`It really started with a cement finisher by the name of Jockey,” says Ray Benson, looking like he`d be more comfortable behind a desk than on a living room sofa. Jockey is dead now, he says, and this was 33 years ago, but a lot of things seem to live with 64-year-old Ray Benson.
Jockey was a bachelor who spent most of his money on booze, and he never did take care of himself, says Benson. He lived from week to week and from paycheck to paycheck, mostly off the largesse of his employer, Ray`s father, Ragnar Benson.
Ragnar Benson was by all accounts the type who would give Jockey whatever he needed just about whenever he asked. But if, for instance, Ragnar said to charge a meal at a local restaurant and use his name, Jockey would say no. He could eat somewhere else a lot cheaper and would prefer the cash.
”So he just wanted the money and he wanted to drink,” says Ray, who was quite irritated at the time.
”Father, what do you think would happen if, say, you die and Jockey gets hurt so he can`t take care of himself,” Ray asked. ”Do you expect me to support him or take care of him?”
”Of course,” said Ragnar Benson.
”How do you expect me to do it?” came the response. Ragnar Benson Inc. was at the time one of the 10 largest general contracting firms in the United States, a monolithic company that employed thousands of people. Supporting each employee indiscriminately seemed to Ray Benson, who would inherit the company and was to be named president and chief executive officer the next year, a bit much to handle.
”Well, with the money,” said his father, groping for a response. ”With the company money, or some way, your money, the company`s money, some way.”
So Ray Benson made a proposal: ”I said here is a way we can make these people save money. Let`s put money away for them.” So Ragnar Benson finally agreed to start a profit-sharing plan.
If Ray Benson were a politician, you would probably vote for him, but not like you`d vote for his father and not like you`d vote for Ronald Reagan, not because of any movie star looks-though his eyes are shockingly blue and his chin Kirk Douglas square-not because of any anecdotal view of the world that makes everybody laugh a little more but think a little less.
You would probably vote for Ray Benson because that profit-sharing and retirement plan eventually became worth more than the company itself. And because Jockey finally got his money.
Whether he spent it on horses or liquor or food can`t be known. Ragnar Benson and his son would both have hoped for the latter. But as if just to be sure, when Ray sold the company more than 20 years later, he donated the buildings in which Ragnar Benson Inc. operated in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago to the Lutheran Social Services of Illinois. Part would be used as a treatment center for alcoholics.
By that time, Ray`s penchant for giving was well established. Countless dollars had already gone to other causes, many of them through a fund set up in the name of a deceased daughter at St. Matthew Lutheran Church in Itasca. Now worth about $1 million, the interest it generates is used for everything from buying food for the hungry to buying trees for the streets of Itasca. Much goes for counseling.
If there is a common theme, it seems only that the majority of his contributions have gone to the working man.
When the board of Itasca School District 10 voted last year against a 9 percent salary increase for its non-teaching staff members and settled on a 7.5 percent increase, Ray Benson offered to make up the $8,000 difference from his own pocket.
”I felt those people deserved to be paid more,” he says simply.
The board, of which he is the president, turned down the contribution, saying it would undermine its integrity.
”He is very-I do not want to use the word domineering-but very strong, and some people feel intimidated,” said Rose Traeger, the secretary of the board and the only vote other than Benson in favor of allowing the donation.
”I would listen to him before anyone else. A man does not make million in business and not know what he is doing.”
Although he does not deny it outright, the notion that he made millions is greatly exaggerated, Ray Benson says. ”The company was never worth a lot of money because we never kept a lot,” he says. ”Father has never needed a lot and neither have I. Father has never had a second home anywhere. We have never had boats. We never had airplanes, my wife and I; we still don`t.
”It would be portrayed that way because we did so much work. In other words, at one time, we were doing about $150 million of work a year. You would think we would make a lot of money then. And we did. And yet, we distributed it to our workers. We had workers who would jump off a building for us if Father and I asked them to because we took care of them.”
Asked whether the descriptions of his father as a millionaire contractor, which circulated in the press in the 1950s and 1960s were accurate, Benson demurs, indicating it depends if you count the money he set aside for his grandchildren.
”We are not nearly as wealthy as people think we are,” he says, adding it is not likely the Benson name will soon appear on the Fortune 500 list of the world`s wealthiest people. Maybe if the category were enlarged a bit from 500, he says, like to a million.
Nevertheless, it seems that Ragnar Benson had his extravagances. It is estimated he spent more than $50,000 in 1957 to take 69 friends and relatives to Sweden, where he and many of the others had been born. When one of his nieces, whom he had promised to take along, was prevented from going because she was expected to go into labor, he made a special trip three months later. This time, he took just his wife, his niece and her baby.
Most of these people, as Ray Bensen tells the story years later, however, were employees, ones who had never been back to their homeland. A check of old newspaper articles suggests his memory is correct.
Ragnar Benson eventually became known as America`s unofficial emissary to Sweden, making dozens of trips. He was so pleased to be named guest of honor at Minnesota`s Swedish-American day in 1959 that he invited all of his employees with more than 15 years of service to go along. They totaled 77; so he chartered three Pullman coaches.
That he had money is undeniable. In 1959, he personally guaranteed promoter Bill Rosensohn $500,000 if he would stage the Floyd Patterson-Ingemar Johanson heavyweight championship fight at Soldier`s Field. Rosensohn decided on New York anyway.
Despite it all, and quite unlike his son in later years, the most interesting story about Ragnar Benson is not what he did with his money but how he got it.
