Remembering Jazz Legend Pete Fountain

Co-CEO and trustee of the Otto Bremer Trust, Brian Lipschultz shares joint responsibility for the $900 million charitable trust. Outside of the office, Brian Lipschultz is longtime jazz musician and fan. The jazz world recently lost a legend in New Orleans Jazz clarinetist Pete Fountain, who died in early August at the age of 86.

Born Pierre Dewey LaFontaine Jr. in New Orleans on July 3, 1930, Fountain started playing the clarinet when he was a child at the advice of a doctor. Suffering from respiratory issues, the doctor suggested a wind instrument to strengthen his lungs. Aside from that, it gave the world a jazz legend.

Fountain is perhaps most famous for his regular TV appearances on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and The Lawrence Welk Show. Known for his free-spirited approach to playing, Fountain was famously fired from The Lawrence Welk Show after a particularly loose version of “Silver Bells,” something he’d later joke about with the press.

With nearly 100 albums under his belt, he performed for everyone from the president to the pope.

OBT Donates to Child Abuse Treatment Program

 


Financial and investment management senior executive Brian Lipschultz currently serves as co-CEO and trustee of St. Paul, Minnesota-based Otto Bremer Trust (OBT). Brian Lipschultz also serves as a board member of Bremer Financial Corporation.

Founded in 1944, OBT owns 92 percent of a commercial bank and manages a diversified investment portfolio. The grants provided by OBT are funded by these holdings. In 2015, the charitable trust bestowed over $46 million in grants and program-associated investments to more than 500 organizations in Minnesota, western Wisconsin, and North Dakota.

In March 2016, the trust donated $2.5 million to assist in funding the Center for Safe and Healthy Children at the University of Minnesota Masonic Children’s Hospital. The donation will fund a fellowship program, increased community education, and additional staff.

Treating over 350 children that have been abused and neglected, the center was the only one of its kind in the region when it began operations in 2014. It has been renamed the Otto Bremer Trust Center for Safe and Healthy Children in recognition of the generous donation.

A public health crisis, child abuse deaths total 1,580 annually; this figure now surpasses the 1,250 annual child deaths caused by childhood cancers.

The trust's donation is among the largest of its kind in the country.