A message from the president, Gwen Haggerty-Bearden
The Ted and Jane Von Voigtlander Foundation was founded in 2006 by my mom, Jane Von Voigtlander, after the passing of her husband, Ted Von Voigtlander.
The word “helpmate” describes in a warmly precise way the wonderful relationship that my parents, Ted and Jane Von Voigtlander, enjoyed for nearly 25 years of married life. I was seven-years-old when my mom first met Ted – she was a single, working mother raising me on her own. She was a waitress at Weber’s Restaurant in Ann Arbor and he was a patron (I remember my mother saying “how handsome he was”) — she soon became as indispensable a part of Ted’s life as he became of hers and mine.
At the time they met, Ted, co-owner of Discount Tire Company, was in the early stages of building the young company and now Discount Tire Company has grown to become the world’s largest independent tire and wheel retailer operating more than 1000 stores in 35 states. My mother soon found her role as Ted’s travel companion and informal aide de camp, flying out of Ann Arbor Airport with him on the company’s Lear 55 jet and visiting as many as eight cities in one day. “When Ted died in 1999, Discount Tire had already become the largest independent dealership in the world,”… “It was a big, big accomplishment.”
