Leon Levine, Family Dollar founder and North Carolina philanthropist, dies at 85

Leon Levine, the Family Dollar Store founder who shared his fortune with health care, education and community causes in Charlotte and beyond, died Wednesday. He was 85.

Levine’s name marks institutions across the region. The self-made man who never finished college started one of North Carolina’s biggest scholarship programs. The creator of one of the Southeast’s biggest foundations combed The Charlotte Observer for troubled charities to help.

The Leon Levine Foundation has granted more than $450 million, with more than half the total awarded since 2008. The figure doesn’t include gifts by Levine and his wife, Sandra.

“The depth and breadth of Leon Levine’s generosity has transformed our philanthropic landscape,” retired Foundation For The Carolinas President and CEO Michael Marsicano said in a statement. “Imagine a legacy that reaches virtually every citizen in our community with generosity. This is the legacy of Leon Levine.”

Family Dollar founder Leon Levine remembered in Charlotte for philanthropic legacy

The Southeastern Council of Foundations ranked the Levine foundation the 21st-largest by assets in the region in 2017 with $534.5 million. The foundation’s current assets total about $700 million. That seems likely to grow: In a 2009 Observer interview, Levine said the foundation would receive the couple’s wealth when they passed.

A teenage businessman

Levine was born in Wadesboro, the youngest of four children whose father died when he was 12. He began helping his mother and brother Sherman run The Hub, the family department store in Rockingham.

“I learned a lot about business and people in that store,” he said in a 2009 Observer interview. “You quickly learned the customer is the most important person.”

Sherman and Leon, then 19, bought a chenille bedspread factory in Wingate in 1956 but it struggled because of its small size. Levine took classes at Wingate College in mornings and ran the factory in the afternoons.

At 22, Levine used $6,000 to open the first Family Dollar Store on Charlotte’s Central Avenue in 1959. He had first visited a chain of stores in Tennessee that sold items under $1, according to the foundation’s website. Levine decided his store would sell everything — cleaning supplies, clothing, household goods — for $2 or less.

A second store opened by 1960. The company began selling shares in 1970. A year later, its 100th store opened, in Brevard; its 1,000th in 1985. By 2019, more than 8,000 stores were operating.

The chain’s competitive niche: small stores in neighborhoods, within easy reach of their lower-income customers. Most items are still priced below $10. Levine found store locations by checking supermarket parking lots for fresh oil stains — a signal that neighbors drove old, leaking cars. Motor oil was a bestseller.

“The late ‘50s and ‘60s were the era of mall building. Leon Levine was something of a contrarian to that. He did not go into the malls, he stayed in the neighborhoods,” community historian Tom Hanchett told The Observer in 2018. “He had brilliant foresight.”

Levine’s first wife, Barbara, died of breast cancer in 1966. Levine’s daughter from that marriage, Mindy, died at 25 in 1987. He married Sandra Levine in 1978.

Honoring customers

The foundation was created in 1980. By 2019, health care had gotten 31% of its grants, followed by education, Jewish values, human services and community causes.

Tom Lawrence, the foundation’s president, said in a 2020 Observer interview that he believed Levine viewed the foundation as a way to honor the discount retail customers who had built Family Dollar.

“When he was in business, one of his focuses was on buying his inventory — he was one of the great negotiators of his time,” Lawrence said. “The benefit of that was not just to the bottom line but to benefit the customers, to give back.”

“There’s a lot of visibility with larger named organizations around the Charlotte area, but what gets lost is that literally hundreds of groups have been funded by his foundation,” Lawrence said. “The vast majority of grants were given to causes that just needed operating funds.”

Levine and his wife remained deeply involved in the foundation well into his 80s.

“They love the work and the foundation — he has called it his second career,” Lawrence said. “The first decades of his life was about building a business and making money; now it’s philanthropy. Both are board members, and not a grant goes through this process without his having reviewed it, with me and the board, and his signing off on it, even the small ones.”

In 1980, the couple donated $1 million toward the creation of Shalom Park and in 1997 gave an additional $2.5 million. The giving continued: In 1991, they gave $10 million to help build the Levine Science Research Center at Duke University.

“We’re not on an ego trip,” Levine told The Observer in 2009. “These people want our name up there because it helps them raise more money.”

When the Museum of the New South raised $8.2 million in its 1998 capital campaign, it was renamed the Levine Museum of the New South in honor of the couple’s $1 million donation.

In 2002, in honor of the late Barbara Levine, the foundation gave $1.1 million for an endowment fund to advance breast cancer genomics research. In 2003, the foundation’s $5 million created a scholarship fund at Central Piedmont Community College and its $10 million donation helped create the Levine Children’s Hospital at Carolinas Medical Center.

In 2009, following a deep recession, the foundation worked with Foundation for the Carolinas and others to create the Critical Need Response Fund, which distributed nearly $7.6 million.

It also awarded $7.4 million to UNC Charlotte to begin the Levine Scholars Program. It was the largest individual academic gift in the university’s history and in scope rivaled the venerable Morehead-Cain scholarships at UNC Chapel Hill. The Levines added $12.9 million in 2014 to extend the program.

An additional $8 million went to Queens University of Charlotte for a wellness and recreation center.

In 2010, the foundation invested $10 million in Project L.I.F.T., a public-private partnership that works with schools in west Charlotte. The foundation gave $15 million that year for the Levine Center for the Arts’ cultural campus of museums and theaters in uptown Charlotte. It gave $20 million to Carolinas HealthCare System, now Atrium Health, for the Levine Cancer Institute. At the time it was the largest gift ever to a Charlotte institution.

In 2016, the foundation awarded $25 million to Carolinas HealthCare for a second building at the Levine Cancer Institute.

Levine’s impact reached well beyond Charlotte, with donations of nearly $70 million going to groups outside of Mecklenburg County. The foundation gave $5 million to Appalachian State, for example, $2.5 million to Campbell University and $1 million to Richmond Community College.

In 2002, the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest Americans estimated the family’s net worth at $800 million. In 2022, the Levines were no longer listed.

Family ties frayed

Family ties sometimes splintered. In 1987, days after a disappointing earnings year, Levine announced that two relatives, cousin and company president Lewis Levine and Leon Levine’s son Howard, a senior vice president, had left the company. Lewis Levine later said he’d been fired, while Howard Levine said he was pushed out, adding at the time that he and his father “don’t have a personal relationship.”

The younger Levine started a discount women’s clothing chain in Philadelphia. By 1996, he had reconciled with his father and returned to Family Dollar. Howard Levine was named president and chief operating officer in 1997 and took over as CEO in 1998. Leon Levine retired as chairman of the discount chain in 2003.

Dollar Tree bought Family Dollar in 2015 for $8.5 billion and a few months later Howard Levine stepped down as CEO, ending nearly 50 years of family ties. Three years after the acquisition, Dollar Tree closed the chain’s Matthews headquarters in favor of a consolidated site in Chesapeake, Va.

Editor’s note: Bruce Henderson, who reported and wrote this story, is a retired Observer reporter.