Eckhart G. Grohmann

Introduction

In his introduction to the catalogue of artworks that make up the Milwaukee School of Engineering’s “Man at Work” collection bearing his name, Eckhart G. Grohmann (born June 29, 1936 in Breslau, Silesia, Germany) declares, “Each of us is the product of our birth and the environment in which we grow up.”[1] While perhaps a bit cliché, this notion astutely captures Grohmann’s experience and success as a German immigrant entrepreneur in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Besides serving as a compelling addition to the litany of successful German immigrant entrepreneurs in United States history, Grohmann’s story is extremely valuable to complicating our understanding of the dynamics of transnational migration in the realm of post-World War II global capitalism. Immigrating to the United States in the early 1960s, long after the primary wave of German immigration to this country, Grohmann does not fit the all-too-familiar and mythologized narrative of the old world European immigrant peasant turned captain of industry that permeates much of the American popular memory of past European immigrations to the United States. Moreover, he did not arrive in the United States as a poor labor migrant searching for social and economic mobility, and, while Grohmann cites political security as a major reason for his departure from Europe, he was not a traditional Displaced Person (DP) or exiled refugee common to Cold War era European migrations to the United States.[2] Grohmann was already a member of the entrepreneurial class in Germany, and immigrated to the United States partly to achieve greater access to industrial management positions and entrepreneurial capital than he could attain in Germany. He settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—a city known for its historically high concentrations of German immigrants and their descendants. These combined factors certainly provided Grohmann with the entrepreneurial and cultural knowledge and background that permitted his rather immediate entry into American business and social networks that surely aided his fairly quick rise to success. By the turn of the twenty-first century, Grohmann had not only proven to be a strong and ambitious business leader, having had controlling interests in a variety of enterprises from aluminum casting and founding to sausage making and business alarms, but had also become a significant booster of private higher education in Milwaukee. As Grohmann suggests in his above quote, his background was ever present in the prosperity of his business and social enterprises, directing his actions and decisions nearly every step of the way.

Family and Background

Although Grohmann’s background might be characterized as being rather privileged, it was undoubtedly quite turbulent as well. Eckhart Georg Grohmann was born in Breslau, Germany (today the Polish city of Wrocław), in the former Eastern German state of Silesia on June 29, 1936.[3] Now part of Poland, the area of German Silesia that Grohmann’s family called home had survived the reshaping of Eastern European territorial boundaries that occurred through the peace settlements that followed the First World War. Large sections of Eastern Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were carved off to help construct the independent states of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Intended to preserve peace in the wake of the deadliest war the world had seen to date and limit the effects of ethnic nationalism, new national borders were delineated around ethnic territorial boundaries. However, these new political borders often failed to reflect actual ethnic territories, drawing lines especially between otherwise congruent groups of ethnic Germans. This bred growing resentment and political tension in Eastern Europe in the interwar period. Though still within the parts of Silesia that remained in territorial Germany, the Grohmann family was surely in the midst of this conflict.[4]

Silesia was also a significant rock-quarrying region—an industry in which Grohmann’s family had built a notable and extensive enterprise. While his father managed his family’s farm, Grohmann’s grandfather ran the W. Thust works in Gnadenfrei, which his family had established in 1819 and built into one of the top quarrying and processing firms in Germany, specializing in marble and granite tombstones and statues.[5] In a 1976 interview, Grohmann explained, “At the height of its prominence his family’s W. Thust operation was the largest marble and granite processing firm in Germany, operating five plants and 20 active quarries,” most of which were located in the Eastern German countryside.[6] To be sure, the W. Thust works’ steadfast success was a remarkable feat in the midst of the economic and political turmoil of interwar Germany.

