Gerald Gidwitz, who with a partner helped start Helene Curtis with clay dug out of the Arkansas River they put in jars and sold as “Peach Bloom Facial Mask,” died of congestive heart failure, Tuesday, July 11, said his son Ronald. He was 99, just six days short of his long-held goal of 100.
Mr. Gidwitz was chairman of Helene Curtis when the publicly traded business was sold to Unilever for $915 million in 1996. Although he had been with the company since his graduation from the University of Chicago in 1927, Mr. Gidwitz had only marginal interest in the soaps and shampoos that were the basis of its fortune, focusing instead on acquisitions and side businesses.
Among his start-ups was Continental Materials Corp., a building materials company still controlled by the family.
“He was an extraordinary entrepreneur, and he had little patience for day-to-day business,” his son said.
Outside business, Mr. Gidwitz was committed to educational causes, setting up after-hours classes for Helene Curtis workers in the 1940s and later funding literacy programs in conjunction with Roosevelt University, on whose board he served for many years. Many of his educational efforts grew out of his conservative political beliefs.
He was an ardent cold warrior in the 1950s and ’60s, starting the Education for Survival Foundation to impress upon children the dangers of communism and later funding literacy programs he felt would help get people off welfare.
Mr. Gidwitz was born in Memphis and until age 12 lived in Mississippi, where his father owned a farm and a general store.
The family later moved to Chicago, where Mr. Gidwitz’s father intended to retire, but it was more expensive to live here than his father had figured and so he went back to work, starting a paper box business with his brother-in-law.
The family acquired a financially troubled beauty products company called National Mineral through a debt the firm owed the Gidwitz box company.
“The company was essentially bankrupt,” his son said. Mr. Gidwitz joined Louis Stein in starting it back up.
The company prospered in the 1930s with shampoo brands including Lanolin Creme, which did not last, and Suave, which did. In the 1940s, it was renamed Helene Curtis after Stein’s wife and son. Stein was bought out by the Gidwitz family about the same time.
While Mr. Gidwitz’s brother, Willard, ran day-to-day operations as president, he indulged his passion for buying and tinkering with other companies.
“He liked to find business, he liked to make the deals, he liked to negotiate,” said Chuck Cooper, chief operating officer at Helene Curtis from 1984 to 1994.
Mr. Gidwitz’s political leanings also sometimes influenced his business decisions. Continental Materials was started as a uranium mining company in the 1950s when Mr. Gidwitz developed an interest in the mineral because of its potential impact on the nuclear race with the Russians, his son said.
While he had strongly held stands on world events, “fundamentally he had no interest in politics,” his son said. “His interest was in ideas.”
Mr. Gidwitz turned over Helene Curtis to his son Ronald in 1979, and later transferred control of Continental Materials to his son James.
Mr. Gidwitz met his wife, Jane Blumenthal, while on business in Philadelphia during World War II. They married in 1944 and settled in Chicago before moving to Highland Park to raise a family. After the children were raised, they moved to the Near North Side in the early 1970s. Mrs. Gidwitz died in 2001.
Mr. Gidwitz played tennis into his 90s, but had little other interest in sports.
Until recently quite spry for his age, Mr. Gidwitz delighted in quizzing people on how old they thought he was, figuring they’d guess low.
In addition to his son Ronald, who was a Illinois gubernatorial candidate in the 2006 Republican primary, and his son James, other survivors include two more sons, Peter and Thomas; a daughter, Nancy; and nine grandchildren.
The family plans a private memorial service.
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tjensen@tribune.com
