The Franklin Weinberg Fund was founded in 1955 by Charles and Edith Weinberg as the Charles M. Weinberg Fund. It was renamed in 2004 in honor of the ongoing contributions and support from Maynard and Charlotte Franklin to the Fund. The Fund is a private charitable trust administered by the families of the descendants of the Weinberg family, and does not accept unsolicited proposals.
Charlie Weinberg was born in 1893 - it's not clear if he was born in Brooklyn, or on a boat from Europe to Brooklyn, but for official purposes he was born in Brooklyn as a US citizen. He moved to Seattle after high school and went to work for the Phelps Dodge Company there. Seattle is where he and his wife Edith started their family, starting with the birth of their daughter Charlotte in 1920, followed by their son Gil in 1926. The family then moved to Los Angeles, where Charlie became an entrepreneur and was involved in many businesses, with the main focus being on heavy machinery of different types.
After World War II, Charlie realized that with the US having built lots of new roads and storm drains in communities all across the country during the 1930s and 40s, cities and towns would have a huge need for mechanical street sweeping to keep their streets clean and keep the storm drains from being clogged. He proceeded to develop and sell what became one of the country's leading street sweepers through his company Wayne Manufacturing. The Wayne street sweeper became a huge success - this historical promotional video provides a glimpse of Wayne at its peak. Wayne Manufacturing also sold golf carts and other similar vehicles, and was ultimately sold to FMC Corporation for a substantial sum.
Charlie Weinberg also had a diverse real estate portfolio, and in the 1950s partnered with his friend Joe Rosenblatt to purchase 300 acres of oil-producing marshland in South Los Angeles near Wilmington. They dredged it and subdivided it to turn it into buildable parcels, sold them off for a profit, and retained the oil rights. The Weinberg-Denbe partnership from this project still exists today.
Charlie and Edith were also involved in many charitable activities, with the largest being support for what became Cedars Sinai Medical Center - Charlie was heavily involved in supporting the merger of Cedars of Lebanon and Mount Sinai hospitals in 1961. The Franklin Weinberg Fund was a vehicle for their charitable work, and after Charlie and Edith died in the 1960s, the Fund held a share of their estate and became managed by their descendants. Today the Fund mostly consists of an investment portfolio, along with a share of the Franklin Denbe partnership, that generates income that is given away each year to support causes that Charles and Edith's descendants are involved with.