Grohmann’s contact with his grandfather’s W. Thust operations proved to be such a formative experience in his entrepreneurial development that he later declared it the place where he was “baptized” in the trades.[7] It was at the Thust works, for instance, that Grohmann asserts he learned the value of hard work. “As a young boy,” he recalls, “I watched the tradesmen working in our family marble enterprise…. I watched the blacksmiths, carpenters, quarry workers, stone cutters, and especially the master sculptors and their apprentices create marble statues for monuments and elaborate tombstones.”[8] The process of turning raw stone into a final product, “using little more than brute strength and ingenuity,” as one reporter described, particularly fascinated him.[9] In a 2007 interview, Grohmann remembered, “I saw them chiseling away until finally there was a Maria or a tombstone … usually religious things.”[10] Moreover, Grohmann observed the organizing and building of a successful and extensive corporation in the W. Thust stone works, especially noting its “vertical integration” that controlled the entire process and its quality from beginning to end—the “extraction of the stone to its sculpture into church statues and cemetery figures.”[11] Grohmann’s interaction with his grandfather’s quarry workers also suggests an early formation of his managerial distinction or entrepreneurial differentiation from manual laborers. “I loved to watch the guys,” Grohmann noted in a 2008 interview. “And they loved me, too. They made a special saw for me.”[12] While this reminiscence exhibits mutual affection between Grohmann and the quarry workers, it might also demonstrate that he was a special guest—the boss’ grandson—who was to be treated accordingly. In all of his recollections of his experiences at the W. Thust facilities recorded in interviews over time, Grohmann, indeed still quite young, was an observer of hard work, not a participant in it.

The bitterness and resentment towards the Allied Powers, Communists, and Jews over their alleged contributions to the “stabbing” of Germany in the back in the peace settlements following the First World War became manifest in Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, and in the subsequent installation of the totalitarian Nazi regime.[13] Hitler and the Nazis viewed the fertile and resource-rich territories to the east, especially Poland and Russia, as the ideal area to achieve their goal of Lebensraum, or living space, for the new German Reich. On the heels of the German invasion and quick defeat of Poland in September 1939 were the Einsatzgruppen and several units of the German Order Police that composed an extermination force targeting Jews and Communists throughout the region and facilitating the expansion and intensification of the Nazi concentration camp system.[14] In order to aid in the construction of grand Nazi building projects, the SS established the German Earth and Stone Works (Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke, DEST) in 1938 “to exploit forced labor in the quarrying of stone and brick making.”[15] According to Paul B. Jaskot’s work, Architecture of Oppression, the SS expanded their DEST enterprise to Silesia, where they established a concentration camp and forced labor quarry at Gross-Rosen to use Polish and Russian prisoners of war to quarry granite for monumental building projects, like the German Stadium in Nuremberg and the Soldiers’ Hall in Berlin.[16] Jaskot notes that the DEST’s Gross-Rosen project became problematic for private firms like W. Thust, especially as more and more prisoners were allocated to quarrying there, and its training program was opened up to “eligible young men from the occupied eastern territories who were sympathetic to National Socialism.”[17] In April 1942, Jaskot indicates, the W. Thust works lodged a formal complaint with the regional administration that the DEST’s Gross-Rosen enterprise “was operating at an unfair advantage in comparison to other quarries and workshops in Silesia,” as the region’s private firms could not possibly compete with the DEST’s high wages or extensive pool of both free and forced labor.[18] Attempting to placate their Silesian critics, the DEST vowed to no longer recruit free labor from Silesia, and send their trainees to other DEST enterprises, but also conveyed that private industry would have no say in the matters of the SS.[19]

As Grohmann recalls in a 2012 interview, the Second World War proved further disruptive to his family’s W. Thust operations almost immediately as the German government shut down its westernmost operation during the war, deeming it non-essential to the war effort. His family decided to move all of the processing equipment and machinery from these plants east to Silesia rather than leaving them idle in the west, expecting that the family’s Silesia operations would remain safe during the war.[20]

