The Tierneys’ Hearts of Gold

Editor’s Note:

Prominent local philanthropists Thomas T. and Elizabeth C. Tierney, who in 2015 gave $1 million gift to Goodwill of Orange County, the largest single donation to the nonprofit in its 92-year history, are the honorary chairs for its 4th annual Goodwill Gala happening Oct. 27 at Monarch Beach Resort in Dana Point.

The Tierneys’ incredible history of philanthropy was chronicled in this Coast Magazine feature published in March 2017.

For more information on the gala or to purchase tickets, call (714) 480-3355 or email amyh@ocgoodwill.org.

***

By LORI BASHEDA
Sycamores, old oaks and white wooden fences line the road to Los Ranchos Estates, an equestrian neighborhood of custom homes in Coto de Caza. Siri stops me at a black iron gate adorned with two life-size bronze horses. They part sleepily, and I roll down a dusty brick driveway, past a barn and up to a stately Georgian mansion overlooking a pasture where real horses graze. The air is fresh here, and Saddleback mountain looms in the distance.
Tom Tierney steps out the front door to greet me, but his black lab, Raider, and French bulldog, Frieda, beat him to it. Together the four of us head inside to the great room, which is at once cozy and elegant in the way of an English hunting lodge. A mounted elk head stares out near the fireplace. An antler chandelier hangs overhead. A zebra rug from a family safari spreads out on the limestone floor. There is a whiff of leather in the air.
Tom’s wife, Elizabeth, looking stylish in red patent leather loafers, offers cold drinks and cashews. The dogs stretch out at our feet.
Tom is 78 and worth millions. But one of the first things out of his mouth is how he’s creating yet a couple more businesses.
“So we can do more,” he explains.
It’s actually a family joke, he says. “I have to keep working to pay my pledge list.”
The couple have a trust fund that will take care of their four grown children, nine grandchildren and two great grandchildren. But it will also help take care of the community: the veterans, the students, the artists.
“There is the recognition that everyone has an expiration date,” Tom says. “As we grow older and enter that area of, ‘You can’t take it with you,’ you have to say: What is the best use of the time and material resources you have?”
Their gift giving is so prolific that the couple were recently honored with the pres-tigious 2016 National Philanthropy Day Legacy Award.
This is why I’m here, to uncover what motivates the Tierneys to give millions of dollars away, often to strangers, when they have the means to lead a “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” kind of life. Or at least the life of Riley.
There is no one neat answer. It trickles out over the next few hours, intertwined with the story of their romance, which at first glance seems quite unlikely.

