‘A tremendous loss.’ Businessman Karl Anderson, Tacoma booster and lover of life, has died
When Karl Anderson wanted something done in Tacoma, or elsewhere, he typically didn’t wait for someone else to take action.
“He had one gear in life: fast forward,” recalled longtime friend and local attorney Jim Waldo. “When he went after something, he was relentless.”
Much of that meant building his own legacy beyond the early history made by his family in concrete engineering and development.
Anderson, a major figure in Tacoma’s business and philanthropic scene, passed away Saturday after a lengthy illness at age 78. The death was not COVID-19 related.
Memorial details were to be determined at a later date.
Born in Pennsylvania, Anderson was perhaps best known as chairman of Concrete Technology Corp. in Tacoma, a family business launched with a production facility in 1951 by his uncle Thomas Anderson and Arthur Anderson, Karl’s father.
The company led the development of the country’s pre-stressed concrete industry, then a relatively new building technique involving concrete developed with steel rods or wire under tension. The combination ultimately creates a much stronger concrete.
Speaking to the Seattle Times in 1995 after his father’s death, Karl Anderson recalled: “We were fighting with steel people for a contract to build streetlight poles. They said concrete would crack like a sidewalk if a car ran into it. So my dad set up a steel and a concrete pole and had a crane swing a steel drum full of gravel at them. The drum buckled the steel, but just went `boing!’ against the concrete.”
The company’s work has supported bridges, monorails and buildings (including Cheney Stadium), from Alaska to Indonesia.
On Thursday, Anderson’s daughter, Rebecca Fountain, told The News Tribune the company would continue to be owned by the third generation of Andersons.
“It meant a lot to my dad that the business would stay family owned,” Fountain said.
Story after story, from Anderson’s friends to archived news coverage, show a pattern of a man driven to boost Tacoma’s standing in the world, leading the charge but also trying to find common ground and some happiness along the way.
“Happiness is not something you can go to Amazon and order online,” Anderson told The News Tribune in a 2017 profile when he was awarded the University of Washington Tacoma Milgard School of Business Lifetime Achievement award.. “... It’s not a tangible thing, and it’s not a destination. It’s a journey.”
News of his passing spread rapidly among those who knew him.
“Everyone is shocked,” former Pierce County Executive John Ladenburg told The News Tribune on Tuesday. He reminisced on the ways Anderson and his own paths had continued to be interwoven through the years, “in a lot of ways,” politically and socially.
“Our thoughts are with his family and everyone at Concrete Technology,” said Port of Tacoma Commission Vice President Dick Marzano.
“Karl was a great community leader who strongly supported both the Port and the city. Since 1951, his family’s company has been a major employer in the Tacoma Tideflats as well as an innovative global leader in prestressed concrete manufacturing,” Marzano said. “Over the years, his company helped build vital infrastructure in the Puget Sound region and across the country — including the marine terminals at the Port of Tacoma.”
For John McCarthy, Port Commission president and co-chair of The Northwest Seaport Alliance, the loss was immeasurable.
“He was one of my closest friends. I knew him for more than 40 years,” McCarthy told The News Tribune. “He was probably the most think-outside-the-box creative person I’ve ever known. He was a true leader, and he was absolutely a great organizer. He was telling me had served on something like 62 boards.”
He credited Anderson with being instrumental in the creation of LeMay America’s Car Museum. Anderson served on the museum board as treasurer.
The Lands Claims Settlement
“When Karl decided something needed to get done, at whatever scale, if no one was going to do it — he would,” said Waldo, who first worked with Anderson on the Lands Claims Settlement among the Puyallup Tribe and various local governments in the Tideflats in the 1980s.
Waldo served as lead negotiator in the process.
Ladenburg first worked with Anderson as part of the negotiating settlement group on the land claims settlement, first as a City Council member then after his election as Pierce County prosecutor.
The historic $162 million settlement at the time was one of the largest ever reached with a tribe and consisted of a complex web of negotiations.
Waldo recalled Anderson helping to get the landowners in the Tideflats organized. Anderson became involved because of the effect of the tribal claims on potential expansion of Concrete Technology Corp., his family’s business.
Waldo recalled one particular impasse of the negotiating parties at the Tacoma Dome Hotel.
“We were in very tense point in the meeting,” he recalled, and Anderson took a break and stepped out. “Next thing I know he opens the door to the meeting room and introduced this world-champion kazoo band.”
The band had won a competition that was happening next door at the Tacoma Dome, and band members were outside when Anderson happened to run into them.
“Everyone laughed, and it broke the tension,” Waldo recalled with a chuckle.
