John L. Smith (pharmaceutical executive)

John Lawrence Smith (February 10, 1889 – July 10, 1950) was a German-born American chemist, pharmaceutical executive, and sportsman. He was born Johann Schmitz in Krefeld, Prussia, in Imperial Germany; his family emigrated to the United States when Schmitz was three years old, settling in Stonington, Connecticut. He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1908 and the family legally changed its name to Smith in 1918.

Smith first joined Charles Pfizer and Company at age 17 while he was studying at night at Cooper Union (he received his degree in chemistry in 1911), and would spend almost his entire business career at Pfizer. He rose to the positions of director (1918), secretary (1925), vice president (1929), president (1945) and chairman of the board (1949). His only absence from Pfizer, from 1913–18, came when he was a general superintendent at E. R. Squibb and Sons. In the early 1940s, he supervised Pfizer's successful development of a process for the large-scale manufacturing of penicillin and is credited as having led the transformation of Pfizer from a chemicals supplier to a research-based pharmaceuticals company.

Smith, a baseball player as a youth in Connecticut and a lifelong fan, became an investor in the Brooklyn Dodgers of Major League Baseball in 1944, and the following year he became a one-quarter owner of the franchise, an equal partner along with Dearie Mulvey (and her husband, James), Walter O'Malley and Branch Rickey. Under the quartet, the Dodgers won two National League pennants (1947; 1949), and made history by breaking the six-decade-old baseball color line with the 1947 debut of Baseball Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson. But O'Malley and Rickey clashed over control of the Dodgers and developed a deep animosity; over time, Smith became more sympathetic with the O'Malley position.

...
Wikipedia