Stewart W. Bainum Sr. and the price of staying in school

Stewart W. Bainum Sr. could afford hotels before he could forget a school bill. As a teenager, he had been asked to leave Mount Vernon Academy in Ohio because he could not pay his tuition. In 1936, he headed for Washington with $3 and a cardboard suitcase. He found work as a plumber’s helper, saved, and returned to finish high school in 1938. The departure is the sort of detail that makes a tidy business legend. The return is what makes his story interesting.

He wanted the education badly enough to go back for it. Years later, when money had ceased to be his immediate obstacle, he would help other students stay in school. Between those two moments came a plumbing business, property development, a hotel company, and a family whose early domestic arrangements would have given an estate agent considerable explaining to do.

The tuition bill came first

Born in Detroit on June 10, 1919, Bainum grew up during the Great Depression. His family later lived in Cincinnati. Mount Vernon Academy offered a different setting: a Seventh-day Adventist boarding school, and an education he had persuaded his mother to let him pursue. Paying for it proved another matter. Desire could secure permission. It could do very little for an unpaid account.

The Washington job gave him a route back. A plumber’s assistant earned 30 cents an hour, work with a direct relationship between time spent and money saved. His next step was college in the Washington area, at the institution now called Washington Adventist University. He attended without completing a degree. School remained expensive even for someone already accustomed to working for it.

College also brought him into Jane Goyne’s life. They married in 1941 and eventually had four children: Barbara, Stewart Jr., Roberta, and Bruce. Their partnership would run through both the businesses and the philanthropy. Jane belongs near the beginning of this story, where the work was being done, well before a foundation made the couple’s intentions formal.

The family lived below the business

Bainum progressed through plumbing into contracting and property development. Jane handled administrative work in the early plumbing operation. The couple worked out of their apartment. Their son was born in a basement apartment in a house they owned, with the upstairs rented to tenants. Home and business shared an address, a budget, and presumably the occasional interruption.

The arrangement was repeatable. Bainum bought a house, made room downstairs for his family, rented the floors above, and sold when the property had increased in value. Then he began again. Stewart Jr. later recalled that by age seven he had lived in six houses. For a child, moving day was family life. For his father, it was also a transaction.

The progression makes sense at the scale of a working household. Plumbing led to knowledge of buildings. Contracting widened the work. Property ownership introduced rental income and resale. In 1951, Bainum formed Realty Investment Company. By 1957, he had opened the Park Silver, his first hotel, in Silver Spring, Maryland. Hospitality emerged from years of practical experience with property.

His son remembered the early years with affection and a small reservation about paternal storytelling: “He had some good stories and most of them, I think, were true.” It is a useful family observation. Even a business career assembled from invoices and renovations acquires a little polish when its founder tells it at home.

A hotel company with a past of its own

The company Bainum helped build had beginnings elsewhere. In 1939, seven independent hotel owners in Florida joined forces to exchange practices and refer guests to one another. Their cooperative became Quality Courts United. A traveler could follow a recommendation from one property to another; a hotel owner could benefit from a network larger than a single building.

Shared standards helped make those recommendations credible. The association developed common operating practices and published the names of qualifying properties. Hotels retained their individual owners while participating in a common system. The appeal was plain: someone arriving in an unfamiliar town would have a reason to trust the next hotel, and someone running that hotel would have help finding the next guest.

Bainum entered this existing world with his own properties and ideas about its structure. He joined the Quality Courts board in 1961 and encouraged consideration of a shift from a nonprofit membership organization to a for-profit corporation. The change came in 1963. It gave the organization a different way to raise capital and pursue expansion.

In 1968, Park Consolidated, Bainum’s hotel business, merged with Quality Courts Motels. He became president and chief executive officer and moved the headquarters to Silver Spring. Getting there involved a proxy fight, which he won. The former contractor was now working on the architecture of a corporation, where persuasion and votes mattered alongside the buildings themselves.

The distinction matters. Choice’s roots reach back to the Florida cooperative. Bainum supplied a later, consequential chapter: properties, leadership, restructuring, and a merger. Calling him a founder of the modern company lineage preserves both histories. An organization can have several beginnings, depending on whether one is looking at its first agreement, its business model, or its eventual name.

Quality Courts became Quality Inns International in 1972, reflecting a business expanding into overseas markets. During the next decade, the lodging system developed multiple brands. Comfort Inn opened in 1981, and Sleep Inn and Comfort Suites followed in 1986. The company acquired the rights to the Clarion name that year. Different travelers could be offered different lodging options within the same business.

The inheritance included a summer job

Inside the family, access to that business came with work attached. At his father’s insistence, Stewart Jr. started at age 12 as a janitor and maid. Later summers brought dishwashing and construction labor. The future executive got acquainted with the jobs behind the rooms. A family connection might explain why he was there; it did very little to wash the dishes.

He joined his father in business in 1972 and succeeded him in leadership in 1987. The hotel company took the Choice Hotels name in 1990 and became separately traded in 1996. Bainum Sr.’s career thus extended into a business recognizable to later generations of travelers, while the responsibilities of running it passed to others.

A second succession concerned the foundation. Barbara Bainum followed her father as its CEO in 2008. The institution had begun four decades earlier, when Stewart and Jane established The College Foundation in 1968. Its early work helped students with limited resources continue their education through college loans. Giving had become an organized part of the family’s work while the businesses were still developing.

The timing joins two sides of his life. The year of the hotel merger was also the year of the foundation. His business was becoming larger and more structured; his educational giving was acquiring a structure of its own. The couple’s childhood experiences of financial hardship remained relevant to decisions made from a very different financial position.

“We believe that each individual has value and potential and deserves a quality learning environment.”

Stewart Bainum, 2011

A promise with homework attached

In 1988, Bainum sponsored a class at Kramer Junior High School in Southeast Washington through the I Have A Dream program. He promised support for college if the students completed school. He had once needed wages to return to a classroom. Now he could offer students some assurance about what would be possible after theirs.

The sponsorship went beyond the future tuition bill. It included dedicated staff, mentoring, tutoring, and other educational support. Bainum hosted students at his farm and held annual Christmas parties at a hotel. Those gatherings added a personal connection to the financial commitment. His presence could be remembered as well as his promise.

Ten students attended Mount Vernon Academy, his own school. Nine graduated on schedule in 1994. That experience helped lead to Pathways to Success, a scholarship program for children from low-income families. The work expanded to boarding and day schools. Across 1994 to 2018, the program provided more than $45 million in scholarships to thousands of students.

The foundation also returned to the Dreamers in 2012 to examine the program’s longer effects. Learning from those participants helped inform its later emphasis on reaching children earlier and supporting more of the circumstances around their education. The original promise continued to generate questions. A foundation built around schooling could itself learn.

Bainum died on February 12, 2014, aged 94. In 2015, Commonweal became the Bainum Family Foundation, honoring both founders as the organization developed its next approach. His business career received another public acknowledgment with his posthumous induction into the Business Travel Hall of Fame in 2023. The institutions kept moving after the life that helped start them had ended.

His story is easiest to understand at its smallest scale: a student looking for work, a family downstairs, a boy doing a summer job, a class offered help with college. The hotels gave those decisions reach. The school bill gave them a remembered purpose. Bainum had returned to finish his own education. Through the foundation, he kept finding ways to help someone else continue theirs.