The last grandson of the world's richest man, a mountaineer turned outfitter, a flamboyant TV game-show king, a short-order cook who became a waffle entrepreneur and a Nobel Prize-winning scientist are among notable deaths in our monthly round-up.
David Rockefeller
David Rockefeller, heir to one of history's most fabled fortunes, died on March 20. At 101, he was the world's oldest billionaire.
He was the last-surviving grandson of the Standard Oil founder John D Rockefeller, America’s first billionaire. He was the only one of his family’s five sons to spend his entire professional career in the corporate world, rising to chief executive of Chase Manhattan Bank during 35 years at the company.
He was a confidant of world leaders from Deng Xiaoping to Fidel Castro. Under Rockefeller, Chase – now known as JP Morgan Chase – was the first US bank to open offices in the Soviet Union and China and, in 1974, the first to open an office in Egypt after the Suez crisis of 1956.
Rockefeller would visit the bank’s Arabian Gulf units each year in his Gulfstream II jet. Nemir Kirdar, who would go on to found Investcorp but from 1976 to 1981 was Chase’s head for the region, in his memoir described Rockefeller’s meeting with Sheikh Zayed on one such tour. The scene comes after the men have been introduced:
“‘Your Highness,’ Rockefeller continued, ‘I see all this extraordinary development taking place in Abu Dhabi under your rule. I run a bank and that’s challenging enough, but to build a whole nation is amazing. How have you achieved it?’
“Sheikh Zayed was by nature a deep and thoughtful man. When I translated Rockefeller’s remarks, he looked at me with his penetrating gaze for what seemed an age. He absorbed the question and seemed to turn it around in his mind. Then he said slowly: ‘It’s like a tree’. There he paused. I sat attentively, expecting him to continue. Rockefeller raised an eyebrow at me, wanting to know what he’d said.
“‘Sir, he says it’s like a tree’, I explained.
“Now we were both waiting for the next remark. But that was it. In that one phrase, Sheikh Zayed had summed up his whole philosophy as a founder of his nation.”
Royal Robbins
In 1957, Royal Robbins became the first climber to ascend the Half Dome formation in America’s Yosemite park. A decade later he made the climb alongside his wife, Liz, which made her the first woman to scale the route. Afterwards the couple were aghast at a picture of themselves in their moment of triumph, clad in torn shorts and scruffy shirts. “When we looked at that picture,” Robbins said, “we said, maybe we’d better get in the clothing business”.
They started selling climbing gear and clothes out of a garage in Modesto, California, the next year.
They were climbing in England’s Lake District in 1971 when Robbins’ wife became friendly with local women who made wool sweaters and asked them to tailor the jumpers to suit the needs of climbers. These quickly became a popular item. According to a history on the company website: “The Herdwick and Swaledale sheep’s wool made for rugged, durable sweaters that, with slight improvements, were ideal for cool weather climbing.”
The company adopted the name Royal Robbins and did much of its sales through mail order and, later, online. In 2003 the couple sold the business.
But while Robbins ran it, he tried to make it a pleasant place to work, and he tried to make the gear as ecologically friendly as possible.
“I wanted to be remembered for the leadership of my company in a joyful way. People had fun,” he said.
As a climber he had tried to leave behind few traces of his presence; this became known as “clean climbing”.
As a retailer he specialised in gear that could be removed from the mountain, unlike the old-style metal pitons that many climbers used.
In his later years, when arthritis meant he could not keep on climbing, he turned to kayaking and rafting as a way of staying close to nature.
Robbins died on March 14 at age 82.
Chuck Barris
Chuck Barris was a legendary television producer who at his commercial peak was supplying the US networks with 27 half-hour shows a week. His greatest fame, however, came when he took to the stage himself.
Barris, who died on March 21 at age 87, pioneered programme formats that put ordinary people in embarrassing situations on The Dating Game and The Gong Show during the 1960s and ‘70s.
Barris was considered a television revolutionary for creating programme formats that lasted for decades and sowing the seeds of reality television by showing everyday Americans on primetime TV. The Dating Game is often compared to The Bachelor, which premiered on ABC in 2002.
Barris’s family was left destitute when his dentist father died of a stroke.
Later, when Barris attended Drexel University in his native Philadelphia, he spent summers working in his grandfather’s clothing store. After graduation, he moved to Pittsburgh to work for US Steel.
“My ambition came from my great fear of ever ending up in that clothing business,” he once said.
Barris moved to New York and worked as a page at NBC, where he was accepted for its management-training programme after using top industry executives as bogus references on his résumé, he said. He then landed a job with Dick Clark on American Bandstand in Philadelphia. Barris also became a pop music producer, writing the 1962 hit Palisades Park for the singer Freddy Cannon. The song peaked at No 3 on the US pop charts.