Their childhoods set the stage.
Tom’s dad, Carroll, was a laborer in a Detroit boiler room, “a beloved Irishman” who taught him “a man’s word is his bond.” Carroll had three house rules: respect your mother, work hard and go to church on Sunday – rules Tom still follows.
His mother, Rosalie, was a reader. She loved literature and poetry, and passed that on to Tom, who “goes through fiction like he drinks milk,” Elizabeth says.
“My parents gave so much of themselves in terms of love and their few material possessions. I just promised myself I had to one day do the same for others,” he says.
Elizabeth also had a working-class upbringing. Her mother, Cordelia, was a fire dispatcher and later a reading instructor.
“My mother would give you the shirt off her back,” she says, but she didn’t have the money to give much more. “Her thing was: Make a casserole if someone is sick and share what you have.”
Her dad, William, had fought in the Philippines during World War II. He returned to the oil fields and alcoholism.
“It was a sad story,” she says. “Things never worked very well for him after he got out of the military. We lost track of him when I was about 16.”
Tom and Elizabeth were the first in their families to attend college. But this is where the similarities stopped. As the ’60s unfolded and people began to pick sides, their paths split.
Tom joined the Air Force, working with nuclear weapons operations during the Vietnam War. He was stationed in Saigon for the bloody Tet Offensive, and from his Quonset hut he watched body bags arrive at an airport morgue to be flown back to America.
Back in California, Elizabeth became a peacenik high school teacher, loading her daughter in her VW van on weekends and heading out of her Bakersfield driveway to Haight-Ashbury to protest the war.
When Tom returned home in ’68, he was advised to wear civilian clothing to his office at the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica, then a hotbed of anti-war protests.
He married. And then divorced. Elizabeth divorced too, landing in 1977 in Orange County, where she took a job at the human-potential movement Lifespring. A few months later, Tom walked into Lifespring on a whim to sign up for training.
“I was a little bit driven in business.” He smiles at the understatement. “I wanted to learn to stop and smell the roses.”
Let’s just say Elizabeth taught him how.
“I just had it hot for him, and he had it hot for me,” says Elizabeth, gazing across the living room to where Tom is sitting.
Tom meets her gaze and says, “I was ass over teacups about her. Madly in love with her. I still am.”
Neither remembers the first time they realized she was protesting the war while he was fighting it.
“There was no ‘golly, gee whiz, oh shucks moment,’ ” Tom says. “It was just the fact that I was dedicated to protecting the Constitution, and she was dedicated to keep-ing people from stamping out each other’s lives. Our mutual respect for one another far exceeded our philosophies about our use of foreign forces in foreign lands.”
He says the basis for their marriage is mutual respect: “That does not mean complete agreement.”
And she wants to make something clear.
“I was protesting American policy, not the soldiers who went into the war. I had too many friends who served in Vietnam and students I taught who had graduated and several months later were killed.”
The two quickly fell in love, and less than a year later they married at El Adobe de Capistrano and moved their family to Laguna Beach.
Their wedding gift to each other portended things to come: a quick honeymoon in Solvang and a donation of $5,000 to an arts patron group that was raising money for what would later become Segerstrom Center for the Arts.
“We wanted cultural events in our life, and we didn’t want to drive to LA to get them,” Elizabeth says.
Tom worked at what was then “a small-time” vitamin business, Vitatech. Eliza-beth got a job teaching women’s studies and psychology at Saddleback College. To-gether they began spearheading “all sorts of business enterprises,” including an interna-tional company called Body Wise and, between Elizabeth’s talents and Tom’s worka-holic ways, their fortunes grew.
They looked for places and people whom their money could help. The giving be-gan organically, and then grew.
“If it feels right, we do it,” Elizabeth says. “There’s no magic formula. But we don’t do it willy-nilly. We see a lot of proposals, and we know a good one when we see one.”
By the early ’80s, the couple had moved to a house on the Back Bay in Newport Beach (where Elizabeth swapped the tennis court for a horse paddock), and their thoughts were turning to global issues. Elizabeth became active in the academic-minded peace movement Beyond War. She asked her husband to join her – more than once.
“Even today, I’m still regarded as ‘that military guy,’ ” Tom says. “It’s part of my identity and part of my pride, serving my country. When I had a civilian telling me the weapons I was working with were bad for the planet, I was a little bit put off. Pride got in the way.”
But Elizabeth persisted. And Tom relented. Attending one Beyond War meeting was all it took.
“I said, ‘This makes sense to me,’ ” Tom remembers. “I looked at the proliferation statistics. And there was a clear case of overkill – that we have the capacity to destroy one another and therefore humanity as we know it. It became very clear that no one wins the arms race. We all are losers.”
The couple became activists for nuclear disarmament, joining rallies across Or-ange County. “We promised the children we wouldn’t get arrested. At least not at the same time,” Elizabeth says, laughing.
They also began to wonder: What makes people resolve their conflicts without trying to kill each other? And what if that question were approached academically?
At the time, they were selling their Palm Springs home, so they took the $325,000 profit and gave it to UCI to create a Chair in Global Peace and Conflict Stud-ies. They have since given many scholarships to UCI students in the arts, humanities and nursing.
Just how many students?
“I don’t know,” Elizabeth says. “Do you, Tom?”
“A lot,” he answers.
(About 150, it turns out, according to UCI.)
They were in the audience the night their first scholarship was awarded. It was going to a bioscience student, a first-generation Vietnamese American. The young man’s name was called. But instead, a small Vietnamese woman stood up and walked across the stage.
“I just knew that was his mother,” Elizabeth says. “So I went over after the cere-mony and I started talking to her. She didn’t speak much English, and I don’t speak any Vietnamese, but you know how women start talking. She said her son was not there that night because he took her shift – she cleaned offices – so she would have the honor of walking across that stage.
“It choked me up,” Elizabeth says.
And it brought home how even a small gift, like a scholarship, can have a huge impact if you consider not just the recipient, but their family and other lives they go on to touch.

