Founders
“Chance favors the prepared mind.” - Louis Pasteur
Saul Haas was a testament to Pasteur’s insight on achievement, and he fashioned a rich, full life out of it—as a journalist, political confidante, broadcaster and humanitarian. It is no coincidence that the Saul and Dayee G. Haas Foundation is among his legacies, devoted to helping prepare other minds, to improving their chances.
He was a man of many parts: complex, self-made and self-educated, described variously as brilliant, compulsively curious, irascible, compassionate, a benevolent despot - and sometimes not so benevolent. "He could be generous to a fault and devilish to a fault," one long-time critic-admirer said. In a column on Saul’s death, Seattle Times TV writer Chet Skreen remembered him as "one of broadcasting’s most colorful characters."
He was born in New York’s Lower East Side, June 12, 1896, to Albert and Lena Haas, Romanian-Jewish immigrants, in hard circumstances, the oldest of four children. The Haases arrived on that huge, turn-of-the-century tide from Europe, a particularly bad time for everyone, especially for immigrants. The Industrial Revolution fallout was wracking the country: financial panics; one of the worst depressions in the country’s history; endemic, often violent, labor strife.
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