Most of the time the card game took place after the dishes had been cleared away, but sometimes they played before the meal, at Carl’s house. It did not make a lot of difference to Carl Gerstacker. He would always suggest a game that would be suitable for the group assembled, depending on how many people were going to play, and the ages of those people. Anyone beyond babyhood was eligible, and emergence from babyhood in his book was determined by the ability to sit at a table, hold a fistful of cards, and lay them politely on the table....

Carl’s story begins with Rollie and Eda. They first met as classmates at West High School in Cleveland. Rollie was one of the brightest lads in the class, the son of Michael Gerstacker, the druggist who owned Gerstacker’s Drugstore over on Fulton Street, on Cleveland’s west side. Rollie worked there after school. Eda was something of a celebrity around the school, one of a set of identical twins, Eda and Elsa, the daughters of a farming couple, the Uhincks. They dressed identically most of the time, and resembled each other so closely that no one could tell them apart except...

Dow is hiring people up in Midland,” Uncle Jim told him in the course of his high school graduation festivities, “and you may be able to get a job.” Such an opportunity was as rare as hen’s teeth during the Depression years, so a few days later he hopped on an all-day bus from Cleveland to Midland to try his luck. It was good. On 5 February 1934, at the age of seventeen, he was hired on as an hourly laboratory helper in the Physics Research Laboratory, and appeared on the Dow payroll for the first time. He worked there...

Sometimes a mistake can turn out to be one of the best things you ever did, and that was the case with Ger-stacker when World War II came along.

By the fall of 1940 he had saved enough money to buy an automobile, and yearned for the freedom it would give him to go where he wanted, when he wanted. Like everyone else he saw the war clouds gathering in Europe as Adolf Hitler invaded nation after nation, and he was a reserve officer subject to immediate call to arms if the United States got into the war. On the...

The Dow Chemical Company that Gerstacker came back to in the summer of 1946, after his military service, was in a state of considerable confusion. Now that the war was over, men who had worked for the firm were flooding back from the military services, and there was little or no advance warning of who or how many might arrive on a given day. As a result, there was little or no opportunity to prepare for their arrival. In addition, the company was losing its wartime customers right and left (more than ninety percent of its wartime output had gone...

Everywhere you looked, at the end of 1960, youth was taking over. The old hands in government and industry were moving out, and the youngsters were moving in.

In Washington, Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was seventy, was being replaced by John F. Kennedy, aged forty-three. The oldest of the U.S. senators, Theodore F. Green, ninety-three, was succeeded by forty-two-year-old Claiborne Pell. The new governor of Michigan was John B. Swainson, who was thirty-five.

In industry the takeover by the young followed the same pattern. At the Ford Motor Company Robert S. McNamara, forty-four, was named the new president and...

In the fall of 1968 Gerstacker’s family life went smash. And like Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall, it was a complete smash, and could not be put together again. The more successful he became in his career, it seemed, the more of his time that career consumed, and the less time he had to devote to his wife and daughters, and the more his home life deteriorated. A final rupture with Jayne had been coming on for years now, and the breakup finally occurred that fall in spite of his best efforts to prevent it.

He avoided a divorce...

The phase of his life called “deceleration” began with a series of highly satisfactory and eminently enjoyable events. A month after his retirement as chairman he left on a rambling trip to the Orient, beginning with a stop in Tokyo. There, on 16 June, the America–Japan Society and the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan joined hands to honor him at a luncheon the two groups organized at the Tokyo Hilton hotel, with 156 attending from the American and Japanese business and diplomatic sectors. This became the occasion for his farewell address to his Japanese friends, and he talked...

He began a long career in philanthropy in 1944 with $1 million in Dow stock and a directive from his Aunt Elsa.

Uncle Jim Pardee—his “Unkie”—had died in January 1944, suffering from cancer the last few years of his life. His “Auntie” died the following October, also from cancer, having made out her will in August setting aside $1 million in Dow Chemical common stock for the purpose of solving the cancer problem—“for the care and cure of cancer,” she stipulated. Carl and his sister Elsa were named the two trustees of the fund.

“Elsa and I...

Carl and Esther had planned to move to “a nice warm climate” when he retired, probably to the place he had built on St. John in the Caribbean, but when it came time to move they decided they did not want to leave Midland. “There were just too many things pulling us back,” Gerstacker said. “I think Midland is the finest place in the world to live.”

Instead he threw himself into remaking the town they loved, and he spent an increasing amount of his time and money on the beautification and revitalization of his home city, and especially on...

It is too early to make an accurate assessment of Carl Gerstacker’s imprint on history—that remains for future generations—but it is easy to speculate that he will go down as one of those legendary figures that speckle the pages of American business history, one of the industrial titans who built the foundations of America’s greatness.

Even in his own lifetime it was difficult to sort out the stories of his exploits that were true, and those that had grown up as legends. In his early days as a financial guru he quickly became identified as springing out of...