Walter Cherry is a man of enthusiasms. His enthusiasm for the people who work at Cherry Corp., the Waukegan headquarters of the vast electronics company he started in a basement, is evident as soon as you walk in the door.
“Walter Cherry is one of a kind,” said Laurie Collins from behind the reception desk. “When I just started working here, I told Walt that my daughter was having brain surgery. Three months later he was still asking me, `How is Heather doing?’ “
His enthusiasm for flowers, especially dahlias, is a North Shore legend. Until he and wife Ginny moved to Glencoe last year, the “absolutely glorious plants” he grew himself in the front yard of his Winnetka home stopped traffic on Tower Road, remembers Bob McDermott, a retired attorney who still serves on Cherry’s board of directors.
And his enthusiasm for causes has earned him the respect of people such as Charles J. Blanchard, who was president of the Management Association of Illinois for 30 years. “In that time, I interacted with maybe 1,000 CEOs, and Walt Cherry was always on my list of the top five,” Blanchard said. “He’s a forward thinker who really believes companies that reaped prosperity during Illinois’ good days should give back to the state during hard times.”
But it is Cherry’s enthusiasm for discovery that is paramount, that draws him, at age 77, back to his office in Waukegan each day, where he and an engineering team are working on a new design for electronic sensors. He has handed over the reins of his company to his son Peter and now is working as a research engineer.
“He’s a like a Thomas Edison of contemporary society,” said Thomas Martin, president emeritus of the Illinois Institute of Technology and a Cherry director. “Walt is very rare,” Martin continued. “He can create something technically, then see it through to manufacturing. The electronic switches he started by hand in his own garage have grown into an international company, with sales of over $300 million each year.”
Ironically, it was Edison who was responsible for nearly sending the founder of one of Lake County’s largest companies onto another career path. “I grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, with a soldering iron in my hand,” Cherry said from behind the desk of the small, homey office he now occupies in Cherry Corp.’s administrative building.
“As a little boy, I always played with electricity. But when it was time to go to college, my parents decided I should go to Yale and major in chemical engineering. They said that Tom Edison had already invented everything in electronics.” But after graduation, Cherry returned to his soldering iron, first as a research engineer for his father’s company, Cherry-Burrell, then as an expert in ultra-high-frequency electronics for the Army during World War II.
By then he had married Ginny Ballad, whom he met in Winnetka, where his family moved when he was a teenager. “He was the newcomer,” said Ginny, now 75. “All the girls set their caps for him, and I won.”
After the war, Walt and Ginny moved their young family into a Cape Cod-style house on the east side of Northbrook, and Cherry took a job with Zenith Electronics. “But I always wanted to be on my own,” Cherry said. “I had all these great ideas, which my boss thought were not so great.”
In 1949 he and another engineer, William Channer, pooled their resources, a sum of $7,500, and started the Cherry-Channer Corp. in the basement of an earth-moving company in Highland Park. “We had five punch presses and three riveting machines, and we’d make any kind of electronic product no one else wanted to make,” Cherry explained.
Ginny remembered going down the back stairs and past the garbage cans of the upstairs company to reach their work area. “It was exciting to be on our own and more than a little bit scary. We never had more fun in our lives,” she said.
The company did well, Cherry said, but the partnership did not. “After three years, Channer and I were ready to get divorced,” he said.
Cherry turned to his mother’s attorney (his father had died while Cherry was in the Army), James Good, to formalize the separation.
Good, who has since retired and moved to Pinehurst, N.C., said, “Since Walt wanted the divorce, he had to make the biggest concessions. The company’s products were 75 percent electrical harnesses and 25 percent electronic switches. `You take the switches,’ I told him.”
Soon Cherry and his small staff were producing so many switches that they were able to move into their own little building in Highland Park, on Deerfield Road behind the Solo Cup Co. “They were growing so fast they didn’t have time to expand,” Good recalled, “so when they needed more space, they built balconies over the main floor,” he said.
By 1970, the Cherry Electrical Products Corp. was making hundreds of different switches for automobiles and electrical appliances and had outgrown the Highland Park site altogether.
“I took a census of the employees to find out where they lived and determined that Waukegan was a good location,” Cherry explained. “Back then, the area on Sunset Avenue in north Waukegan was all open country, but Mayor Sabonjian (the late Robert Sabonjian) convinced me it was the place to build.”
Today, Cherry’s Waukegan facilities include five buildings (a sixth is under construction) sprawling across 30 acres. The corporation, which includes a semiconductor plant in Rhode Island, employs more than 3,200 people.