UCI tallies the Tierney’s gifts at $5 million. That’s not counting the $50 million the couple helped raise co-chairing a capital campaign for the university’s Douglas Hospital.
Last year, the couple gave $1 million to Goodwill, the largest single donation in the nonprofit’s 90-year history, to build the Tierney Center for Veteran Services in Tustin, which provides job training and education. It was Goodwill that nominated the couple last fall for the National Philanthropy Day Legacy Award.
So how do they want people to see their legacy?
“We are community builders,” Tom offers.
“This is where we live,” adds Elizabeth. “Where we have worked. Where our chil-dren have gone to school. We’ve seen Orange County develop, from a small place to a huge sophisticated community. And we’ve been involved in … all these things to en-hance it, to make our community a wonderful place to live.”
It’s difficult to put a price tag on their legacy. The Tierneys aren’t counting, or at least they’re not sharing. They will say only that giving is just part of their day, like riding horses and throwing slumber parties for their grandkids.
So how do they choose whom to give to, whose lives to change?
“Every gift we give is based on our values,” says Elizabeth. “We often talk about our values.”
Value No. 1: Believing in all people’s potential.
“When I was 17, all I cared about was making 85 cents an hour at the feed and hobby shop and having a great car (a ’49 Ford) to go on dates,” Tom says. “I was a goofball in high school.”
But Wayne State University near his home in Detroit took a chance on him.
“They gave me a trial, to see if I could make it. I graduated in business and got a commission in the Air Force.”
In 2015, Tom returned the favor with a cool $2 million to restore a 125-year-old mansion on campus for an alumni house and set up a fund for Wayne State students who “just need a little bit of a lift to be college-qualified.”

Elizabeth is not on Facebook, and she has never taken a selfie. She is happiest at the family’s Busterback Ranch in Idaho. Every summer she packs up the dogs and her six Peruvian Paso horses and climbs behind the wheel of her Ford F-350, a horse trailer hitched to the back, to head north until autumn.
“Elizabeth’s the trucker,” says Tom, who drives a Tesla.
“I’m the cowgirl,” she corrects. She rides a couple of hours a day, sometimes longer, heading into the backcountry with female friends and family members for camp-outs. (A buck she shot with a bow hangs in the living room of their Coto house.)
When Tom is at the ranch, he has a giant long-ear donkey named Larry that he likes to pet. His other hobby is prowling small-town antique stores in search of treas-ures: Wooden airplane propellers. Wagon wheels. Old gas station or Coca Cola or bak-ery signs that he can nail to the barn.
“He’s a junker,” his wife says. “If he can bargain for a dollar off something he’s happy.”
Once, in the desert, he spotted a bronze-winged pig the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and pulled up to the property.
“I gotta have that pig,” he told the owner.
“Get out your wallet,” the owner told him.
Today “Pigasus” sits in a pasture at their Coto homestead. It’s not far from a life-size cow that used to stand on a financial building in downtown Chicago. Flying next to their Coto driveway is the American flag, a spotlight shining on it after dusk.
“He is a Boy Scout and he will be forever,” Elizabeth says.
Tom does not disagree.
“I’m a redneck when it comes to patriotism … the responsibilities of citizenship and the obligations that go with being American,” Tom says. Community service should be required, he believes.
“We’re all in this together. There are so many people that can use a hand up. Everybody should look at what can they do to make the world a better place to live in. That’s the whole thing.”