The month of October saw the passing of some significant business figures, from the Hong Kong-born Canadian who toughed out the schoolyard to become a world-renowned architect to the ingenious UK woman who invented disposable diapers.
This is our monthy look at the prominent business figures who have died recently.
Bing Thom
Bing Thom wanted his projects to be instances of “building beyond buildings”.
It was an apt summary of the architect’s design ethos, as iterated through much-admired buildings in North America and, increasingly through the years, Asia. Indeed, the Hong Kong-born Canadian-based architect was on business in Hong Kong when he died on October 4 from an aneurysm. He was 75.
Washington’s Arena Stage, for instance, was one of his bigger successes. Before the redesign the building was showing its age and was in a part of the US capital that had gone to seed – “cab drivers don’t want to take me there,” Thom said.
His solution was to create a complex, the Mead Center for American Theater, that refurbished two old buildings including the Arena Stage and added a third, with all of them under a cantilevered roof.
The Washington Post said the design helped spur redevelopment of the area by provoking people to look at it in a new way. The centre's undulating glass walls, it said, "create an unmistakable architectural presence for motorists on the Southwest Freeway and for thousands of baseball fans on their way to Nationals Park. His design won plaudits as visually arresting and technically adept and as a structure that transcended its fundamental purpose".
Thom had come to Canada at age eight. He spoke no English and once told the Vancouver Sun newspaper that schoolmates picked on him. "For the first month or so, I had a fight every day because somebody called me names," he said. "But it doesn't matter – I got a thick skin from that and a thick head."
He studied architecture at the University of British Columbia and Berkeley and later interned under the famous West Coast architect Arthur Erickson.
Thom’s well-known designs included the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts in Vancouver, four pavilions at the city’s Expo 86 and the Xiqu Centre opera house in Hong Kong.
His wife Bonnie and he were married 50 years. They had no children, but Thom once said, “All my buildings are my kids”.
Herbert Irving
The last surviving founder of Sysco died on Oct 3 at age 98.
Herbert Irving would go on to use his fortune from Sysco’s success to become an important philanthropist. He donated more than $300 million to Columbia University Medical Center in New York.
Sysco, the world’s largest food-services provider, was formed in 1969 when the owners of 12 businesses merged their operations. Irving became vice chairman of the board and head of its finance committee, and provided $500,000 to back a loan for interim capital that the Houston company needed to get started to sell its frozen French fries, corn and fish sticks.
Sysco today employs about 52,000 people, and has a market value of $26.3 billion. It reported sales of $50.4bn in its latest fiscal year.
Irving made his first donation to Columbia after being treated by its doctors. His contributions have helped pay for specialised cancer-treatment centres, scholarships and out-patient facilities. “Cancer always needs money,” he said in an interview in 2013.
Irving was born in Brooklyn and served in the US Army in Europe during World War II. After he was discharged from the military, Irving returned to his job as a teacher but found that he and his wife couldn’t start a family on his salary. He then joined his brother-in-law to start Global Frozen Foods, which evolved to become Sysco.
The Irvings were known for their collection of Asian art, some of which can be seen at the Florence and Herbert Irving Asian Wing of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Leslie Nassar
A rebellious Australian technology pioneer and social-media satirist, Leslie Nassar died on October 22 at age 43.
Nassar was walking with his two young daughters in their current hometown of Nampa, Idaho, when a pickup truck hit him. A 20-year-old man has been charged with fleeing the scene of a crash.
Nassar was able to do both the inward-facing and outward-facing work of modern technology.
“He understood code and content and knew how to make them both sing,” Peter McEvoy, executive producer of the Australian television programme Q&A, told The Guardian newspaper. Mr McEvoy was trying to give the show a better social-media presence back in 2008. Nassar built a system, called TweeVee TV, that allowed the show to show tweets on-screen while also filtering them for content.
More recently, Nassar was co-founder of a digital production studio called Wrangling Cats.
He was probably best known for his satirical Twitter accounts. The first, which mocked an Australian cabinet minister’s attempt to filter the internet, resulted in Nassar’s departure from his job at Telstra, the country’s biggest telco. Nassar’s later parody sites included Department of Australia and Department of Internets.
Phil Chess
The pioneering American record-company entrepreneur Phil Chess died on October 19. He was 95.
With his brother Leonard he co-founded Chess Records and helped launch the careers of Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and others and amassed a catalogue of rock and electric “Chicago” blues that profoundly influenced popular music in the 1950s and beyond.
Started in Chicago by Leonard and Phil in 1950, Chess Records was home to many of the major blues artists of the following two decades and also took on such musical pioneers as Berry, Etta James and Ike Turner, whose “Rocket 88” is considered one of the earliest rock songs. Chess’ rise helped mark the migration North of such Southern-born blacks as Muddy Waters and Wolf and the transition of the blues from acoustic to electric, with hard-hitting arrangements that the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and other white stars openly drew upon.
After Phil served in the Army during World War II, the brothers started out with various small business ventures, including a nightclub, before getting into the music recording business.
