Preston Robert Tisch, Owner of Loews Hotels and Giants, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN NOV. 16, 2005
Preston Robert Tisch, who with his older brother built a multibillion-dollar business empire and who himself was postmaster general, half-owner of the New York Giants football team and leader of many of the city's top business groups, died yesterday at his home in Manhattan. He was 79 and also had a home in Harrison, N.Y. The cause was a brain tumor, said Jeffrey Stewart, spokesman for the family.
Wellington Mara, the co-owner of the Giants with Mr. Tisch, died on Oct. 25.
Mr. Tisch was sometimes called "the other Tisch" to differentiate him from his older brother, Laurence, who was known as a no-nonsense financial strategist, partly from being the fiercely cost-conscious chairman of CBS from 1986 to 1995. He died in 2003.
But it was more often Preston Robert Tisch, universally known as Bob, who seized the public view, first as a persuasive marketer for hotels and other companies owned by the Loews Corporation. As operations chief, his attention to detail once included personally hiring all bellmen for Loews hotels. He saw them as his best salesmen. Mr. Tisch freely gave his talents to New York City. He served as Mayor David N. Dinkins "ambassador" to Washington; was chairman of host committees for the 1976 and 1980 Democratic National Conventions; and led the way in building a new convention center on Manhattan's West Side. His last campaign, Take the Field, to revitalize the ragged athletic fields of the city's public high schools, raised $140 million in donations. He said he could have written a check himself, but wanted a broad base of continuing support. Mr. Tisch's enthusiasm for convening the city's movers and shakers began during the city's fiscal crisis in the 1970's with breakfasts at his Park Avenue hotel, the Regency. Major players in that municipal drama -- the labor leader Victor Gotbaum, the real estate mogul Lewis Rudin and the investment banker Felix G. Rohatyn -- were the first regulars. "Stop over for breakfast, and you'll meet a lot of people," Mr. Tisch was famous for saying.
Many credit Mr. Tisch with coining the term "power breakfast," and the Regency continued to attract the likes of Beverly Sills, Henry Kissinger and Mr. Dinkins who said in an interview, "When you think of Bob Tisch, you smile." In recent months, Mr. Tisch continued attending power breakfasts, as well as meetings at Giants Stadium and sports events there and elsewhere. Among the city organizations he headed were the New York City Convention and Visitors Bureau, the New York City Partnership and the New York City Chamber of Commerce and Industry. When he joined with Mr. Rudin and other executives to form the Association for a Better New York in 1971, he and other soon-to-be billionaires posed delightedly with brooms. Larry and Bob Tisch were known for their generosity, not least their gifts to New York University where the medical center and arts school both bear the family name. So does a gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the children's zoo in Central Park, not to mention namesake institutions at the University of Michigan, Tufts University and elsewhere. The Tisch brothers add up to a quintessential Big Apple success story, beginning with playing stick ball on the streets of Brooklyn and building to a financial conglomerate with annual sales of more than $15.2 billion and assets of $73.7 billion. Their holding company, the Loews Corporation, ranks 127th on the Fortune 500, and has subsidiaries engaged in various kinds of insurance, the production and sale of cigarettes and watches, and the operation of hotels and oil and gas drilling rigs.
Preston Robert Tisch was born in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn on April 29, 1926, to parents who came from Russia. His father, Abraham Solomon, known as Al, owned a garment-manufacturing business and bought two summer camps in New Jersey, Laurel and Lincoln, which his wife, the former Sayde Brenner, helped him operate. As teenagers, Larry and Bob worked at the camps.
"My parents were middle class and like everybody else in Brooklyn at the time, they worked hard and tried to move up the scale," Mr. Tisch said in an interview with Newsday in 1991.
The family moved every three years to get three months of free rent, a common practice even among the middle class. This meant Mr. Tisch attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx for one year and Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn for three. Mr. Tisch joined the Army after briefly attending Bucknell, and enrolled at the University of Michigan after his discharge in 1944, earning a bachelor's degree in economics. His wife, the former Joan Hyman, recalled him selling keychains for a dime, or two for 15 cents, in front of the university's football stadium. They married in 1948.
Besides his wife of 57 years, he is survived by two sons, Steven and Jonathan; and a daughter, Laurie.
In 1946, Larry, then a student at Harvard Law School, saw an advertisement for a sleepy resort in Lakewood, N.J., called Laurel-in-the-Pines, and persuaded his parents to put up $125,000 to buy it. A family friend threw in another $50,000 and took a one-fourth interest. The Tisches refurnished the hotel, added amenities like a swimming pool and dreamed up promotional schemes that included importing three reindeer from Finland to pull sleighs in the snow. By the time Mr. Tisch joined the business in 1948, the hotel was prospering. The family began investing profits in small hotel operations in Atlantic City, almost literally playing Monopoly on the boardwalk. They then took positions in Manhattan hotels. They typically found unprofitable properties, made improvements and raised rates.
The brothers, personally and in business, could not have been closer. Their families socialized together, they went to temple together, played tennis together and even commuted to work together. In business, Larry made deals, Bob ran companies. In 1956, the brothers were ready to build their own hotel, the Americana at Bal Harbour, Fla. They did not borrow a cent to build the $17 million hotel. It did $12 million in business the first year, in large part because of Mr. Tisch's success in getting convention business. With $65 million from their thriving hotels, the brothers started buying into the Loews Corporation. An antitrust decree had separated the company's theaters from its film-making unit, and the brothers recognized that many of the theaters occupied prime real estate. By January 1961, they gained total control of Loews. They knocked down the old Loews Lexington theater and used the site to build the 800-room Summit, the first hotel built in Manhattan in 30 years. They built the Americana, which at 50 stories was the world's tallest hotel upon completion in 1962. Other hotels followed, and Loews became a leading chain. The Tisches decided to recast the company as a conglomerate. In 1968, they acquired Lorillard, then the nation's fifth-largest cigarette company. In 1974, they bought the CNA Financial Corporation, a nearly bankrupt Chicago-based insurance company. Within a few years, it had assets of $16.5 billion and an A+ credit rating. In 1979, they purchased the troubled Bulova Watch and turned a profit. By 1980, Loews had revenue of $4.5 billion and earnings of $206 million, and all its segments were doing well. Luck mixed nicely with strategy. When the brothers sold the Traymore Hotel in Atlantic City in 1956, they retained a parcel of its land. They were able to take advantage of the casino boom that began in 1978. In the early 1980's, the Tisches bought five supertankers for $25 million when the oil market was depressed. The deal had no risk because even if oil prices did not rise, the scrap value of each tanker was $5 million. Mr. Tisch was postmaster general for almost two years, beginning in 1986. He used his marketing skill to come up with the idea of selling stamps by phone, and stressing sales of commemorative stamps, which are financially advantageous for the Postal Service because collectors seldom use them as postage. Mr. Tisch, whose net worth was $3.9 billion in 2003, according to Forbes, relished such hands-on personal involvement. Not only did he help found Meals-on-Wheels and serve as its president for 20 years, he many times personally delivered meals to elderly patrons. His habit of working Sundays prevented him from seeing a professional football game until 1961, but he made up for it. After buying the Giants in 1991, he loved to attend practices and confer with coaches. Mr. Tisch improved the Giants' business by sharpening marketing strategies, and, just as he had raised hotel rates, increasing ticket prices. He remarked that for all his business success and his oversight of the world's largest civilian work force at the Postal Service -- and even his considerable civic and philanthropic contributions -- he found people most admired his ownership of the Giants. That made sense to him.
"I want to be part of the fraternity and live out my life as a Giants owner," he said in 1991, shortly after acquiring a share of the team.
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