Ingram's May 2024

DONALD HALL HALLMARK

ADELE HALL MULTIPLE NON-PROFITS

MIKE HAVERTY KC SOUTHERN/CPKC

His father, Hallmark founder J.C. Hall, didn’t exactly gift wrap the son’s career when Don Hall started there in 1953. He labored for five years before

Starting at the bottom was a family tradition three generations before Mike Hav erty came along nearly 80 years ago. His great

While her husband, Don Hall, was building Hallmark into the world’s first name in greeting cards, Adele Hall had her shoulder to a more philanthropic

earning the vice-president title and nearly another decade before Dad retired. That set the stage for the younger Hall to lead the company for the next 20 years. On his watch, the company expanded into other lines with the acquisition of Crayola, multipurpose development with the Crown Center office, retail and residential complex, and media with the parent cable TV’s Hallmark Channel. Lesser-known among his contributions to the region is the role he played nearly 20 years ago to transfer one of the nation’s premier corporate collections of photography to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. That 6,500-piece set bore an estimated value of $65 million, with much of the value gifted to the museum.

grandfather ably demonstrated that as an Irish immigrant on a track-laying crew before the start of the Civil War. Haverty’s grandfather was a Missouri Pacific brakeman; so was his father. And on his 19th birthday, young Mike Haverty followed suit, but he had a bigger role in mind: enrolling in the railroad’s management-training pro gram, he earned a business degree (and later, an MBA), jumped to the Santa Fe Railway, and rose to president there. After joining Kansas City Southern, he led expansion with acquisitions that connected the regional carrier to ports in Mexico then Canada. He retired in 2013, but his work positioned the company for its eventual merger in 2021 with Canadian Pacific.

wheel. One needn’t look far to see evidence of the contributions she made before she died in 2013 at age 81. Start on the Hospital Hill campus of Children’s Mercy, where the region’s highest-level neonatal intensive care unit and the region’s only Level I pediatric trauma center bear her name. Children’s issues were favorites, but she served on the boards of national and regional organizations such as the American Red Cross, United Negro College Fund, Menninger Foundation, the George Bush Presidential Library Center and the Library of Congress Trust Fund. She was the first woman to lead the Heart of America United Way as chair, and sat on boards for the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation, Salvation Army and Starlight Theatre.

PAUL HENSON UNITED TELECOMMUNICATIONS/SPRINT

CLARK HUNT KANSAS CITY CHIEFS

LAMAR HUNT KANSAS CITY CHIEFS

A number of hands were on the wheel as the Sprint Corp. rose from a small regional telephone company to the third-largest telecommunications company in the Uni-

Clark Hunt is just one more Super Bowl championship ring away from attaining truly uni- que status in the century-plus exis- tence of the Nat

Lamar Hunt exhibit- ed a typically Texan reaction to being told, “No, you can’t,” when the old National Foot- ball League denied his request to add an expansion team in

ted States. But not everyone drove things forward quite as much as Paul Henson. He came on board at United Telecommunica tions when it had 500,000 customers, served 500 rural communities, and generated sales of $42 million. By the time he wrapped up his career there as chairman in 1990, Sprint had 4 million customers in 3,000 communities with sales of $8 billion, and was well on its way to becoming the Kansas City region’s biggest private-sector employer and No. 1 publicly traded company. Acquisitions accounted for much of that; Henson navigated 28 Sprint acquisitions during his tenure, during which the company built the nation’s only all-digital fiber optic network, a visionary path that drove consumer growth. He was 71 when he died in April 1997.

ional Football League: No other team or owner can claim to have won three straight league championships. As one of the heirs to the Lamar Hunt business legacy—and the one tasked with oversight of the Chiefs—Hunt currently presides over the most successful pro sports run this city has ever known. He’s a business version of the two-sport star; in addition to leading the Chiefs, he’s also owner and chairman of FC Dallas, which goes head-to-head against Sporting KC, the franchise his father founded. His workday doesn’t stop there; the family’s holdings also include warehousing and industrial property developer Hunt Midwest, along with energy and natural resources interests and private equity investment.

Dallas. That region already had the Cowboys. The powers that be weren’t interested in cannibalizing market share. Hunt didn’t take his ball and go home, and he didn’t just form a team: He formed a whole new league, the AFL. After three seasons in Dallas, he sought a more receptive audience and found it in Kansas City. With some assistance from H. Roe Bartle—a man whose nickname was “The Chief’’—Hunt brought pro football to town in 1963. That, however, was just one measure of his impact here. His Hunt Enterprises also developed Worlds of Fun and Oceans of Fun, and the real estate arm of his holdings, Hunt Midwest, is a power player in industrial real estate development, warehousing and logistics. And don’t forget his vision that has made KC the Soccer Capital of the World with his ownership of The Kansas City Wizards.

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May 2024

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