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Raising The Bar: The Life and Work of Gerald D. Hines
Raising The Bar: The Life and Work of Gerald D. Hines
Raising The Bar: The Life and Work of Gerald D. Hines
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Raising The Bar: The Life and Work of Gerald D. Hines

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Gerald D. Hines stands at the top of the international real estate investment and development world. A Purdue graduate with a degree in engineering, Hines may have arrived in Houston in 1948 for a nine-to-five job at a heating and air conditioning company, but before long he was making the deals that would transform Houston’s skyline. Later, with his revolutionary idea that great architecture was good business, he was reshaping the skylines of the world. Today, Hines is a respected global organization with a presence in 20 countries that has developed, redeveloped or acquired more than 1,100 properties.

Raising the Bar: The Life and Work of Gerald D. Hines tracks one man’s incredible rise, from building small office/warehouses to manifesting Houston icons like The Galleria, One Shell Plaza, and Pennzoil Place to cultivating the national and then global expansion of his company. It paints the portrait of a man who himself is a study in contradictions: a child of the Depression and a citizen of the world; an engineer who still carries the slide rule that has guided his career yet commissions daring feats of art and architecture; a reserved and humble man in a field known for being brash and aggressive who takes on physical challenges with wild abandon. With enlivening anecdotes and revealing characterizations, Raising the Bar reveals the man behind the premier real estate company in the world like never before.  
LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 2, 2016
ISBN9780988926158
Raising The Bar: The Life and Work of Gerald D. Hines
Author

Mark Seal

Mark Seal joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor in 2003, covering stories as varied as the Bernie Madoff scandal, Ghislaine Maxwell, Tiger Woods, the fall of Olympian Oscar Pistorius, the making of classic films such as Pulp Fiction, and many more. His 2016 Vanity Fair article “The Over the Hill Gang,” about a gang of retired thieves who pulled off the biggest jewel heist in British history, was the basis of the 2018 film, King of Thieves, starring Michael Caine. In addition to Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli, he is the author of the books Wildflower and The Man in the Rockefeller Suit. His website is Mark-Seal.com.

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    INDEX

    INTRODUCTION

    Today, in his nineties, Gerald Hines is successful beyond conventional comprehension. But for the developer who has made a profound impact on the built environment, the milestone is yet another beginning in a lifetime of beginnings. At fifty, he married Barbara Fritzsche, his partner and sounding board, and embarked upon a new and exciting life of adventure, travel, and business. At sixty, he became a father to a second family. At seventy, he moved from his longtime home in Houston to London, where he began, practically anew, by championing his company’s expansion into international real estate. In his mid-eighties, he returned to Houston, encouraging its further expansion, both domestically and in far-flung cities across the globe. Now Hines races against the perceived limitations of age and accomplishment.

    To appreciate how far he’s come, consider where he began. For the story of Gerald D. Hines is one of triumph over seemingly insurmountable odds. In real estate, you try to put the odds in your favor, he says.

    I guess I just tried harder, says Gerald Hines, thinking back to 1938. He is back in his eighth grade classroom in Gary, Indiana, and he is lost.

    He cannot see the blackboard and cannot focus on his textbooks. The world is enshrouded in fog, and he is trapped inside—or outside—of it. No one knows what plagues him. Not his teachers. Not his steelworker father. Not even his schoolteacher mother.

    Gerald Hines cannot see.

    Not only could he not see the blackboard from the back of the room, but he also had dyslexia, which caused him to transpose the letters while reading his textbooks, says Barbara Hines. This was eighty years ago, so people didn’t know what it was.

    Eventually, an optometrist fitted him for eyeglasses, and his world opened anew. As for his problems with reading, over time Hines learned the power of focus, to summon inner strength to overcome physical limitations.

    Hines excelled in math. In his algebra class at Emerson High School, a teacher, Minnie Talbot, became his personal savior and saint, delivering the instrument that would soon guide his life and career. Here it is, he says, producing one of his treasured one-by-four-inch plastic slide rules that he has carried in his suit jacket pocket for all of his professional life. The slide rule serves a dual purpose. First, it allows him to make lightning-fast calculations: adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing, and conjuring up square roots in seconds. Second, it serves as a prop, a way to stall time while deliberating during intense negotiations. Slide rule in hand, the boy who once could not see became a visionary.