As the Soviets overwhelmed the German army and the front inched ever nearer to the German homeland by early 1945, however, Germany’s defeat in the Second World War became more and more certain.[21] Grohmann recalls that Polish and Russian forces extracted his whole family from their home and business, and, along with a large portion of the German population, they were “driven like cattle out west in the middle of winter.”[22] Having to start from scratch with little more than “empty buildings and a good name,” Grohmann’s family moved their W. Thust operations to their westernmost facility, a small processing facility located just outside of Frankfurt.[23] This relocation was certainly a monumental blow to both the family and the W. Thust corporation. The bulk of their quarrying business and their family farm was located in eastern Germany, which had been lost in the redrawing of political boundaries, the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Polish and Czechoslovakian territories, and the polarization of East and West Germany in the onset of the Cold War.[24] Despite these sizeable setbacks, however, Grohmann and his family embraced their new home in West Germany and rebuilt their W. Thust enterprise.[25]

Grohmann worked to begin his business career here as well, attending the University of Mannheim Business School, where he earned a Diplom Kaufmann (roughly the equivalent of a Masters in Business Administration) in 1962, while giving wealthy American visitors guided limousine tours around Europe on the side.[26] However, even though his family’s quarrying firm had thrived once again, Grohmann recalled in a 1974 interview, “the large number of family members involved in its management made him realize his future as an industrialist lay elsewhere.”[27] Also citing the continued threat of a Soviet invasion in the decades following the Second World War in a 2012 interview, Grohmann noted that his decision to leave Europe was made even more resolute in his desire to “get away from the Iron Curtain,” and to never experience the turmoil he and his family faced at the end of the war ever again.[28]

Considering Canada and Australia as possible destinations away from Cold War Europe, Grohmann decided to put his Volkswagen on a ship and migrate to the United States, arriving in New York on July 4, 1962, as a twenty-six-year-old adventurer seeking, as he says, an executive position in an American corporation, and eventually an enterprise of his own.[29] His path to business success in the United States was facilitated with the passage of the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act that gave preference to highly skilled immigrants for entry—especially industrialists, exempting many of them from the quota system.[30]

Business Development

Shortly after coming to the United States, Grohmann decided to settle in the Midwest, answering an ad that called for six executive trainees that the DoALL Company—a tool manufacturer headquartered in Des Plaines, Illinois—had posted in the Wall Street Journal.[31] Grohmann recalled in 2012 that DoALL hired him in 1963 and then quickly sidetracked him from the training program to help facilitate the creation of the company’s exhibit, “The Extension of the Hand”—an overview of the history of tools—for the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair.[32] After the exhibit was completed, Grohmann returned to DoALL’s training department in Chicago. Needing more sales experience as part of his training, the president of the company’s Wisconsin branch requested that Grohmann join their team in Milwaukee.[33]

Milwaukee was indeed a natural place for Grohmann to pursue his entrepreneurial development. Historically known as the Deutsch-Athen, or German Athens, of the United States, Milwaukee over the course of the nineteenth century established a national and international reputation for the dominance of its German identity, cultural institutions, and businesses. With the advantages of an intricate river network, a natural harbor on Lake Michigan, and its role as regional railroad hub, Milwaukee quickly grew into a powerhouse for many different industries, including steel, tanning, meatpacking, and brewing. Many of its well-known industrialists were either German immigrants or children of German immigrants, like the tanners Pfister and Vogel, and Trostel and Gallun, the industrial gear manufacturer Falk Corporation, and, of course the brewers, Schlitz, Pabst, Blatz, and Miller.[34] The rapid growth of these and other industries created an almost insatiable demand for labor, drawing immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe to the city to fulfill this demand. The city’s extremely large and highly concentrated German, Polish, and Italian populations, among others, secured Milwaukee’s status as an immigrant city, sharing first place with New York City as such in 1910.[35] As Anke Ortlepp notes, however, German immigrants made up a dominant portion of the city as the percentage of people with German background remained well over half the city’s population through the early twentieth century.[36] While Grohmann does not directly attribute his success to Milwaukee’s German ethnic heritage, the depth of the population’s German roots and the prominence of German industrialists in the city’s history provided a distinct cultural environment that would have certainly helped his endeavors as a German immigrant entrepreneur to at least some degree.[37]

