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Stewart Bainum's empire began 73 years ago with $3 and a cardboard suitcase.

Bainum, 17 at the time, had been kicked out of his private high school outside Cincinnati because he couldn't afford the tuition. So he took whatever money and belongings he had, hitchhiked to the Washington, D.C., area after a recommendation from a friend, found a job as a plumber's assistant and made enough money to go back and get his high-school diploma from the school that had kicked him out.

"One day I was holding the suitcase too close to the road and a car hit it," recalled Bainum, founder of Choice Hotels International and Manor Care Nursing Homes. "I had to piece it all back together."

Things never came easily for Bainum, now 90, but he has dedicated much of his life to making things easier for others. After making his fortune from Choice Hotels and Manor Care, Bainum used the money to fund the Commonweal Foundation, a nonprofit organization that gives about $12 million per year of Bainum family money to scholarships and educational programs for disadvantaged students.

Last week, the Montgomery County Community Foundation named Bainum the county's Philanthropist of the Year, honoring the man not for his considerable wealth, but for the way he used it.

"I don't want to make big things out of my family's worth; you shouldn't be giving money away just because of your ego," Bainum said from his Chevy Chase office Nov. 16, a day before he received the Philanthropist of the Year Award at a ceremony in Bethesda.

That humility made it difficult to convince Bainum, known for shying away from the spotlight and public appearances, to even accept the award.

"Even though he didn't want it and wouldn't like it, we were going to do it anyway," Barbara Bainum, Stewart's daughter and his successor as chief executive officer of Commonweal, said of nominating Bainum for the award.

When he won the award "I had to call him and break the news," she continued with a straight face from Commonweal's Silver Spring office Nov. 16. "That was difficult."

While Bainum has every right to be boastful of what he has made out of his modest beginnings, he always defers the credit, often to less fortunate people who paved the way for him.

Like his father, who worked as a machinist for Ford Motor Co. in Detroit for 20 years before getting laid off during the Great Depression, moving the family to Cincinnati and working for the government for $1 per day. Like his grandfather, who woke at 3 a.m. every day to buy produce from farmers and then sell it in the streets of Cincinnati, leaving the leftovers for Bainum.

Bainum had no silver spoon. He worked as a plumber for 20 years after graduating high school and attending one year of college at what is now Columbia Union College in Takoma Park, a Seventh-Day Adventist school that taught him the values he still lives by.

As he expanded his own plumbing business to 150 employees, he moved on to general contracting, then managing investment funds, then building apartment buildings, then hotels and nursing homes. He opened his first hotel in 1957, which is now the Comfort Inn on Georgia Avenue in Silver Spring, and his first nursing home in 1959 in Wheaton. Commonweal was founded in 1968.

Since then, he established a scholarship program in 1994 that offers 1,400 scholarships to faith-based schools across the country and an afterschool program in 2000 that operates at 40 county schools and has helped fund hundreds of nonprofit organizations, including the Montgomery County Housing Partnership and IMPACT Silver Spring. Perhaps Commonweal's finest achievement began in 1988, when the organization sponsored 67 sixth-graders at Kramer Junior High School in Washington, D.C., one of the poorest in the city. The assistance enabled 80 percent of them to graduate from high school and 38 to attend college.

"The kids would have the TV on studying in one room and their mothers, some of whom were prostitutes, were working in the other room," Bainum said. "That kind of situation is what we were fighting."

He built offices for his businesses on Columbia Pike in Silver Spring, near the home where he and his wife, Jane, lived for nearly 50 of their 68 years – and counting – of marriage. The couple have four children, including Stewart Jr., who now runs Choice Hotels, and 10 grandchildren.

"While his giving is broader than the county, he's made a huge commitment over a long time to giving here," said Sally Rudney, executive director of the Community Foundation, which gave out $5.4 million in grants to county nonprofit organizations last year.

Both Stewart and Barbara Bainum say as the county has become more urban, greater economic disparity has emerged and greater need for charity and educational programs has followed. So in recent years, the family's charitable efforts have spread further across the county, even if its name hasn't.

"I don't want to promote the family name, that's not the objective," Bainum said. "The objective is to help people and pay back the things we have benefited from."