Switching to daytime programming at ABC, Barris developed game shows in Los Angeles. He founded Chuck Barris Productions in 1965. His shows included The Parent Game, The $1.98 Beauty Show and Three’s a Crowd. After selling his company in 1987, he moved to St Tropez, France, where he lived for a decade.
He became recognisable to a generation of North Americans as the zany host of The Gong Show, which showcased amateur acts notable for an absence of talent and the participants’ willingness to make themselves look foolish. Billed as “everybody’s chance at the big time”, it featured performances that could be terminated as soon as one of three celebrity judges struck the gong, a large metallic disc that emitted a crashing sound.
Joe Rogers
The Waffle House co-founder Joe Rogers, who went from short-order cook to co-founder of one of America’s largest restaurant chains, died on March 3. He was 97.
Rogers, born in Jackson, Tennessee, was the son of a railway worker who was laid off during the Great Depression. With his father unemployed, Rogers delivered newspapers and laundry to contribute to the family income.
During the Second World War, he joined the US Army Air Corps, learnt to fly and also trained B-24 pilots, eventually earning the rank of captain.
After the war, he found work grilling burgers during the day at a Toddle House restaurant in New Haven, Connecticut. At night, he studied accounting and other aspects of the business from the manager and his wife. He was quickly promoted to local and regional management positions.
After moving to the state of Georgia, in 1955 Rogers and Tom Forkner opened the first Waffle House restaurant just east of Atlanta in Avondale Estates. Under their leadership, the Waffle House chain grew to 400 restaurants by the end of the 1970s.
Rogers still spent time at the corporate headquarters in nearby Norcross until a few years ago, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
“I’m not an executive, I’m a waffle cook,” Rogers told the newspaper.
“My father genuinely loved every customer who walked into a Waffle House, and customers immediately understood that,” said Rogers’ son, the Waffle House chairman Joe Rogers Junior.
Christy Mihos
Christy Mihos, who built and sold a chain of convenience stores bearing his name, twice ran unsuccessfully for governor of Massachusetts and endured bankruptcy, died on March 2. He was 67.
Mihos, who was born in the Massachusetts city of Brockton, turned his father’s grocery store into a chain of nearly 150 stores across New England called Christy’s Markets. He and his brother eventually sold the chain for millions of dollars.
In 1999, he was appointed to the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority board and campaigned against mismanagement and cost overruns in the multibillion-dollar Big Dig motorway project.
Mihos and another board member, Jordan Levy, were fired by the state’s acting Republican governor, Jane Swift, but took their case all the way to the state’s highest court and were reinstated.
Mihos mounted failed runs for governor as an independent in 2006 and as a Republican in 2010.
His later life was marred by the bankruptcy, which overlapped with a nasty divorce squabble that resulted in him spending a week in jail for failing to pay his wife nearly US$80,000.
George Olah
George Olah, who came to North America as a refugee and went on to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry for finding a way to stabilise an elusive form of carbon and use it as a catalyst, died on March 8. He was 89.
His work had important industrial applications, from the more effective oil refining to the production of less polluting forms of petrol and even the development of new medicines.
Olah, a native of Budapest, fled in 1956 with his family when the Soviets crushed the Hungarian Uprising.
After the family’s landing in Montreal, Canada, Olah found work as a research scientist at Dow Chemical in Sarnia, Ontario.
In the Dow lab he began to study carbocations, which are carbon atoms whose existence is so fleeting that many scientists believed they did not exist.
Olah discovered through many hours of lab work that not only did they exist, but they would remain stable if you dissolved them in certain “superacids”, which are hundreds of times stronger than sulphuric acid. This allowed him to study the carbon atoms and find their potential applications.
“This transformed the field of carbocation chemistry and paved the way for synthesis methods involving the use of superacid catalysts that produce important organic compounds,” Chemical News wrote in its obituary of Olah.
He was awarded the Nobel in chemistry in 1994, by which time he had left Dow for academia, first at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and then, from the late 1970s, at the University of Southern California.In recent years he had worked on the potential of methanol as a form of renewable energy.
According to his obituary, Olah believed that you could take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and, through a reaction with hydrogen, produce methane, a gas for which he had developed methods for conversion to methanol. This, he asserted, would end humanity’s dependence on fossil fuels while also cleansing the atmosphere of built-up carbon dioxide. This would require huge amounts of energy, which he proposed to gather from natural sources such as sunlight and wind.
* Agencies and The National
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