Born in Spokane, Washington in 1934, Dennis Washington moved with his family back to his mother’s hometown of Missoula, Montana at an early age. Washington’s parents moved to Washington state to a booming World War 2 driven economy in Bremerton - a small town on the water across from Seattle. Like most Bremerton men during WW2, his father Roy worked at a defense shipyard.
In 1942, Dennis contracted the very dangerous, and widely rampant at the time, Polio disease. It was so common in fact, that in 1944 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt arrived where his father worked at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard and pushed his polio-afflicted body onto braces where he addressed the crowd of shipyard workers (like Dennis' father). It was this now famous speech that helped to propel the United States towards victory in the two theaters of World War II.
It was at this time that my Grandmother, Marian Joyce Benning, best friend of Dennis' sister Beverly Washington, visited Dennis frequently during his recovery in the larger town of Seattle, Washington. After the end of World War 2, Dennis & Beverly's parents divorced and he would spend time living between Washington State, California and Montana.
He knew the value of money at an early age and began supporting himself by the time he was a young teenager. After high school, he headed to Alaska in search of work (as is still a very common case today!) where he was introduced to construction. This step proved to be a critical decision for Dennis and would help guide the direction for the rest of his life.
A couple years later Dennis went back to Montana to work for his uncle's large construction company' By the time he was 26, he had reached the role of Vice President. After growing his uncle's business, he decided to take a risk and in 1964 at the age of 30 with a $30,000 loan, the same year he married his wife Phyllis, he formed his first construction company - the Washington Construction Company - which by 1969 would become the largest contractor in Montana, and in 1979 one of the largest civil construction companies in the nation.
Ever seeking good deals, he took a calculated risk and purchased the 100 year old Anaconda Copper mine in Butte Montana in the 1970s. The timing was right as the demand for copper skyrocketed due to the hardware demands of the soon-to-become dominant technology industry. He continued to diversify into numerous sectors including industrial construction, environmental cleanup, railroads, marine shipping and more. In 1993 the Washington Construction company merged with the large-scale heavy-civil construction company Kasler Corporation.
Dennis, being comfortable with calculated risk, took another leap forward when in 1996, the much smaller Washington Construction company merged with Morrison-Knudsen, a publicly traded construction and engineering giant that was undergoing financial difficulty (to put it mildly). From there, Washington directed the formation of Washington Group International—acquiring components of Westinghouse and Raytheon to mold one of the largest design/build companies in the United States.
Then on November 15th, 2007, 43 years after starting the Washington Construction Company, the Washington Group International (WGI) was purchased for $3.1 billion.
Ever diversified, Dennis' other private businesses, grouped under the name of the Washington Companies, is comprised of more than a dozen companies, including the largest privately owned railroad in the United States and the largest marine transportation company in Canada. These include: Aviation Partners, Dominion Diamond Mines, Envirocon, Modern Machinery, Montana Rail Link, Montana Resources, Seaspan, Seaspan Corporation and SRY Rail Link.
Dennis married Phyllis Washington and they have two children together - Kyle & Kevin. An ardent philanthropist, he established the Dennis and Phyllis Washington Foundation in 1988. Focused on education, health and human services, community service, and arts and culture, it has contributed to organizations in Montana and throughout the nation and has a particular ongoing commitment to Young Life, an interdenominational Christian ministry to youth. A gift to Young Life of the 64,000-acre Washington Family Ranch in Oregon provides a summer camp experience for hundreds of teenagers annually. Side note: This was the Rajneeshpuram commune - which the Netflix documentary "Wild Wild Country" is based on.
Daniel Pinna 