Not interested in settling for an executive position in someone else’s firm, however, Grohmann began searching for a business of his own, which he found in the Aluminum Casting and Engineering Company (ACE/CO)—a small aluminum foundry on Milwaukee’s south side. Grohmann had befriended Bauer F. Bullinger, a former Milwaukee County administrator and partner with the Milwaukee law firm Houghton, Bullinger, and Nehs. Bullinger knew the owner of ACE/CO, John T. Watry, who had founded the company in the early 1940s, and knew of Watry’s interest in selling the company due to his growing age. While Watry’s ACE/CO was a relatively inconsequential figure in the booming postwar American aluminum industry, it was a pioneer in permanent mold casting—a secondary method of aluminum manufacture that reused iron molds for broader production of individual parts instead of relying on the one-time sand molds typically used in production, also known as “jobbing.”[38] According to the Aluminum Association, this method remained a steadily profitable venture throughout the post-war decades.[39] However, Watry had no interest in seeing his small company go to a larger competing firm, so, when Grohmann approached him as an independent party in 1965 who “saw possibilities in the small Milwaukee firm,” the aging Watry was eager to sell.[40]

Although well steeped in the workings of business administration, Grohmann was not experienced in the operation and management of an aluminum foundry.[41] As a result, he experienced significant challenges . According to a 1976 story in the Milwaukee Sentinel, two significant executives departed ACE/CO shortly after Grohmann had acquired the firm, producing a rather rocky transfer that threatened the ongoing work and ultimate success of the enterprise. “Looking back,” the Sentinel noted, “[Grohmann] views the departures as a ‘big favor’ since they forced him to learn the total operation, from pouring molten metal to sales and marketing.”[42] Grohmann’s approach to these challenges reveals the extent to which he learned from his family’s successful building and rebuilding of their W. Thust operations. Not only did he respond to this challenge directly, he also viewed it as an opportunity to learn, and therefore become able to control, all parts of the production process in his facility from beginning to end. However, as he indicated to the Sentinel reporter, it was through addressing these challenges that he was no longer merely an observer of hard work; he had also become a participant.

In addition to these internal, organizational problems, Grohmann faced broader challenges to his ACE/CO investment as well. Even though aluminum production and jobbing continued to thrive through the latter half of the century, Grohmann was attempting to establish and grow a successful business in the midst of a time of massive social and economic restructuring in the United States, which scholars have characterized as the beginning of the “post-Fordist,” “post-industrial,” or “post-modern” era. While dramatically improving the conditions of scores of American workers—especially white men—postwar industrial expansion and the resulting economic boom significantly changed the lives of many Americans and the face of American cities. Numerous white workers with increased social and economic mobility left the city for newer, more spacious suburbs, segregating those without this mobility (typically minority populations) in urban centers, and effectively fragmenting urban life.[43] However, faced with intensifying global competition and the growing worldwide economic crisis of the 1970s, several American industrial firms attempted to restore and preserve their postwar profit rates by working to reduce investments, cut labor costs, and eliminate tax responsibilities.[44] They accomplished this through the movement of capital in what has become known as “deindustrialization:” shifting focus to more flexible modes of production, outsourcing labor-intensive jobs, moving entire operations in pursuit of more docile, cheaper labor markets and communities willing to provide tax-breaks, or even shutting plants down altogether, selling off their assets piece by piece.[45] In Milwaukee, as in other American industrial centers, these transformations generated an unprecedented urban crisis, and promoted a growing sense of despair and uncertainty among its residents.[46]

