Ingram's May 2024

CLIFF ILLIG CERNER/SPORTING KC

MIN KAO GARMIN

EWING KAUFFMAN MARION LABS/KANSAS CITY ROYALS

Cliff Illig will long be remembered as part of the founding trium virate at Cerner Corp., which put Kansas City on the map for health

It’s a long way between a spartan office with two folding chairs and $5 billion in annual revenue with 35,000 employees world wide. But Min Kao

Visionary. Entrepre- neur. Civic cham- pion. Philanthro pist. Mentor. You’ll turn a lot of pages in a dictionary looking up words to describe Ewing

care IT and informatics. Over the past 20 years, though, he’s had his fingers in a lot of other pies. A big one was served up in 2006 when he teamed up with Cerner colleague Neal Patterson and three other business executives to buy the Kansas City Wizards from Lamar Hunt. Later rebranded Sporting KC, the team has elevated soccer’s presence in this region well beyond the goal lines of Children’s Mercy Park, building facilities and supporting youth programming that increased exposure to the sport and its popularity. That’s one major reason Kansas City was able to secure host city status for the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

traversed every step of that, starting in 1989, when he and the late Gary Burrell founded Garmin (a mashup of their names). They drew on their background in electrical engineering and navigation systems to create personal GPS devices for consumers—cars, trucks, boats and planes. In doing so, they created a global tech power, one with a big impact on the regional economy here, with more than 5,000 people employed at the Olathe headquarters. If there’s a Taiwanese native who can belt out the University of Tennessee theme song “Rocky Top,” our money is on Kao: He donated $12.5 million to build a new engineering building at his alma mater—using that as an incentive to get state lawmakers to kick in $25 million— and $5 million more to fund scholarships and a professorship there.

Kauffman. “Mr. K,” as his employees called him, amassed $5,000 to start a small pharmaceutical company—in his basement—selling calcium supplements made from crushed oyster shells. He translated that success into Marion Labs, sold controlling interest nearly 30 years later to Dow Chemical to create Marion Merrell Dow, and leveraged the proceeds to acquire the Kansas City Royals. And he spread the wealth: His profit-sharing model made millionaires of an estimated 300 Marion Labs employees upon the $2.2 billion sale. Before he died at age 76 in 1993, he structured the ball club ownership to keep the team here, essen tially gifting it to the city by placing ownership under the control of the Gre ater Kansas City Community Foundation.

JONATHAN KEMPER COMMERCE BANK

JAMES KEMPER JR. FORMER COMMERCE BANK CEO

R. CROSBY KEMPER JR. UMB BANK

Like his father before him, Jonathan Kem per hitched his career wagon to Commerce Bank after first securing his Harvard MBA and working for

It really was a different era: Born into the third gen- eration of an iconic Kansas City bank ing family—and enrolled at Yale when the Japanese bombed

This towering fig ure of banking— figuratively and, at 6-foot-7, literally— contributed at least as much to the family’s banking legacy in Kansas City

three years in New York (for the Federal Reserve Bank) and Chicago (CitiCorp). He began the journey here in 1982 as a loan officer—no special status based on blood ties. Working his way up the organization, he became chairman and CEO in 1991, and held those duties through his retirement in 2018. Over that run, the bank’s growth produced better than an 11-fold increase in assets, from $2.14 billion to $24.45 billion. As chairman emeritus, he retains a seat on the bank’s board of directors, but that’s just one sliver of the board service he has accrued over the past 40 years, often to causes and organizations tied to his passion for history and historical preservation of architecture, including the Kansas City Public Library, as well as trustee positions with the family foundations.

Pearl Harbor—James Kemper Jr. could have sought the refuge of privilege. Instead, he enlisted in the Army, served with a machine-gun unit in the south Pacific and earned a Purple Heart, then came home to resume his education and enter the family trade. He became president of Commerce Bank in 1955, throwing himself into civic responsibilities as well as business. He was the founding chairman of the Downtown Council, did a turn on the Kansas City school board, and was a trustee of the Midwest Research Institute, now MRIGlobal. On a national level, he was an associate of the Brookings Institute and chaired the Board of Associates of the Smithsonian, and also sat on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. He died in December 2016 at the age of 95.

as did its 19th-century patriarch. After all, three children raised by R. Crosby Kemper Jr. went on to succeed him after his 30-year run leading UMB Bank and 54 years overall, from his hiring in 1950 to retirement as chairman in 2004. Banking was his passion, but just one of them—Kemper was fiercely devoted to the arts (the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art was his baby), agri culture and entrepreneurship. He also donated the land for the West Bottoms arena that would bear his name, and his legendary philanthropy included a $2 million gift to restore the Liberty Memorial and World War I Museum. His civic engagement didn’t stop there; he ran as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in 1962. He died in 2014 at the age of 86.

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May 2024

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