Interviews available with founders of LaRosa’s, Meridian Bioscience
June 22, 2011
Attention Assignment Editors
Interviews available with founders of LaRosa’s, Meridian Bioscience
Cincinnati State will hold its 2011 Commencement ceremony Thursday, June 23 at the Duke Energy Center, starting at 7 p.m.
Two of the honorees at Cincinnati State’s commencement – Buddy LaRosa, founder of the LaRosa’s restaurant chain, and William “Bill’’ Motto, founder of Meridian Bioscience Inc. – will be available for media interviews prior to the ceremony.
Mr. LaRosa and Mr. Motto are scheduled to be in Junior Ballroom A on the Third Floor of the Duke Energy Center between 5:30 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. If you would like to schedule an interview, please contact Cincinnati State Media Relations Coordinator Robert White at (513) 569-4775 (office) or (859) 468-6640 (cell) or robert.white@cincinnatistate.edu.
Here are brief biographical sketches of Mr. LaRosa and Mr. Motto, assembled from a variety of sources:
Donald “Buddy’’ LaRosa
Honorary Degree Recipient
Donald "Buddy" LaRosa founded what became the LaRosa’s restaurant chain in 1954.
He is the grandson of Italian immigrants and was raised in South Fairmount. His parents divorced when he was young, but he stayed close to both, living with his mother during the week and his father most weekends. When he got older he worked with his father – a Teamster and an amateur boxer – at a fruit stand in Findlay Market.
Mr. LaRosa took up boxing himself as a teenager, and also played football in high school (Roger Bacon) even though he was technically too little (legend has it he once slipped weights into his pants so that he’d make his 150-pound minimum before he stepped on the scale). After high school he served in the U.S. Navy.
His family attended San Antonia Church on Queen City Avenue in South Fairmont, which served Cincinnati’s Italian community. While helping at the church’s summer festivals, and while visiting Philadelphia during his Navy service, he discovered the growing popularity of what was then a relatively uncommon offering in America: pizza.
After his discharge from the Navy, Mr. LaRosa raised $400, found a handful of partners and opened “Papa Gino’s” pizzeria on Boudinot Avenue in Westwood. It soon proved popular with high school students and their families.
Within a few years, Mr. LaRosa had bought out his partners and began expanding his business through franchising. In time he had restaurants throughout Cincinnati, Northern Kentucky, Southeastern Indiana and Dayton, Ohio.
In the early 1980s LaRosa’s began delivery service for almost everything on its menu, and in 1991 launched a centralized “One Number’’ program which allows carryout customers to place an order anywhere by calling the same telephone number. Today, according to published reports, the privately-held company has 60 outlets throughout the region.
Mr. LaRosa has long been interested in local sports, particularly boxing and high school athletics.
The Buddy LaRosa High School Sports Hall of Fame was established in 1975 to recognize outstanding athletes from area high schools. Each year, nominees are considered based solely upon high school accomplishments. Collegiate, professional, or other amateur achievements have no bearing on the selection process. The nominee must have graduated high school 10 years before eligibility may begin.
Mr. LaRosa also rekindled his interest in boxing, most famously by managing the career of welterweight Aaron Pryor along with scores of other fighters. Mr. LaRosa also founded the Cincinnati Golden Gloves Gym at the Cincinnati Recreation Center in Mount Auburn.
Last year, a musical based on Mr. LaRosa’s life, “Everybody’s Buddy,” premiered at the College of Mount St. Joseph. Proceeds from the production went to Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.
William J. Motto
Honorary Degree Recipient
William J. “Bill’’ Motto is the founder (1977) and currently the Executive Chairman of the Board of Meridian Bioscience, Inc.
Meridian (http://www.meridianbioscience.com/) is a fully integrated life science company that manufactures, markets and distributes a broad range of innovative diagnostic test kits, purified reagents and related products and offers biopharmaceutical enabling technologies.
These products and diagnostic tests are used in the early diagnosis and treatment of common medical conditions, such as gastrointestinal, viral and respiratory infections. Meridian’s diagnostic products are used outside of the human body and require little or no special equipment.
Meridian is based in the Cincinnati suburb of Newtown. It markets its products and technologies to hospitals, reference laboratories, research centers, veterinary testing centers, physician offices, diagnostics manufacturers and biotech companies in more than 60 countries.
Mr. Motto was born in 1941 in Hazelwood, Penn., to a family of Hungarian immigrant factory workers. Told he wasn’t intelligent enough for “regular’’ high school, he instead attended a vocational high school and focused on shoe-making, then worked in a steel mill after graduation before enlisting in the U.S. Navy from 1959-1963. Upon his discharge he attended Point Pleasant Community College.
After graduation he entered the pharmaceutical/diagnostics industry as a sales representative and sales manager.
While living in Cincinnati – with a wife (Barbara Gould) and three young sons to support – he turned down a promotion in favor of taking the chance to start his own company. He took $500 and an idea (an efficient way to ship stool samples for testing to labs all over the country), and began Meridian Diagnostics in his basement. He used $250 to pay for the articles of incorporation, the balance for a refrigerator and a deal with a vial manufacturer. Today this product – albeit much improved – is shipped in the millions of units around the world.
That was the start of the company that Mr. Motto then nurtured into a worldwide, multi-faced industry leader.
In 1986 Mr. Motto took Meridian Diagnostics public. Today the company, known as Meridian Bioscience Inc., has some 400 employees, affiliates and offices in seven countries and a market capitalization of approximately $1 billion.
