Good on Paper

Living a block from the Coral Gables campus, Philip Genet, A.B. ’71, was “a UM rat. I used to jump the fence, dying to watch football practice. One time I fell and cut my leg, and one of the trainers took me in and stitched me up. He said, ‘If you want to be here that badly, why don’t you help out the team?’”

But long before Genet started fetching towels and water, setting up hurdles on the track, and tending to the baseball scoreboard, he knew he wanted to attend the University of Miami. Among his fondest memories are sitting on his father’s lap, twirling the UM class ring around his father’s finger, and going to Hurricane games at the Orange Bowl with him and Uncle Saul, J.D. ’48.

In total, there are 11 Genet relatives who have graduated from the University of Miami. The Hurricane lineage begins with Philip’s father, Irving Genet, A.B. ’37, who came to Miami from New York in 1936 with his parents and three siblings—Martin, Florence, and Saul. In 1939 Irving and his father founded Dade Paper Company in Miami, a wholesale distributor of disposable food service packaging. Starting the business depleted family funds, so Irving bartered with the University of Miami—towels, facial tissue, and napkins in exchange for tuition for his siblings.

Irving’s brother, Martin, J.D. ’40, was the first in a line of School of Law graduates, including his two sons, Sandor and Benjamin, and grandson Solomon. “It was wonderful to go through so similar an experience as my father and grandfather—the same law school with the same professors,” says Solomon, J.D. ’99. Solomon’s brother, Martin, graduated from UM with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 2003.

Celebrating his 90th birthday this February, Irving Genet still heads to work at Dade Paper every day at 5:30 a.m. Philip Genet, who “grew up in two places—Dade Paper and the fields of the University of Miami,” has lived in San Francisco for 30 years, where he owns a wholesale disposable food packaging business. Philip and his sister, Donna, A.B. ’65, M.A. ’69, last year announced a $100,000 gift from the Irving and Sylvia Genet children—Philip, Donna, Lenny, and Julian—to create an endowed scholarship in the School of Education.