Cherry’s initial expansions abroad in the mid-1960s were also modest. “Our first overseas manufacturing location in Germany was the most pitiful,” Cherry recalled. “We rented a room from a farmer on a hillside in Bavaria, with a cow sleeping next door. I don’t know why anyone started to work for us.”
Today, Cherry has modern subsidiaries around the world, including facilities in China, India, Japan and the new Czech Republic. International activities account for 45 percent of the corporation’s total revenues.
Cherry Corp. stock has been traded publicly since 1978, and the corporation ranks as one of the country’s 100 top electronics companies.
Cherry’s personal life also expanded rapidly. In 1950, when Ginny was pregnant with their fourth child, she persuaded him to move into a “fabulous” eight-bedroom, five-bathroom house on Tower Road in Winnetka.
“I didn’t take the move lightly,” Cherry admitted. “The house cost $45,000, which I thought was highway robbery. Nothing was worth that much money.”
Because the house’s front yard received the most sun, Cherry chose that location for his flowers. “I started small,” he insisted.
His son Peter, now 47, remembers only the enormity of the annual enterprise. “He bought a big greenhouse from some house in Wilmette and carted it home in the back of a truck so he could begin growing thousands of seedlings each spring,” Peter said.
Cherry also turned his attention to what he now calls his “civic duty,” serving as a member and president of the Winnetka Park District Board and as a member of the Winnetka Village Council.
Fellow council member George Noyes recalled, “Walt was one of the best trustees I’ve ever observed, because of his respect for opposing opinions. When Walt disagreed with you, he was a formidable opponent, but when the voting was over, so was the debate. He never had an ego problem.”
Martin, who was IIT’s president from 1974-87, spoke by phone from his home in Irving, Texas, about the first time he met Cherry.
“We were working on an interactive-television project, and I had sent one of our professors out into the northern suburbs to stir up some corporate interest. The man came back wildly enthusiastic about this wonderful person who knew everyone who worked at his plant in Waukegan. Sure enough, when I went out for a plant tour, Walt introduced me to everyone-by name. Bob Galvin, who was then CEO of Motorola, and I soon talked Walt into serving on our board of trustees.”
Another board position was born in tragedy. In 1971 Walt and Ginny’s youngest son, Samuel, was killed in the crash of an Army helicopter in Germany, just 10 miles from Cherry Corp.’s Bavarian plant. “After losing our son, I wanted to do something to memorialize him by helping other youth. I heard about Allendale, a residential school in Lake Villa that helps abused children, and Lord, those kids needed help,” Cherry said.
Allendale’s president, Bob Holway, said Cherry arrived just in time.
“We were going through great turbulence, and the state was threatening to close us down. But Walt said we could turn things around, and with his support, we did. Walt’s a hard negotiator and an economic conservative, but he’s also giving and caring. Whenever we have a special program, at Christmas, Easter or graduation, when no other trustees are around, Walt and Ginny are always here,” Holway reported.
Cherry’s love for children spills into his office, which is crowded with family pictures but not family members. “I was always so busy letting the kids have their head,” he said. “Our oldest son, Walt Jr., worked here for five years or so, but he apparently didn’t like it well enough to stay. He moved west to be on his own, and now he’s a poker dealer in Nevada. Our daughter, Catherine, worked here as a summer job, but she’s moved to a little town in Idaho.”
Their son Peter almost moved on as well. “Peter worked here during the summer while he attended Yale,” Cherry said. “When he was about to get his MBA from Stanford, Peter wrote home about all the wonderful job interviews he was getting. Ginny said I’d better write a love letter back, telling him how much I’d like him to work here with me.”
Peter, who took over as Cherry’s president and CEO in 1992, said his ascendancy into his father’s company and finally his executive suite was “natural. I’d only had one other job, as a lifeguard one summer at the Skokie Country Club in Glencoe.”
Peter, who started as an assistant to the vice president in 1972, has more of a financial background than his father and a greater interest in profitability over discovery.
“We don’t always agree,” Peter said, “but now I’m the boss. And whenever I go into his office to bemoan some travesty, he just smiles and says, `Welcome to management. I’m just an employee here.’ “
Cherry is the happiest of employees. “I can now work full time, 40 hours a week, as a research engineer,” he said.
IIT’s Martin is not surprised that Cherry has returned to his first enthusiasm. “Walt already has 40 patents, and he’s still pioneering new areas of technology,” Martin said.
Cherry laughed off all comparasions to Thomas Edison, saying, “That man was 10,000 times more creative than I’ll ever be.”
But, like Edison, Walt Cherry would like to continue making new discoveries when he’s in his 80s.
“There are some new concepts I’m just getting started on,” he said.
