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Ted Lerner was 21 and going to George Washington University Law School on the GI Bill in 1946 when his father died. He started selling houses on weekends to support his mother, sister, and brother.
Washington builder Melvin Gelman had 300 houses he couldn't sell, so he offered to let Lerner sell 25 of them. "It was the middle of November," Lerner recalls. "I had one house completely wrapped in cellophane with a huge red bow. Santa clauses stood on each corner…"
By the end of the weekend Lerner has sold 100 houses – and discovered he had a knack for real estate.
A few years later, Isadore Gudelsky called to offer Lerner an interest in a "pile of dirt" he was planning to turn into a shopping center. Lerner went to Michigan and New York to check out the newest retail idea – the shopping mall. Gudelsky and Lerner opened Wheaton Plaza in 1960.
It was the start of something big – and then bigger still. When Lerner proposed building Tyson's Corner Center, the only customers in sight were cows looking for grazing land. "Even Isadore hesitated," Lerner recalls.
Tysons opened in 1968 and immediately become the hottest mall in the region.
In the decades that followed, Lerner helped create more shopping centers as well as commercial and residential projects. By the late 1980s, one could assume that every adult in Washington had probably lived, worked or shopped in a building developed by Ted Lerner.
Lerner also started the Annette M. and Theodore N. Lerner Family Foundation to serve the community that nurtured him. His many contributions include a law-school building and a health-and-wellness center at his alma mater, George Washington University; a theater for the Bethesda Academy of Performing Arts; and major gifts to the US Holocaust Museum, Hadley's Park and organizations serving Washington's Jewish community.
Ted Lerner's son, Mark, and his sons-in-law, Robert Tanenbaum and Edward Cohen, are now in business with him. He rarely offers them advice. He says, "If they asked me, I would tell them to look at the facts but also to follow their instincts."
They can only hope their instincts are as sound as Lerner's – instincts that for 50 years have built a great family business and a tradition of giving back to the community.
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