At 30 years old, Joseph Gripkey didn’t have a gilded resume. He had bounced from teaching high school to loading railroad cars. And when he landed a job as a charity accountant, the little-known organization was consumed by lawsuits and tax debts brought on by its founder’s profligate spending.
During its time of crisis, the board of Holy Land Christian Mission–later renamed Children International–turned to Gripkey for guidance, and in 1974 he was installed as the charity’s chief executive.
“They turned to me because I was the guy who wore a suit,” he said.
Gripkey’s new responsibilities transformed his life and propelled the once-marginal charity to the forefront of modern child sponsorship agencies.
Listed in the organization’s financial reports as the charity’s executive chairman, Gripkey was paid $176,617 for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 1996, and given an $18,000 expense allowance. He helped manage the Kansas City organization for part of last year while maintaining a residence in Florida.
Under Gripkey’s stewardship, Children International became a philanthropic powerhouse that last year took in some $65 million in donations while supervising programs for more than 200,000 children in nine countries.
But there are many faces worn by the hard-charging executive and by the charity that dispenses programs for destitute children from behind the facade of its brick-and-glass headquarters on a rolling, 61-acre site in suburban Kansas City, Mo.
Gripkey signed some fundraising letters with a religious salutation: “In His service.” But as he made tough choices at Children International’s headquarters, he was often heard to say: “I’m not a missionary, I’m a businessman.”
Children International’s business depends on promises, and perhaps the most important one is the assurance to the sponsor that it can be trusted to make the best possible use of every charitable dollar.
“Frugality is an organizational way of life at Children International,” the charity assured a potential sponsor in a November 1992 letter. “The salaries of the employees of Children International are fair and competitive in today’s marketplace.”
But it is not clear what Gripkey was actually paid.
There is a discrepancy between the salaries reported for him on charity tax filings and those listed in internal Children International payroll records. The computerized ledgers, produced for charity executives by the payroll specialist Automatic Data Processing (ADP), show Gripkey’s biweekly pay as $7,379.04 in November 1992 and a year-to-date total of $154,661, which would have given him an annual salary of more than $190,000–or some $50,000 more than CI reported to government authorities and the charity’s sponsors. CI’s tax filings state Gripkey was paid $119,787 during the year ending September 1992, and given an $18,000 expense allowance.
ADP printouts from March 1993 reflect the same pay for Gripkey. Attempts to reach Gripkey by letter and telephone for comment about his salary were unsuccessful.
Former CI treasurer Bernard Pope, who worked for the charity for 13 years until April 1993, examined the payroll sheets for the Tribune and said they matched his recollection of Gripkey’s salary at the time. Pope said he was surprised the charity told sponsors anything different.
Gripkey’s eventual successor, Children International President James R. Cook, declined to respond to written questions about the payroll sheets but said in a letter that the Tribune was making an inappropriate, “apples and oranges” comparison between payroll ledgers and tax filings that were several years old.
Pope said Children International hired ADP to handle the payroll of its top officers, including himself, because the charity did not want other workers to know what they were earning.
Though Children International projected an image of a gentle charity to the giving public, Gripkey could be a strict corporate taskmaster, some former employees said.
“He had a tendency with his employees to degrade them publicly,” said Carl Pfaff, who held various supervisory positions at Children International between 1984 and 1991.
“I’ve seen him be very cruel to people verbally,” said Joy Hays, a former Children International fundraiser.
“People would come out of his office in tears,” said Susan Ikazaki, CI’s director of corporate relations from 1991 to 1995. “It was definitely a culture of paranoia.”
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But Wallace Keene, a longtime friend of Gripkey who served on CI’s board of directors, said Gripkey’s stern manner was simply part of an effort to ensure that as much money as possible went to the needy children.
“He ran a very tight ship,” Keene said. “You had 10 hours of work to do, you’d better work 10 hours. He was a stickler for that, very strict on that.”
After declining interview requests for months, Gripkey finally telephoned a Tribune reporter who had left messages at his Florida residence in November.
Gripkey rattled off a staccato description of his management style:
“Good. Honest. Hard. Demanding. Exciting. Motivational. Leadership. Creative,” he said.
He described himself as an innate leader, the type who would go to a movie theater and end up “trying to get the line straight” at the ticket counter.
“I put in tremendous hours–three, four thousand-hour years, year after year. I didn’t take a day off,” he said.
In September 1996, Gripkey stepped down as chief executive officer and was appointed executive chairman, a position he said decreased his day-to-day involvement with CI. His current salary, if any, is unknown.
In the telephone interview from Santa Fe, where he and his wife were vacationing, Gripkey described his current responsibilities with Children International as much more low-key than before.
“Day to day, I try not to do a whole lot. I’m burned out on the day-to-day stuff actually,” he said.
“I’m still involved in the marketing and fundraising,” Gripkey said. “I try to do the things that are fun.”