Herb Denenberg, consumers' fierce friend
Friday, March 19th, 2010
By: Peter Crimmins
pcrimmins@whyy.org
One of the first great consumer advocates in Philadelphia has died.
Herb Denenberg was a state insurance commissioner and public utility commissioer who became a local television news reporter.
Upon his death Thursday, friends and admirers described him as a tireless defender of the common man.
Herb Denenberg was literally a child of the Great Depression. He was born three weeks after the stock market crashed in 1929.
Many Philadelphians knew him for his reports on WCAU-TV about faulty consumer products and corporate fraud. He left television in the 1990's, but filed columns for the Bulletin newspaper right up until his death Thursday.
The city's director of consumer affairs, Lance Haver, said Denenberg had rare tenacity.
Haver: "I found him to be kind and generous – he took time to explain issues if you didn't understand them – and he was courageous in defense of regular people. He would never allow someone to be taken advantage of without challenging it, and he challenged people with a ferocity few people had."
Later in life, Denenberg became involved with the Tea Party movement. He died of a heart attack at the age of 81.
In the early 1980s prior to banking deregulation in 1982, banks and savings & loan associations were chafing from the competition with the money funds. Money funds paid their shareholders all of the profits over their expenses; banks paid investors as little as they could get away with.
One Friday during a Philadelphia newspaper strike, Delaware Park, the racetrack, was having serious financial problems. Delaware Cash Reserves, a $1 billion Philadelphia-based money market fund, was serving its investors well.
Some of the Philadelphia bankers (apparently out of sheer jealousy) started the rumor that Delaware Cash Reserves was also in trouble. Obviously any financial professional knew that the two institutions were totally unrelated. Delaware Park could have invested in Delaware Cash Reserves but the opposite was not true.
I was Publisher of Donoghue’s Money Fund Report at the time and when I was told about the $100 million “run” on Delaware Cash Reserves noon that Friday, I knew they couldn’t place an ad in the Philadelphia newspapers due to the strike; so, I immediately dropped what I was doing, flew to Philadelphia with the intention of going on WCAU-TV’s evening news and telling Philadelphians that “I would invest my mother’s money in Delaware Cash Reserves. Obviously, they were safe and uninvolved with Delaware Park.
When I arrived at the back door of WCAU-TV, Herb Denenberg, the great consumer advocate, and Harry Gross, the Philadelphia Daily News columnist and, ironically, my CPA course instructor twenty years earlier were waiting for me.
Herb was one of the great consumer advocates until the day he died. He was my friend and he will be missed.
Bill Donoghue, Chairman, W. E. Donoghue & Co., Inc. Norwood MA