‘Homerica’ founder memorializes his daughter and grandmother through fund at The Trust, which supports children.
Donald A. McPherson (1910-1980)
In the mid-1950s, Donald Alan McPherson started the first full-service, custom real estate business designed to help corporate employees move and get settled in their new communities. He called it Homerica.
“This company was the first true home counseling business licensed to provide services in all fifty states,” Daniel T. Bloom wrote in his 2005 book, Just Get Me There: A Journey Through Corporate Relocation. The plan was to provide counseling to transferees before the move, then turn them over to real estate agents in return for a referral fee, Bloom wrote. The company was a success, and its founder retired to Hawaii.
Donald was born December 22, 1910, in Oakland, Calif., to Arthur R. and Lulu Frances McPherson. He graduated from Trinity College in Connecticut in 1932 with a Bachelor of Science degree. That same year, he married Ruth Cheney Yeomans in Palm Beach, Florida. In 1933, he received a Master of Arts degree from Harvard University. Ruth and Donald had one daughter, Gail, and three sons, Alan, Duncan, and Bruce. They divorced in 1938.
Early in his career, Donald worked in the publishing industry in New York at D. Appleton-Century, Reynal & Hitchcock, Houghton-Mifflin, John Wiley & Sons, and The Author’s Press, which offered free copies of “The Wonder Book for Writers,” encouraging people to write stories and plays, and send them in for publication.
He married his second wife, Jean Elizabeth McCandlish, in 1943 in Silver Spring, Maryland. In 1952, Donald and Jean had a daughter, Janet Hays McPherson, who died in a car accident at age 15. The car she was riding in left the road near Fenwick Island, Delaware, and overturned in a marshland. Janet was thrown into a ditch filled with water and died at the scene.
In 1955, Donald switched from publishing to real estate. When he and Jean moved to the New York area, it took visits to dozens of neighborhoods before they found one where they felt comfortable. After his disastrous move, he saw a need to help corporate transferees sell a home, buy another, and finance the deal. Donald started Homerica Inc., advertised as “the homefinding service of America.”
Homerica dovetailed nicely with Donald’s other venture, Homequity Inc., a custom service that helped homebuyers secure a mortgage.
Donald and Jean divorced in May 1969, and in October 1972, Donald married again, this time to Georgianna Gray in Las Vegas, Nevada. He died May 17, 1980, in Kula, Maui, Hawaii, at age 69.
He established the Janet H. McPherson Memorial Fund for Children in The Trust in 1971 to honor his daughter, who was named for her great-grandmother, Jeannette “Janet” H. McPherson.