Clarence Otis, Jr.
| Clarence Otis, Jr. | |
|---|---|
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| Born | 11 April 1956 |
| Occupation | CEO, Darden Restaurants |
Clarence Otis, Jr. (born April 11, 1956 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, United States) is an American businessman and former CEO of Darden Restaurants. Otis was named the 11th most powerful person in Central Florida by the Orlando Sentinel in 2010.
Otis was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi on April 11, 1956 to Clarence Otis, a janitor and Calanthus Hall Otis, a homemaker. He moved with his family to Los Angeles where he grew up in Watts, at the height of the civil unrest of the 1960s.
He gained a scholarship into Williams College in Massachusetts, where he majored in Economics and Political Science. He graduated magna cum laude in 1977, receiving the school's Political Science writing prize and Phi Beta Kappa recognition in his senior year. Otis then moved on to Stanford University Law School in California, earning his Law degree in 1980.
He worked in the field of corporate law, specializing in the fields of securities law and mergers and acquisitions. He started out with the firm Donovan, Leisure, Newton & Irvine and moved on to Gordon, Hurwitz, Butowsky, Weitzen, Shalov & Wein. From the start he ran with a high-flying crowd; one of his clients was famed financier Carl Icahn. But, he later on remarked, "I thought the finance side was more exciting than the law, so I moved to an investment banking firm"—Kidder, Peabody & Co. The barely 30-year-old Otis became a vice president at First Boston Corporation in 1987. In this job he got his first exposure to Florida's booming economy as he worked on real estate deals there. He became interested in public and government finance, serving as managing director of Giebert Municipal Capital in 1990 and 1991, and as a vice president and later managing director in Chemical Bank's securities arm between 1991 and 1995. He played a key part in turning around the bank's struggling public finance division, shepherding funding of $2.6 billion for tax-exempt pollution-control projects and participating a $208 million New York City bond issue that was named deal of the year by Institutional Investor magazine.
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