    He saw opportunity in the Houston of 1948, into which he arrived, in debt, on the $1,200 Ford he was driving and taking advantage of $5-a-night lodging at the YMCA. Before long he was helping shape the city.

    First, with a series of offices lining a stretch of Richmond Avenue, so filled with his modernist structures that it became known as Hines Boulevard. Then, his first high-rise. The Willowick, that was a big one, he says when asked about one of his biggest business gambles. The Willowick was a sixteen-story apartment building that asked the city that worshipped sprawling homes on Houston’s copious ground to move into boxes in the sky. Its success was due to Hines’ ability to identify his market: The widows of River Oaks, he says, referring to the adjoining residential neighborhood that is, then and now, the city’s finest. Soon, the Willowick was occupied, mostly by women who, having lost their husbands, were introduced to the security and efficiency of high-rise living.

    Next, Hines revolutionized the shopping mall as a mixed-use center, not merely a hybrid but a twenty-six-acre, $30 million reinvention. Pushing the limits of both his and his team’s creativity—as well as his finances and even those of his investors, whose patience and pockets were wearing thin—he presented his vision to his partners with a flip chart over a country club lunch.

    Hines’ plan for a shopping mall represented a brave new world where the limits of brick, mortar, and imagination were transmogrified. Each detail was unprecedented: from the project’s Japanese-born architect to the jigsaw collage of proposed retail, office, hotel, tourist attractions, and recreation to the parking, which was planned around the development instead of relegated to a conventional structure. It would be four floors when most malls were two or three at most. Its focal point would be an ice skating rink in the mall’s basement, and on the roof would be a jogging track and air-conditioned tennis courts. Hines called it the Galleria.

    Concurrent with building the Galleria, he was betting the ranch, as his son Jeff Hines later recalled, on yet another equally risky project downtown. It would be the world’s tallest lightweight concrete building, first forty-eight stories, then fifty, the tallest building west of the Mississippi, so titanic that many predicted it would sink into Houston’s porous gumbo ground and float away forever in the Gulf of Mexico—if it didn’t cause its developer to go broke first. But Hines and his team, including the legendary structural engineer, the Bangladesh-born Fazlur Khan, ensured that One Shell Plaza would not sink, but rise to glory, becoming the national headquarters of the Shell Oil Company giant.

    The craziest thing in the world was to build those two big projects with the limited net worth I had, Hines says. It was crazy, crazy, wild. I didn’t get much sleep. I could have gone broke.

    The risk factors really took a toll on him, adds Barbara Hines. He paid a huge physical price for that.

    In 1975, at fifty, he was diagnosed with angina so severe that his doctors—many of them, near and far—insisted on an immediate coronary bypass, which Hines adamantly refused.

    Once again, his weakness became his strength.

    Just as his dyslexia and eyesight deficiencies launched his determination to try harder and to focus, his angina launched another rebirth. With Hines guided by a young, newly graduated physician named Dean Ornish, his heart affliction became the catalyst to a new life of diet, exercise, yoga, extreme sports, and adventure.

    His strict diet—steamed greens and boiled grains that he would pack with him in his unceasing business travels—along with a zealous devotion to exercise, eventually paved the way for countless others who would follow Dr. Ornish’s plan, which Hines and his wife Barbara supported by both following and funding.

    The now-middle-aged man on a mission to heal his heart was yet again transformed. The Mountains Some Men Climb: Gerald Hines’ Are Often as Real as Steel, read the cover line of a Houston magazine, detailing the developer’s limitless life of mountain climbing, white river rafting, and helicopter skiing. Next, his determination to live a full life without coronary bypass surgery led to a journey within, via yoga and meditation—though he downplayed this aspect of his regimen to avoid raising the eyebrows of his more conservative colleagues and investors.

    Pushing limits became his way of life, and Hines added golfing, skiing, roller-blading, rock-climbing, and motorcycle riding to his roster of activities, though few of these came naturally to him. Through instruction and the ability and drive to try harder, he learned, and, eventually, excelled. As a result, Hines outraced angina. I gradually built the collaterals around those closures, says Hines. The collaterals are blood vessels not much bigger than the hairs on your head. They create a bypass around a blockage. That’s what keeps me alive today.

    Hines’ spirit of bold vision and adventure radiates throughout his company, infusing his employees with their founder’s passions: for exercise, adventure, and the great outdoors as evidenced by the annual Hines extreme ski trip for a select group of the firm’s daredevils; for transforming the built environment; and for the art of the deal. His unbridled enthusiasm energizes everyone around him and provides a sense of purpose for the team, says Mark Cover, a senior managing director at the Hines firm. Hines knows that if you can push your limits in the great outdoors, that spirit will transfer to the office, which is, of course, his favorite and most famous arena of accomplishment.