The New York Times, in coverage of the settlement at the time, noted that both sides considered the agreement a “model for future land claims.”
The settlement took years of work to complete, Ladenburg said, noting it was remarkable Anderson stuck with it through the whole process.
“He did that on his own dime, and on his own time,” even traveling to Washington, D.C., to testify, Ladenburg said.
At the core of the negotiations, “There were probably about eight or nine people that you could say without them the settlement would not have happened, and Karl was one of those in that group,” Waldo said.
The Kalakala
More recently, Anderson took a lead role in the fate of the once iconic ferry Kalakala, which spent its last years rusting away in the Hylebos Waterway.
Waldo recalled getting a call from then-Seattle District Engineer Col. Bruce Estok, who along with the Coast Guard was monitoring the ferry’s deteriorating situation and trying to find a solution.
“He said, ‘I’m reading some news accounts about Karl Anderson. Tell me about him,’” Waldo recalled.
“I said, ‘Bruce, this is your lucky day. You can trust his word.’”
Anderson had offered the ferry’s then-owner moorage at a nominal rate while plans were arranged for a possible refurbishment. But years went by and nothing happened.
“The Kalakala, I remember we all were just shaking our heads,” McCarthy recalled, “but that was Karl, and he just felt for this person. He knew the guy had a dream and idea and not the resources and wanted to help. He did that with a lot of people.”
In November 2012, Anderson ultimately foreclosed on more than $4,000 in unpaid rent and became the Kalakala’s final owner, according to News Tribune archives.
He then paid for the removal of asbestos, oil, PCBs and 50,000 gallons of diesel fuel. He also paid for a team to monitor the pumps that would control up to 1,000 gallons of water taken on by the ailing vessel every week.
Anderson eventually had the ship moved to the graving dock at Concrete Technology on Port of Tacoma Road to be scrapped in 2015.
“I’m thankful that I was able to do this for the old lady,” Anderson said at the time. “I believe the Kalakala knew I had moorage space in Tacoma, knew I had a dock where she could be put to rest, at peace. Now she is getting the peace she deserves.”
“I have the utmost respect for Karl Anderson, the fact that he stepped up and took a very responsible position he didn’t have to take,” Estok told The News Tribune in 2015.
Civic engagement
Anderson served as chairman of the Chamber of Commerce Board from October 1993 to 1994, with the year’s theme “Team Works: Cooperate, Communicate, Collaborate.”
“If we work together, we will thrive,” he said in remarks made at the annual Chamber meeting. “If not, our community will never achieve its potential.”
During that time he also helped lead efforts in the Superfund cleanup of Tacoma’s Thea Foss Waterway.
Waldo recalled: “A number of landowners were skeptical, and Karl went out of his way to go meet with each and tell them that the people that were involved with the city, ‘They are straight people.’
“That really probably saved us a year,” Waldo added. “Otherwise, we’d have had a lot more work to do to gain their trust, and he didn’t have to do that, caring only about the city’s revitalization, and he believed it wouldn’t be revitalized until the waterfront was fixed.”
Over the years, Anderson sat on dozens of boards and committees, many focused on youth, the arts and regional business.
In a statement posted on Facebook on Monday, Maralise Hood Quan, executive director for the Center for Dialog and Resolution, which Anderson helped to establish in the 1990s, wrote: “During these times of distancing, it will be so hard to share our stories of gratitude for Karl’s advocacy in building our community — literally, as Concrete Technology, and socially through all of his projects.”
Toby Murray of Murray Pacific Corp., another local family-based company, wrote to The News Tribune in response to hearing the news of Anderson’s death: “He was an extremely generous and outgoing gentleman. He was particularly active with the LeMay Car Museum and was always among the first to sponsor me for the Emergency Food Network Hunger Walk.”
Anderson’s work ultimately “helped create many new economic and job opportunities that our community, the tribe and our Port are enjoying today,” Marzano said. “His passing is a tremendous loss for our entire community.”
Added McCarthy: “From the port’s perspective, when we met with Karl looking at expanding ... they pay family wage jobs at his company. People have worked there 30-plus years. He always cared about the people who worked for him, and that’s the kind of industry that built the Tideflats.”
As much as any civic, political or business endeavor, happiness remained a constant thread of pursuit for Anderson.
He traveled with friends, organized dinners and relished his personal cigar club, of which McCarthy was a longstanding member even though he quit smoking years ago.
“I’d still go,” McCarthy said.
Anderson told The News Tribune in 2010 that taking time to seek some personal joy was no sin.
“Otherwise, what was your time on Earth worth?” he said.
The News Tribune archives contributed to this report.
This story was originally published May 15, 2020 at 5:05 AM.
