Repaying a kindness

It was 1951, and the Flyers were about to play in the NIT finals at Madison Square Garden. Yoshiharu Ohara ’52 had never missed a basketball game, and he wasn’t about to start now. But he wasn’t so sure if he should join his buddies’ plan to skip class and hit the road.

So he went to see Brother George Nagel, S.M., associate dean of business and the school’s veterans coordinator.

“Yosh was probably the only person to ever ask to cut class,” said Mike Drees, a longtime friend of “Yosh” Ohara and his wife, Yoshi.

When Ohara died in 2019, he gifted many of his personal possessions to his dear friends, the Dreeses. Among the UD memorabilia was a piece of the original Fieldhouse floor, on which his beloved Flyers played.

“He never missed a game,” Drees said.

Ohara also never forgot an act of kindness. He was nisei, a Japanese American with U.S. citizenship, who fought for the U.S. Army during World War II. He came to Dayton to be with Yoshi and search for a university that would accept him. Nagel sat down with Ohara and looked through the veteran’s incomplete high school transcript. “You’ll have to take a little bit of math,” the Marianist told Ohara, as recounted by Drees, “but you get credit for lessons in life.”

Ohara would go on to excel in school, including earning an MBA from Stanford, an accomplishment he always credited to Nagel. Drees said Ohara only ever interviewed for one job, but he built many businesses as friends would seek him out as a partner. The accounting major invented accountancy methods that are still used today.

After the death of his wife in 2008, Ohara was looking for ways to give back. At Caltech, he funded a program in nursing to honor Yoshi, a nurse practitioner and educator. At UD, he established the Brother George W. Nagel, S.M., Memorial Scholarship for students majoring in accounting or finance.

“He always attributed to Brother Nagel how he became the person he did. He was so special to him. We want others to know what Yosh meant to us and what he meant to so many people.”

Major Bernhold ’17 is among the eight students who have so far received the Nagel scholarship for one or more years.

“It was important to me that I showed success in my education,” said Bernhold, a finance graduate who is a life marketing director for Cincinnati Life Insurance Co. “I was investing in UD, and UD was investing in me.

“To know there are donors who care enough to give back made a difference.”

In 2010, Ohara made a trip back to Dayton — his first since he had moved away in 1954. He met the first Nagel scholarship recipients, and he invited them to dinner. “Pick a place you can’t afford to eat,” he told them, as recounted by Drees, who joined Ohara on this and a subsequent trip from California to Dayton. The students picked a steak dinner at The Pine Club on Brown Street.

Ohara also put UD in his will. To date, Ohara and his estate have gifted $2.5 million to UD, with future revenues from his businesses to continue to support students.

Ohara was known as a humble man who always had a story to tell, often of the family farm on which he was raised. He was also known for his own kindness. Colleen Drees first met Ohara when he came to her rescue in an alley after her car had iced over while she waited to pick up her overdue husband from work.

“He always attributed to Brother Nagel how he became the person he did,” Colleen Drees said. “He was so special to him.

“We want others to know what Yosh meant to us and what he meant to so many people.”