    Today, at ninety, he stands at the top of the international real estate investment and development world. But he remains the eternal engineer, forever fascinated by the inner working of buildings, whose basements and ducts he climbed through when he first arrived in Houston in his 9-to-5 job for a heating and air conditioning company, and through which he continues to enthusiastically climb. No one ever loved mechanical systems more than Gerry Hines, says Cover, recalling a recent trip to Phoenix, during which Hines climbed through a building’s infrastructure to discuss the merits of its mechanical systems, inspiring and demonstrating his ever-ardent support of his worldwide team.

    Gerry stopped by the office and shook hands with every employee and allowed time for individuals’ photographs, which was a big deal for our employees, says Palmer Letzerick, senior managing director of Hines activities across Mexico, echoing the experiences and sentiments of many other far-flung Hines managers and executives.

    Hines’ site visits to properties in development around the world, while bafflingly frequent, instilled in employees an appreciation for the urgency and excitement of their work. Mr. Hines arrived on a Tuesday, in the early morning, and we picked him up at the airport, notes Paul Gomopoulos, managing director of a brand-new Hines office in Athens. After a long, cross-Atlantic flight, we offered for Mr. Hines to go first to his hotel to rest. He said, ‘No. I feel great. Let’s go see some real estate!’

    The economy in Greece was tanking at the time of the visit, but Hines saw yet another opportunity. Gerald Hines has the unique ability to be both conservative and daring at the same time, says Gomopoulous. And he has passed this on through the culture of his firm. We take big, bold bets, but we carry them out in an intelligent and disciplined way.

    A recent visit found Hines in New York at 7 Bryant Park, the Pei Cobb Freed–designed, Hines-developed landmark—and the first midtown Manhattan office building to begin construction after the great recession of 2008. At the time of Hines’ visit, the building was nearing competition. He rode the construction hoist with his team—up as far as the hoist would go, which was fifty feet from the top of the building, a precarious 450 feet above the ground. The summit was accessible only by a hanging scaffold, no more than a spindly ladder hanging high in the air. You can’t keep me from the top! Hines exclaimed, charging up the scaffold as the younger members of his team paused to take in the view.

    C’mon John, I want to show you something over here, Hines told the architect John Burgee, design partner of the late, great architect Philip Johnson, during a similarly perilous climb. It was the mid-1970s and Hines and Burgee were high in the sky over downtown Houston inside the nearly completed Pennzoil Place, the twin-peaked, two-tower architectural masterpiece developed by Hines and designed by Johnson and Burgee, which would soon revolutionize both the architectural world and the city in which it stands.

    Atop the structure, over here meant following Hines across a thin plank suspended between Pennzoil’s twin towers with only a sliver of sky, according to a Houston newspaper, between the two towers.

    He walked across the plank! Burgee remembers. And I thought, That son of a gun, he’s trying to get at me. Well, I’m not going to let him be the only one to do it. I’m going on it, too. So I walked across the plank.

    There was nothing but a fatal fall beneath that tiny plank, supported by cables on each side. So when we got over to the other side, I said, ‘Now what is it you wanted me to see, Gerry?’

    And all Hines said was, Nice view up here, isn’t it?

    Yes, it is. But only getting better. Because of Gerald D. Hines.

    1

    Coming of Age

    The Hines family tree unfurls across five blueprint pages, a maze of words, arrows, descendants, and connections. It is fitting that the family tree of a builder would be recorded on blueprints, kept rolled up and stored away, in the same precise and intricate style as those drawn for a building. Before Gerald Douglas Hines, the Hines family was involved in building churches. Yet generations later, the Hines name would come to be known for some of the most significant building projects around the world, and its indelible contribution to the quality of the global built environment.

    At eighty-six, Gerald Hines would return to the rocky coastline where his family had its tumultuous beginnings some three hundred years earlier. In 2011, Hines, along with his wife, Barbara Hines, his granddaughter Laura, and his cousin Doug—who, at eighty-one, still has a cottage in Nova Scotia—sailed some of the same waterways his grandfather Benjamin had navigated to reach his eventual North American home. Only instead of arriving on an overcrowded troopship teeming with soldiers from England as Benjamin had, Gerald Hines and his family sailed into their ancestral homeland in style on the Lady B, Hines’ 146-foot sailboat named after Barbara.

