Longtime Twins owner Carl Pohlad, 93, dies
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Carl Pohlad, a working-poor son of the Great Depression who became one of America's wealthiest dealmakers, has died. He was 93.
A financier who came to be best known through his 1984 acquisition of the Minnesota Twins, Pohlad also headed a family-owned network of banking, bottling, real estate and other companies.
Forbes magazine said in its annual ranking in September that Pohlad was worth an estimated $3.8 billion, the 102nd richest person in America.
Pohlad generally was a private man who fulfilled his prediction of never retiring because business and deals were as critical to him as breathing.
Born in 1915, the third of eight children, Pohlad grew up tough, working in the fields around a rail-crossing hamlet near Des Moines.
His mother, Mary, who died in 2000 at age 104, was the driver of the family, extolling the virtues of hard work as she cleaned houses and did laundry for others. Pohlad's father, Mike, who died in the 1960s, was a railroad brakeman.
Carl Pohlad was a serious boy, who excelled at sports and reading. As a youth, he organized a group of boys to pick cockleburs out of cornfields for 25 cents an hour, pocketing a nickel from each as commission.
After graduating from high school in Iowa, he went to California and sold used cars before winning a football scholarship to Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., in 1937. When not playing ball he earned money boxing in clubs along the West Coast.
Pohlad left Gonzaga after his second football season and returned to Iowa to work at Federal Discount Corp., a finance company headed by Russell Stotesbery, who had married Helen, one of Pohlad's sisters. Pohlad earned a reputation as an emotionless guy who could efficiently collect loans. His sons said his life was shaped by hardscrabble lessons of the Great Depression.Comment -
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