Paul Fireman

Paul Fireman was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1944 to a Jewish family and grew up in Brockton, the shoe town. At a Chicago trade show in 1979 he met Joe Foster and took the North American rights to a small English running-shoe firm called Reebok, buying the parent outright in 1984. In 1982 Reebok brought out the Freestyle — the first athletic shoe designed for women — and the aerobics boom carried the company to an IPO in 1985 and past Nike. He sold Reebok to Adidas in 2005 for $3.8 billion. In 1988 he founded the Reebok Human Rights Awards for activists under thirty, and the Paul and Phyllis Fireman Charitable Foundation, one of the largest private foundations in Massachusetts, has pledged $100 million over a decade to health, education, the arts, human rights and Jewish causes.