    He had only reached as far as Tahiti and Bora Bora when he decided to turn around due to the impending arrival of one of his and Barbara’s grandchildren in America, although by then he had traveled the equivalent in nautical miles of a circumnavigation of the globe. Those earlier voyages were great and exciting adventures. But the builder who had spent his life pushing beyond all conceivable limits in business, sports, and everything else would in 2011 take a sentimental journey to uncover his roots.

    The family members boarded the Lady B in Halifax, where the weather was sunny. Then as the boat headed one hundred nautical miles up the coastline, a fog descended, and they were soon immersed in a world of white. We came sailing up on that big sailboat, motoring most of the way through nothing but fog, said Doug Hines. ¹ After we left Halifax, we didn’t see land again until we were pulling into the harbor and it was all white with snow.

    Finally, through the fog, Gerald Hines had his first glimpse of the precipitously rocky coast on the Atlantic side of the Canadian province. The Lady B had arrived in Isaac’s Harbor (current population: fifteen), a tiny town in Guysborough County, where distant members of the Hines clan remain one of the principal families. Although Isaac’s Harbor had been a fishing town for much of its history, that industry is gone, its remains memorialized in photographs in a convenience store in nearby Goldboro, filled with memorabilia and photos of the old schooners that once crowded the harbor.

    Isaac’s Harbor is situated on a narrow, heavily wooded inlet and is made up of a few houses, which look out on the water. Upon pulling up to the shoreline, Hines and his party discovered they were the only boat in the harbor and managed to tie up right beside the small village.

    FIGHT FOR SURVIVAL

    The Lady B was now docked on the same rocky shore where the first Hines had finally settled in North America in the late 1700s. His name was Benjamin Hines, but everyone called him Soldier Ben, and in Isaac’s Harbor he would be forced to fight for survival against seemingly insurmountable odds. Ben was a United Empire Loyalist to the King of England, a Tory, sent to America from England to fight in the Revolutionary War. It took six weeks for the ship full of soldiers to arrive in North Carolina. By the time the ship arrived, the war was over.

    George Washington had just defeated the British, so they didn’t know what to do with these men, Doug Hines said. So they shipped ’em to Boston. But Boston didn’t want them either. So they came to Canada because they got free land grants from the British. Space wasn’t a problem. There’s all kinds of woods around Isaac’s Harbor where you could put four thousand men with no trouble at all. But the land grants they gave them were in and around Isaac’s Harbor, which is about as poor a spot in the world as you could find.

    Benjamin and his regiment of four thousand displaced soldiers were seemingly doomed upon arrival. A provisions ship was on the way from England, the men were told. But the ship hit a reef and sank before reaching the rocky coast, leaving the men to starve. About one thousand men died the first winter, and those who lived were given the promised land grants but absolutely nothing else. The British soldiers instead were aided by the local native tribe, the Mi’kmaqs, who taught the men how to fish, build lean-tos, and survive off the land. One of the survivors was Soldier Ben, the hale and hearty Benjamin Hines.

    Soldier Ben was a farmer and fisherman, but his primary source of income was from building churches around the region. It was a hardscrabble, freezing-cold existence, but the Hines family remained in Nova Scotia for the next two hundred years.

    Soldier Ben’s name was given to five Hines descendants in his honor, including Hines’ grandfather Benjamin Elisha Hines in 1858. The powerfully built Benjamin worked as manager of a lobster factory in Isaac’s Harbor and was remembered for feats like his ability to walk on his hands and jump over four feet from a standing position.

    Benjamin Elisha Hines was the real reason we went on our trip, said Doug Hines. And the reason I went with Gerry is because he knew I knew where they were buried, and so we went to visit the graves of his grandfather Benjamin and his grandmother Mary Elizabeth Giffin.

    Mary was a dressmaker and had known Benjamin for nine years before she finally married him. She owned a home in Isaac’s Harbor and, according to the family tree, had no debt.² Mary and Benjamin had six children, four boys and two girls—including Gerald’s father, Robert Gordon Hines, who went by Gordon. Mary sold her mining stock to help Gordon begin his life on his own, and she sold her Isaac’s Harbor home to help educate another son, Elisha. She had courage and initiative, was short and energetic with a very firm chin, according to the family tree.