“Neither played an instrument. Neither had even a bent for music,” author Nadine Cohodas wrote of the Chess brothers in her 2000 book Spinning Blues into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records. “But they were entrepreneurs, and through the indigenous sounds of America – blues and its progeny, Jazz, rock and roll, and soul – they found their fortune.”
Chess Records’ first release was a Gene Ammons’ version of My Foolish Heart. Then came Waters’ Rollin’ Stone – a song so influential it became the name of the English rock band and the groundbreaking rock magazine.
For the next 19 years, they recorded a staggering lineup of America’s greatest blues, R&B and rock ‘n’ roll musicians out of a two-story building at 2120 S. Michigan Avenue, which still stands.
The impact of Chess blues was especially strong in the United Kingdom, where American recordings were hard to find in the 1950s and early ‘60s. Chess albums helped inspire the London blues scene of the 1960s, the proving ground for such future stars as the Stones, Clapton, Rod Stewart and Mick Fleetwood. Chess even played in a role in one of rock’s most fateful meetings, when Mick Jagger ran into Keith Richards at the Dartford train station in 1961. As Richards liked to recall, he noticed that Jagger was carrying albums by Berry and Waters and sensed he had found a musical soul mate.
In 1969 the Chess brothers sold the company to General Recorded Tape for $6.5m.
Leonard died of a heart attack that same year. Phil moved to Arizona, where he worked in radio.
Valerie Hunter Gordon
The UK woman who invented disposable diapers using old parachutes and her Singer sewing machine, Valerie Hunter Gordon died on Oct 16 at age 94.
Like many young mothers she had grown tired with cleaning a never-ending parade of traditional nappies. And as the granddaughter of the inventor who founded the Ferranti business group, she had the benefit of a family history of problem-solving.
“I just didn’t want to wash them,” she told the Daily Record newspaper last year. “You had to iron them as well. It was awful labour. I was amazed you couldn’t buy a disposable version. I went to the US and you couldn’t buy them there. It was extraordinary. So, what else could you do?”
Well, you could invent them.
She started tinkering with designs. At first she tried using old parachutes for the shell – the printing from the chutes was visible on her first diapers. She later used a new material called PVC.
She produced a batch of several hundred nappies that her neighbours gladly bought up at a cost of 5 pence a pop. You could wipe them clean – no ironing required.
For the disposable inner pads, she settled on a combination of cellulose wadding and cotton wool.
While her neighbours loved them, manufacturers would not bite. Her break came when her father, at a business dinner, was seated next to Sir Robert Robinson, a manufacturer of women’s products, and used the opportunity to tout Valerie’s invention.
Or as Mrs Hunter Gordon put it: “Lord Robinson was a friend of my father. They thought, ‘This silly woman, better have a go’.”
With a patent in hand, she signed a deal with Robinson and in 1949 the Paddi nappy arrived on store shelves. After a slow start, sales took off in the 1950s. However their undoing came in the next decade when all-in-one Pampers entered the market.
George Pernicano
A pizza-parlour impresario who became a part-owner of American football’s San Diego Chargers died on October 6 at age 98.
George Pernicano, known for his handlebar moustache and his love of a good time, was a zealous devotee of the hard-luck Chargers. He criss-crossed America as he attended almost all of their away games for four decades, earning himself the nickname Road Warrior, until illness forced him to stop.
Born in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, Pernicano was one of 11 children of Italian immigrants. He served in the US Army during World War II before moving to San Diego to introduce pizza to the California city.
In 1961 he was running his restaurant when he heard that the hotel magnate Barron Hilton planned to move the Chargers, then part of the American Football League, to San Diego from Los Angeles. Hilton wanted to find investors in the club, and the exuberant Pernicano showed up uninvited at a meeting of Chargers executives and San Diego city fathers. He talked his way into a 5 per cent stake, later reduced to 3 per cent.
Pernicano’s gregarious personality attracted the football crowd – players, writers, coaches – to his Casa di Baffi, which translates as House of the Moustache. The famous quarterback Joe Namath and the actor Jackie Gleason were frequent patrons. Pernicano would often keep the place open well past the municipal limit of 2am.
The Chargers have never won a Super Bowl though, like Pernicano, they have rarely been dull, featuring such stars as the receiver Lance Alworth, the quarterback Dan Fouts and the brilliant coach Don Coryell. They are now contemplating a move back to Los Angeles, while at the same time pressing San Diego to help build them a new stadium.
The team’s principal owners tried now and then to buy out Pernicano’s stake but he always refused.
Over time Pernicano lost interest in the restaurant trade but would not allow the Casa di Baffi building to be torn down. It sat in growing decrepitude for years. The San Diego Union-Tribune writer Nick Canepa described a visit to the parlour with Pernicano during that period: “In the large basement, he opened a locker. A Lance Alworth game jersey appeared. The refrigerator still had ancient prosciutto hams hanging in it, huge wheels of parmesan on the floor.”
* Agencies and The National
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