A Tale of Two Entrepreneurs

One was a Buckeye who grew up working in the family business.

The other was a red-headed Italian-American who grew up in rural West Virginia and was educated at the elite Greenbrier Military Academy.

That’s where their differences ended, though. Both were taught discipline and critical thinking through the U.S. Army, and both were embraced at an early age by the spirit of entrepreneurialism.

Dr. Donald Panoz and Milan “Mike” Puskar first met while serving in the U.S. Army. Stationed in Japan, they were both in the radio interception unit for the Army Security Agency. When the two young men returned to the United States, they brought back from the Pacific more than just their combat gear and camouflage—they returned with a friendship forged through camaraderie and like thinking.

In 1961, Panoz and Puskar established Mylan Pharmaceuticals in White Sulphur Springs, WV, a pharmaceutical company that today is one of the world’s leading generics and specialty pharmaceutical companies with sales in more than 150 countries and territories.

Despite the families and careers that guided them down different paths and despite the miles that have separated them over the years, Panoz and Puskar have maintained the friendship once forged on a faraway island in the Pacific. Over the years they have established goals and searched for success independent of each other, but one fact remains: without one, the other would not be where he is today.

Puskar, a native of Hubbard, Ohio, began his work experience alongside his brothers and sisters at his mother’s nightclub. His parents set an example in the importance of giving on a daily basis. “Our paperboy was in my class at school, and he was abused,” Puskar recalls of his youth. “He had two siblings, so my mother would send four lunches to school with me every day—one for me and one for each of them so they would have lunch. There was no welfare that many years ago. The community sort of took care of its own.”

Just a state away, an adolescent Panoz stood out in the small, rural community of Spencer, WV because of his red hair. “My biggest problem,” he remembers, “was that I was the only kid with red hair and whenever anything happened, the adults might not recognize my friends, but they certainly knew who I was. One of the happiest moments of my life was when Billy Simmons moved to town. He had red hair, and that kind of got me off the hook.”

Growing up, Puskar had many mentors to draw life lessons from. “Some,” he says, “taught me how to do things right, and some did things wrong and showed me that wasn’t the way to do things.” For Panoz, leaving home at the age of 14 to attend the Greenbrier Military Academy in Lewisburg had the biggest impact on him. “They taught you that you are responsible for your actions in life,” he remembers. “You got merits and demerits, and if the demerits outweighed the merits, you spent time walking off the demerits around the flagpole. I think that first year I might have walked the distance to New York City and back, but I got the hang of it.”

A few years after the two men returned from Japan, Panoz called Puskar and suggested that they go into business together. The end result was the founding of Mylan Pharmaceuticals in a condemned roller skating rink in White Sulphur Springs in 1961. “In all honesty, I never plotted or planned to be an entrepreneur,” Puskar says of the move to start a company. “I just ended up being lucky enough to know Don. He had the dream. I thought it was a good dream, and I went along. Sometimes you end up being an entrepreneur whether you want to or not.”

Of the partnership, Panoz says, “Mike was a mentor to me. He was the more sober and analytical one, and I was the dreamer. He always used to say, ‘Don, when you dream, you dream in technicolor, cinemascope and stereophonic sound.’ And I always thought, ‘I couldn’t have all these dreams without somebody like Mike to do the work and make it happen.”

Puskar and Panoz had identified a very real problem within the pharmaceutical industry—smaller cities and rural communities often had to pay higher prices due to insufficient access to newer medications on the market. Puskar and Panoz’s solution was to make drugs more accessible to patients in such locales, which they set out to do through Mylan. It was around that time that Panoz met a supplier from Detroit named Stanley Tutag who supplied Mylan with a variety of newer products, including chelated iron for anemics. As the company expanded into production, Puskar and Panoz hired Bernard Herman, a veteran drugmaker in Philadelphia. Herman knew of a 5,000-square-foot factory available in Pennsauken, NJ that was already equipped with machinery, and in 1962, production began with a handful of employees under Herman’s watchful eye. In 1965, Mylan moved the company to Morgantown and built a new manufacturing facility for their employees.