Ragnar Benson landed at Ellis Island at the age of 12 with only five dollar bills in his pocket and fewer English words in his vocabulary. And yet, by the time he received a Horatio Alger award in New York in 1969, he was friends with the king of Sweden and owner of one of the largest general contracting companies in the United States. Standing next to him that day at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and receiving the same award was none other than the governor of California, Ronald Reagan.
”Actually my father`s first name was Eric,” Benson says in explaining how Chicago and much of the rest of the world came to know him by another name almost 50 years ago. ”His name was Eric Ragnar Benson. But when he first came over they used to call him `earache` and he didn`t like that. So then he became Ragnar.”
Others knew him by other names. When, as a youngster he told a prospective employer at a Chicago Avenue men`s clothing store his name was Ragnar, the man replied that was too bad. He probably could have had a job, but no clothing store could put up with an employee who was bound to be called Rags for short.
”Well, Father says, `You call me anything you want to call me, just give me the job.` So they called him Jim.” Long after he became known to the rest of the world as Ragnar Benson, many of the old family friends still called him Uncle Jim.
From working in a clothing store, he went on to become a stone mason and bricklayer, began to organize and specialize in concrete and masonry projects in 1922, and expanded into the corporation of Ragnar Benson Inc. in 1933.
It is difficult to separate wholly what Ray Benson is from what Ragnar Benson was. Ray himself makes little attempt. And though his father has been dead for 10 years and the company named after him has been sold, he often speaks of his father in the present tense.
Nevertheless, said Don Hallberg, the president of Lutheran Social Services who grew up in the Austin neighborhood with Ray Benson and once worked for his father, the two became very differenct people.
”His father was the old salt,” said Hallberg. ”He came over from the old country. When you saw Ragnar Benson walking down the street, well, you probably dressed better than he did. He was as common as the shoe.
”Ray is the next generation of businessman,” said Hallberg. ”He and I grew up in this country. We did not come over from the old country.” Where Ragnar came from the college of hard knocks, Ray went to Northwestern University in Evanston and became an engineer.
Under the dual direction of father and son, Ragnar Benson Inc. continued to expand, mostly working in industry. General Motors, Ford Motor Co., William Wrigley Jr. Co., International Harvester, Commonwealth Edison, Greyhound, Motorola and United States Steel were all customers. Their employees eventually numbered in the thousands.
”They were a real force in that community in those early days,” said Hallberg. ”They hired people who were moving to the United States, helped them get started, helped them get a job in the community.”
The famous cooling towers at Three Mile Island were among 22 Ragnar Benson Inc. built around the country. Ironically, although those towers are perhaps destined to become their best remembered work, they were also among the reasons Ray decided to sell most of the company in 1979.
”I have always considered them a high-risk job,” he says. ”In case there was a (construction) accident, they would all be killed because the walls are only a little more than a foot thick and you have to go up 40 stories on scaffolding. I felt that just one bad accident could wipe us out.” Similarly, it became increasingly risky to work on jobs that were so large they would have to be bid two years before they could be completed and with more and more variables to consider.
Ragnar Benson Inc. today is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Austin Co., headquartered in Cleveland. Offices still exist in Park Ridge and Pittsburgh, and, according to a spokesman, there are at least a dozen major projects going on right now in the United States.
Where Ragnar Benson`s legacy became the business he founded and left to his son, Ray Benson`s legacy has become a church, schools, community programs and to some extent, a village he helped form. Aside from serving on the local school board for 35 years and being largely credited with one of the lowest tax rates and most efficient school systems in Du Page County, he also has served on the village of Itasca Planning Commission.
It was Benson who recommended the village allow the development of what is now the Hamilton Lakes area by one firm, Trammell Crow. The development is slowly paying off for the village and the school district in the form of a solid commercial tax base.
Among other things, he has served on the board of directors of Augustana College, Shimer College and the Austin YMCA. In 1960, he received the Young Chicagoan of the Year award. For the last five years, he has served on the Du Page County Water Commission.
Ray and June Benson have seven children, one of whom lives across the street from the colonial-style home her parents still live in on Bloomingdale Road in Itasca. Two work for Elsa Benson Inc., a real estate company Ray spun off when he sold most of Ragnar Benson Inc. He still serves as chairman.
The child whose name is perhaps best known in Itasca, however, is Linda, in whose memory a $1 million trust fund has been set up at St. Matthew Lutheran Church.
Linda was killed, Benson explains, in an accident in downtown Chicago in 1959. He and his wife, June, had taken their children, there were five at the time, to a movie and had parked underground in the Grant Park garage.
”We came out of the movie and everything was great,” he says.
The whole family had just entered a stairway leading into the garage, when a bus, turning off Randolph Street to go south on Michigan Avenue, lost control and skidded into a wall above.
The impact dislodged several blocks of concrete, each weighing 500 or 600 pounds, and they came tumbling down into the stairway. ”One of those landed between my wife and I. I was in front. I had two children, one in each hand. My daughter Vickie was a little bit in front of us, a couple steps. My wife was a couple steps behind me, and she was holding two children, a child in each hand. One of the children was killed, and the other lost part of a foot.” Linda was 5 years old.
”We have got a lot of other people closer to their children, because you never know when you`re going to lose one,” says Benson. ”You can`t be any closer than holding your mother`s hand.”
Thinking back, says Ray Benson, still seated in the living room of the home he says he will one day give to one of his children, ”I think my father and I worked too hard.
”(My children) realized I was not home that much. They are more family oriented. They are hard workers, but their families come first. To run a construction company, the president or chief executive officer, that has to be his life. I don`t think my children really wanted that, and I didn`t really want them to do that either.”