    In 1902, when Benjamin Elisha Hines was forty-four, he injured himself while moving a large stone off his porch, went temporarily blind, and a year later died of Bright’s disease. Seven years later, his widow, Mary, moved to Sydney, Nova Scotia’s third-largest city, on the eastern side of Cape Breton Island. She lived to what was then the ripe old age of eighty-three.

    Gordon was the oldest of his five brothers and sisters. Their marriages and descendants are meticulously charted in the family tree. Like Gordon, they were tradesmen and women, working in machinery, electrical engineering, and the steel mills of Nova Scotia.

    Gordon served in the Royal Canadian horse artillery during World War I. After the war was over, he attended Empire Business College in Halifax and then secured a job in that town as a bookkeeper at Hagen Plumbing Company. Eventually he went to work in Sydney, Nova Scotia—not as a bookkeeper, a trade he disliked, but as an electrical apprentice at Dominion Iron and Steel Company. Gordon loved everything electrical. Loved tinkering with cars and fixing things, reads the family tree.

    My father and his next oldest brother went to work—my father as an electrician, and my uncle as a bookkeeper—with Dominion Steel, said Gerald Hines. They worked and supported the other three children and put them all through school in Sydney. It was a pretty tough situation.

    Through relatives, Gordon met the iron-willed woman who would become his wife. Myrtle Lillian McConnell was born and raised in a Nova Scotia town so tiny that for hundreds of years, it didn’t even have a name. Hines would later recall, My great-uncle went to Aspen, Colorado, in the 1800s as a silver miner, and he came back to Nova Scotia after he found some silver and said, ‘I’ve been to the most beautiful place in the world. I think we should name our little village Aspen.’ My mother was born in Aspen, Nova Scotia, in 1893.³ A century later, her son would not only begin development of Aspen Highlands, a retail and residential ski village, in her hometown’s Colorado namesake, but also marry Barbara, his second wife, who had been raised in Sydney, Australia, there.

    When Gordon met Myrtle in the early-1920s, she was running a lumber-yard as its business manager in the capital city of Halifax. She must have been good, or they wouldn’t have let her do it, said Doug Hines. A woman at that day and time wasn’t doing those kinds of things. She was competent and smart.

    Gordon and Myrtle were married on April 5, 1922, and settled into a steel mill couple’s life in Sydney, Nova Scotia. But as it had been for the first Hines who landed there, life was harsh: the steel mill in Sydney closed, and the young couple, married for only seven months, moved to a citadel of steel—Gary, Indiana—where they became naturalized American citizens.

    The city of Gary, only twenty-five miles from downtown Chicago, was born in 1906, when the U.S. Steel Corporation selected the site for its new plant, Gary Works. The United States Steel Corporation, which began operations in 1901, was at the time the largest business enterprise ever launched, with an authorized capitalization of $1.4 billion, according to a historical summary of U.S. Steel. In its first full year of operation, U.S. Steel made 67 percent of all the steel produced in the United States.⁴ A century later, U.S. Steel remains the largest integrated steel producer headquartered in the United States.

    A LOVING AND CARING FAMILY

    In Gary, Gordon and Myrtle moved into a modest, two-story house at 737 Rhode Island Street. Situated on a narrow lot with a detached garage, it was a row house similar to those up and down the street. Here, their two children—Gerald, born in August 1925, and Audrey, born two years later—were raised. It was a two-story, light red-painted house with a gray front porch, said Bob Watt, Audrey’s son.There was a screened-in porch in the back of the kitchen, and the house had a coal furnace in the basement, where Grandpa had his tool shop. The house was in excellent shape because of Grandpa and very clean because of Grandma. It was a great place to visit and a great place for Gerry and Audrey to grow up.

    Gerald Hines recalled that the home’s proximity to the local school was an important factor for his parents in selecting it, and they set about on improvements to make it more suitable for their growing family. The upstairs comprised a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchen. Later, the family rented the upstairs apartment to tenants. The Hineses rented out a portion of their home not because they were poor, but because a family living in the aftermath of the Depression did whatever they could to bring in extra money. Nothing went wasted or unused in the Hines household.

    Our dining room was converted into a bedroom at night, said Hines. We had a closet, and they pulled the daybed down, and my parents would sleep there. In the morning, they would pull it up and put the bed back in the closet, and it became a dining room again.