According to Panoz, Mylan Pharmaceuticals drastically changed the pharmaceutical industry. “Generics at the time were just getting started, and we were in a position to take advantage of it. There was an opportunity to produce empty, two-piece gelatin capsules, and at that time there were only two companies in the world producing them—Parke Davis and Eli Lilly. We got some contracts and bought the 60-foot machines. We were starting from scratch where a lot of people had been doing it for years.”

As it turned out, Mylan’s capsules were harder to pull apart. In production, this was a very important aspect because if a capsule full of medication came apart in packaging, it would contaminate the whole drum of pills. Parke Davis, at the time, used bands around the middle to seal the capsule, and when the company learned of Mylan’s higher quality capsules, they contracted with Mylan to manufacture and fill capsules for them. This move led to producing for other companies, which led to low cost production and expanding the generic market.

Panoz then came across the technology to protect certain drugs from being chemically destroyed in the body before they were absorbed. With the exception of Puskar, Panoz was unable to get support from the board of directors to explore this break-through in medicine delivery. In 1969, Panoz resigned from Mylan and moved to Ireland where he founded Elan Pharmaceuticals and pursued his dream of developing the new drug delivery technology.

Puskar resigned from Mylan in 1972 over a matter of principle. He then spent a brief stint at ICN Pharmaceuticals in Cincinnati before heading to Ireland to work with his long-time friend and former business partner at Elan.

Back home in Morgantown in 1976, Mylan, which had gone public, was facing bankruptcy and the employees were going on strike. Puskar received a call from Mylan board member Roy McKnight who asked him to return to Morgantown to save the company from its dire situation. Torn between returning home to save his namesake and staying in Ireland to work with his best friend, he went to Panoz for advice.

“I told Don, ‘They want me to come back as president at Mylan. What do you think?’ He said, ‘Mike, I think you should go because you care so much about it.’” In mid-May of that year, Mylan’s president and CEO was fired, and Puskar stepped in to resume control of the company alongside McKnight, who was named CEO. June 1976 marked the last quarter that Mylan Pharmaceuticals ever failed to be profitable.

“Would I have liked for him to come back to Ireland and stay with me?” Panoz says of Puskar’s return to Morgantown to save Mylan, “sure. But we both had a vested interest in Mylan, and I was happy to see that he had gone to make an impression and turn it around, which is exactly what he did.”

Puskar retired from Mylan in 2002 and remained the chairman until 2009. Today he travels between his homes in Sarasota, FL and Morgantown, WV, which will always be known as his special place. Still the enthusiastic supporter for a good business idea, he recently became part owner of a restaurant in Florida. He still enjoys his car collection, which at one time included a Lamborghini and a Maserati. Today he cherishes his 1985 Rolls Royce and his Panoz, a sports car from the company owned by his friend, Don. He also continues in his role as an avid WVU Mountaineer fan—a fan who has only missed three home football games since 1976.

Panoz, who has also retired, had a career that extended beyond prescription drugs and drug delivery. He has built several resorts and golf courses around the world, and after discovering a love for car racing in 1997, he founded Elan Motorsports Technologies and purchased three racetracks—Road Atlanta in Georgia, Sebring International Raceway in Florida and Mosport International Raceway in Canada. The Sebring is home of the annual “12 Hours of Sebring,” an event known as America’s greatest sports car race that celebrated its 60th anniversary this year. He also established the American Le Mans racing series in 1998, which is a series of endurance and sprint races. From 2001-2005, Elan Motorsports built race cars for numerous racing series around the world, including the Indy 500, where Elan’s cars won three of the five races in that timeframe.

Puskar is known throughout Morgantown and West Virginia for his philanthropic endeavors because he loves the state and believes in its people. “I think the people in West Virginia, given the opportunity to do a job, will do it as well as anyone in the world, and I mean that. The reason Mylan is successful is because of the people. People think West Virginia is only made up of dumb hillbillies. They like to hunt and fish and can be outdoorsmen, but if you give them an opportunity, they will give you 110 percent.”

“Mike Puskar has been the real builder and savior of Mylan Laboratories,” says Panoz. “I was just part of the dreaming portion of it. I went off to chase my dreams and Mike went back to save the company and build a phenomenal business and a very important part of the infrastructure of West Virginia. He has been a pioneer in showing that it might be Appalachia, but with new ideas and education, you can compete with anybody.”