Jack Sandner is sitting in his sweats and running shoes and talking about a remark made by his wife, Carole, the previous Sunday night.
”It was about 11 o`clock, maybe midnight, and I`m pulling some stuff out of my briefcase to look at before I go to bed, and she looks at me and says,
`You know, the Merc is killing you. You really look bad.`
”And I just looked at her and I said, `The Merc is killing me?` I mean, I was fine Friday night. It was everything over the weekend. We went skating with the kids Friday night, then we went to three hockey games they were in on Saturday. We had a black-tie dinner Saturday night, we went to Angie`s horse show Sunday, then I played squash with Christopher in the afternoon and here it is midnight Sunday and I haven`t had a chance to open my briefcase.
”And Carole says it`s the Merc that`s killing me.”
He takes a breath to continue, but his wife interrupts, saying, ”Jack, I think you`ve made your point. Stop yapping.”
Jack Sandner, the ex-boxing champ from the South Side who used the same disciplined aggressiveness that won him bouts in the ring to become a highly successful trader in the trading pits of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and recently was elected to an unprecedented eighth term as Merc chairman, is taking a rare day off from work.
His clothes are still sweat-stained from the workout he just finished in the well-equipped gym on the bottom level of the house, and he asks how long he has to clean up before the picture-taking session will start. Ally, 5, pulls at his arm to ask if she can be in one of the pictures with him (yes)
and Julie, the household`s equivalent of Mary Poppins, comes in to ask if he wants to take a phone call (no).
Carole and Jack Sandner live with their six adopted children; her father; Julie; and two dogs, two cats and two birds in a 26-room estate once owned by the meat-packing Swift family.
It`s a house that`s used for many things, from hosting benefits to shooting commercials.
Sears recently had shot lingerie photographs for its catalog and underwear was scattered throughout the house. Polo, Marshall Field & Co., Spiegel, Wilson Sporting Goods and Playboy Enterprises have used the house to create ambience for their ads.
”I had never known before that Playboy has a catalog for clothes,”
Carole said. ”We told them fine, they could use the house so long as everyone wore clothes. They did-long sleeves, high buttons. I think my house is beautiful. I like to share it. The money (from the shoots), that`s our vacation money. I save it, we take the kids to Florida, things like that.”
Most of all, however, the house revolves around family. ”We have never been alone,” Jack says. ”Even before the children, we have always had people staying with us.”
Carole grew up in Michigan, one of 12 children, who became largely responsible for the care of her brothers and sisters when her parents divorced. ”My dad had custody of all the children. I was the oldest, I was about 17. I remember that I was exhausted all the time.”
Jack was a street-smart kid from the South Side, a high-school dropout who was using his fists in Golden Gloves boxing bouts when he came to the attention of Tony Zale, former world middleweight champion. Zale became friend and mentor as well as trainer. Under his tutelage, Sandner racked up a 58-2 record. Instead of pursuing a professional boxing career, however, Sandner channeled the discipline Zale insisted on into education. He went back to high school, crammed three years of schooling into 18 months and graduated first in his class. After graduating from Southern Illinois University, he went to law school at Notre Dame, where he won the prestigious moot court competition and graduated with honors.
These two disparate lives crossed in May 1967. Carole was 18, living at home and in nurse`s training at St. Joseph`s Hospital in South Bend. Jack was 26 and a second year law student. He noticed Carole when he was visiting a friend in the hospital.
”I was his cheapest date,” she says. ”He`d study at the law library until it closed (around midnight), and then we`d go to Dunkin Donuts.” They were married on Valentine`s Day 1970.
”I was planning to go to New York or Washington, but then my mom told me how sick my dad was and said it would be nice if I came home, ” Jack says. So the couple returned to Chicago after he finished law school.
Jack`s parents died within a few months of each other, while Carole and Jack were living with them.
”After my dad died, my mom said, `Now it`s my turn.` She had never told us she had cancer; she felt she had to stay alive until my dad went. They were only 53. I didn`t deal with it well. I had finally gotten to the point where I could give something back to them, and they were taken away. It was devastating.”
Jack and Carole bought their first house in Prospect Heights in 1972 for $26,000.
”We wanted a house so badly, it was such a big deal,” Carol says. ”We didn`t know whether we could really afford it. Jack called one night and said he was stopping at McDonald`s to bring hamburgers home for dinner. When I opened my hamburger box, the house contract was inside.”
They also wanted a family. ”We wanted eight children. It never occurred to me there might be problems,” she says. She had two ectopic pregnancies, and lost both tubes and one ovary. Then they made five attempts at pregnancy through in vitro fertilization, virtually commuting to Eastern Virginia Medical School. It was around 1980, and Eastern Virginia was the pioneer facility in the United States for the procedure.
”Two times, we thought it had worked. . . . There`s incredible emotional turmoil,” Jack says.