    It was a loving and caring family. And Gerald Hines embodied the intense devotion to home and family his parents instilled. He was a good big brother, said Audrey.He would look after me. My mother didn’t have anything to worry about when he was around, because he was very protective. At home, Myrtle ran the show, providing the support system for her taciturn, strong, steel mill–working husband. My mother would have dinner on the table whenever my father arrived home, said Audrey. We always got together as a family.

    In this modest, tract-built house, Hines learned the importance of integrity. My parents were Nova Scotia Baptists, so there was a lot of emphasis on ethics and morals, said Hines. You give a fair amount of work for what you are paid.

    To the boy who grew up there, the house on Rhode Island Street was a castle. I thought it was palatial, Hines would later say. In his bedroom, he felt the first stirrings of a passion for building. I built a lot of model airplanes. I loved building.

    Yes, the Hineses were just another steel-town family, and yet something was different. The difference, Hines and his sister later agreed, was their parents, Gordon and Myrtle, two very different pieces that made a whole. We couldn’t have had better parents, said Audrey.

    Gordon worked as an electrician at Gary Works, U.S. Steel’s largest manufacturing plant, and was later promoted to supervisor. He was a very well-liked man, said Hines. He had a good word for everyone. Gordon was also a quiet man of industry and organization, always working on something around the house. Being in Gary, there was a lot of soot from the steel mills, remembered Bob Watt. So he was often just washing down the porch from the coal that was in the air. Every morning, he would take a bus—never his car, a Plymouth—to his job at Gary Works on the south shore of Lake Michigan. And every evening, he would ride the bus home, arriving back at Rhode Island Street carrying his empty lunch box.

    The perfect counterpoint to gentle, quiet Gordon was his more outspoken wife, Myrtle, also a woman of ferocious industry and a tremendous work ethic. A schoolteacher, caregiver, and full-time wife and mother, she managed the house, rented out the upstairs apartment, and pretty much did whatever it took to keep family life humming along. She was a seamstress, and even when she was in her eighties, she still made her own clothes, said Bob Watt. She was a great cook, a great baker. During the Depression, she would feed people who would come to the house looking for food. She thought maybe they marked the house somehow, because they all knew they could get a free meal there.

    Gerry had a great family, said Dorothy Hines, Gerald Hines’ first wife.A mother who was a very positive influence on him throughout his life. She was always there for him. From her, he got a loving approach to people, and I think he got his good work ethic from his father.

    Ralph Weiger met Hines in Gary when they were both ten years old. Our families went to the same church, the Central Baptist Church, said Weiger.⁸ "We would do the normal things that kids would do. We would go to Sunday school in the morning, then go over to the drugstore to get ice cream. We both delivered papers for the Gary Post-Tribune."

    Myrtle served as something of a mentor and business manager to her young son. My mother used to sit me down and help me with my paper route, said Hines. She is the one that said, ‘Okay, on Friday nights, Gerry, you need to get there and collect that eighteen cents, ’cause if you don’t, you are going to have to carry them for another two weeks until their next payday.’ She would give me tips on selling and collecting from ornery characters. And she would go over my accounts on Saturday morning to see how I’d done. We’d do it together and it was fun.

    High school was a happy time for Hines. He ran cross-country and track for Ralph Waldo Emerson High, and newspaper clippings from those days show his involvement: his name was included alongside mentions of Hoosierdom and the Steel City’s 1942 cross-country campaign and Harriers of Horace Mann and Emerson were victors yesterday . . .

    Competition was very tough on that one- and two-mile track, said Hines. We had segregated schools then. The high schools were Emerson and Roosevelt, and the other groups were Horace Mann and Lew Wallace. Henry Stram was one of the guys that came from Lew Wallace, and he became one of my fraternity brothers. He then went on to coach the Kansas City Chiefs.

    When not in school or on the cross-country field, Hines worked—he always worked, even in his early teenage years—following in his father’s diligent footsteps. Hard work, the ethic he inherited from both of his parents, would undoubtedly become one of the keys to his later success.

    But he wasn’t destined to follow his father into a career at the steel mill. When he was fourteen, Hines took a part-time weekend job in Gary Works, the sweaty, claustrophobic mill where his father worked. Hines’ job was chipping billets, hammering bars of steel into smaller sizes to take to market. I saw the inside of that steel mill, and I said, ‘There is no way I want to work here for my career.’ So you learn what you do not want to do, he said later. It was terrible being in the steel mill. It was grimy, and the language was pretty awful.

