Samuel R. Mitchell, the first full-time executive of the American Hardware Manufacturers Association, is credited with helping lure the organization’s large National Hardware Show to Chicago’s McCormick Place from New York in 1975.
Mr. Mitchell, director of the Lake Zurich Area Chamber of Commerce, also served as chief executive officer and director of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce for 12 years.
Mr. Mitchell, 64, died Saturday, Jan. 4, in his Palatine home. He was named associate managing director of the AHMA in 1974 and became its managing director in 1976, when its offices moved to Chicago from Cleveland. The organization moved to Schaumburg in 1982.
Gerald Skoning, a member of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce’s board of directors, said, “He just always treated the relationship with the city as a government/business partnership that benefited the entire community if it worked well.”
Mr. Mitchell was born in Milwaukee, where he graduated from Marquette University High School in 1956. During the mid-1950s he attended Marquette University but left after one year to join the Army in 1959 as a cryptographer in Paris. He left the Army in 1961.
In 1965 he obtained a bachelor’s degree in marketing and advertising from Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville. After graduation, Mr. Mitchell returned to Milwaukee, where he began work as an advertising supervisor for Allis-Chalmers Corp., a producer of tractors and other heavy equipment. In 1968 he became advertising director for Bolens, a Ft. Washington, Wis., power equipment producer.
He moved to Palatine in 1972, when he joined the Chicago office of Skil Corp., a maker of power tools.
While at the AHMA, he also served as president of the association’s large trade show. The annual event now attracts tens of thousands of people.
In 1981 he began a 12-year tenure as CEO and director of the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry. The organization changed its name to the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce in the mid-1980s.
In 1993 Mr. Mitchell formed a consulting firm, the Mitchell Group. In 1998 he became director of the Lake Zurich Area Chamber of Commerce. Other survivors include his wife, Fran; and a daughter, Erin. A mass will be said at 10 a.m. Thursday in St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church, 11 S. Buesching Rd., Lake Zurich.
