid,” one of his long-time associates said. He was always interested in sports but not particu larly good at most that he tried (a little football, boxing, soccer, basketball, golf), with a couple of exceptions. He was good at swimming and for a time had aspirations of competing in the 1940 Olympics. He was also good at skiing. “He is an amazing skier for a man of his girth,” one of Overmyer’s former execu tives said. “It’s like a mountain facing another moan- tain.” As a young man, he hung around Swayne Field to watch the Mud Hens play, and he particularly liked to sit in the press box when he could get in. But he also had a penchant for trying to run the team without benefit of ownership, and, the story goes, he was kicked out of the stadium on several occasions by Red Smith, then the general manager of the Hens. In any case, when he was 27 he tried unsuccessfully to buy the team from the Detroit Tigers for $75,000, but the team went to another bidder. Later, Mr. Overmyer told a Lucas County grand jury that he was unfairly muscled out of the deal, and he hinted that Bill Veeck and the St Louis Browns had something to do with it Mr. Overmyer was not a particularly good student but he did enroll at a highly regarded private college, Denison University in Granville, O., and studied there for a year before and a year after a three-year stint as an army transport warrant officer. (He helped expe dite barge unloadings during the D-Day landing at Normandy.) Although Mr. Overmyer didn’t finish col lege, Denison named him an outstanding alumnus in 1957, by which time he had achieved fame in the warehousing world -- by having built 260 facilities. Most of what Mr. Overmyer learned about the business world was, it appears, self-taught Even though he had hordes of lawyers working for him at times, he was often a do-it-yourself lawyer. He was a third-generation warehouseman (his father’s father had been a grocery wholesaler), but the warehouses be designed were radically different from those run by his forebears. And he developed a business style that while not unique, was not a product of upbringing or education. He measured winning on a day-to-day basis, even to the point of inventing challenges when nooe existed. Many people, it seems, have an anecdote about Mr. Overmyer’s challenges, tirades, and intimidating man nerisms. For example, there’s the time he was flying in to
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Clipped 1 month ago
- Blade
- Toledo, Ohio
- Feb, 23 1986 - Page 203