While they were going through the years of pregnancy attempts, they had adopted Kathy, now 23, who was Carole`s sister`s baby, and Christopher, now 15.
Angela and Michael, both 12 (born 17 days apart), Nicholas, 8, and Allison, 5, were adopted after the Sandners realized that in vitro would not work for them.
Kathy, now finishing her senior year at St. Mary`s College, South Bend, is an intern at Easter House, a Chicago adoption agency, and plans to work there after graduation. ”It`s something I feel I know about from my mom and dad,” she says. ”I think I`ve known that I wanted to do this kind of work ever since I was a little girl.”
The Sandners moved from Prospect Heights to Lake Forest in 1979 and eight years ago moved to their present North Shore home.
At the same time they were going through the trauma of achieving the family they wanted, Jack was becoming an increasingly important player in the commodities market. He had gotten hooked in 1971, after winning a personal-injury suit for the wife of Merc President Everette B. Harris.
”I went to the Merc to celebrate the victory, and that view (of the pits)-it was mesmerizing. Harris asked if I would like to be on the exchange, and I said, `How much?` He said, `$80,000 for a seat,` and I laughed, told him I didn`t have any money. He said, `What if I guarantee a loan for you?`
”I went home and told Carole it might be a good investment.”
He bought the seat and began trading during his lunch hour while continuing to practice law. Gradually, law became part-time, as trading consumed more time and energy.
his last case in 1976, after spending the night standing in the pork bellies pit of the old Merc, working on his closing arguments. ”I had the platform and the solitude I needed there. I won the case. It was a good way to finish.”
He joined the commodities firm of Rufenacht, Bromagen & Hertz in 1976 and became its president in 1978. In 1980, at age 38, he became the youngest man ever elected chairman of the Merc. This year, he was elected to a record
(nonconsecutive) eighth term. He`s no longer down in the pits, trading;
instead, he has used his powerful position for the last several years to put the exchange at the forefront of a world commodity trading system and has promoted Merc interests throughout the world.
When Sandner comes home at night, he wants to be comfortable, he says. He doesn`t want to talk about globalization, trading, what`s going on in the markets or how much money has been made or lost.
”No point in having a home if it`s just a continuation of work,” he says.
Carole, who worked as an oncology nurse at Northwest Community Hospital in Arlington Heights and then at Lake Forest Hospital until the early 1980s also wants her home to be a haven.
The problem was, although they always have understood each other on such crucial matters as families and jobs, she and Jack had trouble communicating on how they wanted to decorate their home.
”I like pastel florals, which Jack just hated. He knew what he liked but could never really describe it. He was always tearing out pictures from magazines. I have a huge file, but we never got it right.”
”Carole and I could never agree how we wanted the house to look. I don`t like sitting in the middle of a floral basket,” he says. ”Sometimes I would go over to the Merchandise Mart and just walk around in order to relax from the Merc and try to get ideas for our house.”
It was during one of those sojurns through the Mart that he found the look he had been trying to describe.
”I walked into this bedroom in Baker (Baker, Knapp & Tubbs), and it just knocked my socks off. I called Carole and said, `Honey, I`ve found what I like; come on down here.` ”
”He likes to think I was helicoptered in to see what he liked, but I didn`t rush down that fast,” she says. ”But I did get down there, and I liked it too.”
Designer Lawrence Boeder, whose business of the same name is in Lake Forest, had done the model room, and Carole called him to set up an appointment. He met the Sandners shortly before Jack left on a business trip. ”I told him I was going to be out of town for a few days, and he asked if I would mind if he just moved things around a little. I said, fine, but don`t buy anything,” Jack says.
”I called Carole from the car phone when I was on my way home, and she said to come in the front door. I usually go in the back. I walked in and said, `Wow.` This fellow had made the library exactly what I wanted. I said,
`This is great, we don`t have to spend a penny; we`ll just get him in here to move stuff around.` ”
That`s not the way it worked, of course. They reached an agreement on price and scope of work, and for the next three years Boeder worked on achieving the look both Sandners could enjoy.
Sandner has changed from his sweats to a suit and then back into (clean)
sweats for the picture taking. There have been peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, yogurt and carrot sticks for lunch, and now, during a break, Christopher, who has won four state gymnastic championships in the last four years, is practicing on the pommel horse downstairs. Angie and Michael are playing ”Chopsticks” on the piano in the living room while Jack and Nicky toss a ball back and forth in the long upstairs hall. It`s not light-and-easy ball-tossing; Nicky has a good arm and is throwing as hard as he can.
”Right here,” Sandner says. ”Hit me right here and it`s a bullseye,”
and he points to the middle of his chest. Whomp. The ball thuds on his chest. What would it be like to be alone?
There`s a moment of silence. ”I can`t imagine it,” Jack says. ”This is the way it`s supposed to be.”
”I`m looking forward to grandbabies,” Carole says. ”Five more years, and I figure we`ll start having grandbabies. Then there will be even more of us.”