    Other part-time jobs suited him better: peddling vacuum cleaners door-to-door and selling shoes at Sears and Roebuck on Thursday nights and Saturdays. I liked that because you got paid a commission, says Hines. You went for the guy that came in looking for work boots because you knew he needed the shoe with the steel toe, which sold for twice as much as regular shoes.

    It was 1939, and although the Depression had ended a few years before, it still loomed large in the Hines household. It was a major factor in my life because it had such an impact on all of us, said Hines. Working his part-time jobs in 1930s-era Gary, Indiana, left the young man fearing the hard times would return: I think I went into engineering because my father said engineers were one group that didn’t get laid off during the Depression.

    Leisure time for the Hines family was rare but memorable. My folks would take us on trips—Wisconsin, Michigan, and places like that, remembered Audrey. Dad had a Plymouth. Gerry didn’t have a car, so he would have to take Dad’s if he went out on a date.

    Supported by his father’s fortitude and keen sense of organization, and his mother’s more adventurous strength, determination, and encouragement to always try new things, Hines soon found his focus: mathematics. He also found a teacher, Minnie Talbot, who would deeply affect his life. She not only gave him the tools he needed to gain success in life, but also showed him the kind of personal, supportive attention that propels students to achieve beyond their circumstances. She was a great math teacher, Hines said.

    Talbot’s teaching tapped into Hines’ sense of purpose, and he loved learning the advanced math she taught so much that he took the initiative to make sure it was available to him: when it turned out that Talbot could not offer trigonometry unless she had at least eight students in the class, Hines found seven other students to register.

    Of the students in Talbot’s classes, Hines seemed to be the one for whom the teacher made extra time and took a special interest. They didn’t have Algebra II at Emerson, he said. I needed Algebra II to get into Purdue. I went to the Algebra I class, and when they were doing homework or something, I would sit in the back of the class and she would teach me Algebra II. That is how I got through it.

    While tutoring Hines in Algebra II, Talbot introduced him to the instrument that would be ever-present in his journey to global success: the slide rule.

    Hines seemed to have a natural and immediate aptitude for the slide rule, and he practiced on it incessantly until it became an integral part of his life. Fifty years later, he would still marvel at its power. It was just like a computer, he said. In business I could use it to come up very quickly with a multitude of answers. When I wasn’t sure I wanted to answer a question, I’d pull out the slide rule and be thinking about the question and the answer while I was working it. It was a successful diversion.

    When it came to college, there was only one choice for a Midwestern boy who had decided to become an engineer: Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. First, it was an outstanding engineering school, Hines said. Second, it was a land grant school, which meant that the cost was reasonable. They flunked out two-thirds of the freshman class, and that is how they maintained their standards.

    Against those odds, Gerald Hines didn’t fail—even though he had, on paper at least, less education, maturity, and experience than most of his freshman class. Even as a teen working at his part-time jobs, studying hard in school, participating in cross-country, and discovering his lifelong passion for math, Hines was thinking beyond his day-to-day world of sports, studies, and girls; he was thinking of his future. World War II was raging, and Hines resolved he would not be just another enlisted man sent overseas to fight—and die—in far-flung locales in Europe, like so many other young men were. He saw a path to wartime service that might give him more options: he would become an officer. He found out he needed to have at least a year of college under his belt before he could become eligible for Officer Candidate School. So Hines struck on a solution and sought the assistance of his high school’s administration to make it happen. He had completed enough credits to earn his degree, and through the assistance of his principal, Hines was able to enroll in Purdue nine months before he was scheduled to graduate from Emerson High School. With one year of college, he could enter the army not merely as a private, but as officer material ready to eventually apply to Officer Candidate School.

    When Hines said goodbye to his parents and sister and headed off to Purdue in 1943, he was seventeen years old.

    ENTHUSIASM, PEP, AND PERSISTENCE

    Life at Purdue University was even more packed with activity than Hines’ busy years at Emerson High had been. I worked on the side, Hines said. I worked in the cafeteria serving coffee. That helped cover part of my expenses. Hines lived in Cary Hall, a very nice dormitory, he said, which at the time was also housing army personnel.

    During his first year, Hines joined the Sigma Chi fraternity. Pledging Sigma Chi at Purdue would teach him the power of personal relationships: through the fraternity, he made friendships that would last a lifetime and, most important, would lead him to Houston to begin his professional career. His fraternity brothers would become

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