While other firms left Milwaukee for greener pastures, Grohmann approached these challenges as opportunities to build his business, deciding to not only endure these transformations, but to also use them to his advantage. For instance, he recognized that specialization was key to ACE/CO’s ability to distinguish itself in the competition for increasingly mobile capital and the development of more flexible and differentiated production.[47] “After careful study,” the Sentinel reported, “Grohmann came to the conclusion that the firm’s future lay in producing the largest aluminum castings available, ones which competitors, because of technological or financial deficiencies, were unable to produce.”[48] By adding more equipment and expanding his facility’s size to accommodate this specialized production, Grohmann had built ACE/CO from a $1,000,000 in sales a year operation when he acquired it in 1965 ($6,910,000 in 2010 USD value), to a more than $12,000,000 in sales a year operation ten years later ($48,600,000 in 2010 USD).[49] This was indeed a remarkable increase in an era of disinvestment and economic crisis.[50]

Despite this extraordinary growth, ACE/CO experienced significant setbacks in the economic recessions of 1970 and 1976. Grohmann, however, assured the Milwaukee business community that, although ACE/CO may have been “‘bouncing on the bottom’ of the recession” as its customers had cut back on orders, it was not “playing dead.”[51] He viewed these economic downturns as temporary setbacks in the grander scheme of ACE/CO’s progress, and, therefore, excellent chances to expand and make important gains on his competition. Describing his intentions during the 1976 recession to the Sentinel, Grohmann explained, “We’re expanding when business is low; we did the same thing in 1970. … When the volume went up, we were ready.”[52] And expand he did. In late 1974, Grohmann acquired the Lawran Foundry Company from Lawrence J. Andres—a sand casting operation located on Milwaukee’s south side.[53] Both a major competitor and customer of ACE/CO, Lawran was the leading producer of giant aluminum castings in the United States, producing pieces of up to fifteen thousand pounds—certainly making it an appealing investment for Grohmann. [54] According to the Sentinel, the merging of Lawran’s sand casting facility and operation with ACE/CO’s permanent mold casting outfit gave Grohmann’s enterprise “the largest capacity of any US aluminum jobbing foundry,” and moved ACE/CO into the top ten largest aluminum jobbing firms in the country.[55] Moreover, as the cost of iron casting steadily increased, more and more manufacturers were turning to lighter and cheaper aluminum castings, allowing ACE/CO to secure a greater piece of the lucrative automotive parts industry, producing parts for major corporations like General Motors, Chrysler, and Caterpillar.[56] The Lawran facility remained a significant part of ACE/CO’s operations until it was sold to Thomas Woehke in 1990.[57]

In a 2008 interview with the Wall Street Journal, Grohmann claimed that he “never lost his respect for hard labor,” noting that he sympathized with workers as he himself had gone out to the shop floor and “poured castings on a ninety-degree day.”[58] However, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, his relationship with his over four hundred workers quickly deteriorated in disputes over working conditions, wages, and benefits. American workers had high expectations for the booming economy of the 1990s, hoping that it signaled a real opportunity to return to the social contract of the postwar years, and expand it to women and minorities. However, this was not to be the case. Although real wages had grown for the first time in years, the boom did not last as many companies continued reducing labor costs by cutting non-wage compensations like pensions, healthcare, and other “fringe” benefits workers relied on.[59]

ACE/CO’s employees were diverse—blacks, whites, Hmongs, and Laotians— and the company had become one of the “largest employers of Mexican immigrants in Milwaukee.”[60] The operation gained a reputation among some in the surrounding South Side communities for its low pay and dangerous working conditions. Union organizers claimed ACE/CO’s wages started at $5.85 per hour ($8.37 in 2010 USD), with many ACE/CO employees making $10 per hour ($14.30 in 2010 USD) or less. Grohmann strongly refutes these wage claims as little more than union propaganda. Contrary to the claims of union organizers, Grohmann asserts he did not run a sweatshop operation, but maintained tremendous respect for, and dedication to, his workers, compensating them accordingly.[61] However, organizers continued to point to what they perceived as unacceptable working conditions.[62] On March 16, 1993, a pressurized tank exploded on the shop floor, fatally injuring forty-eight-year-old Prentiss Triplett. According to the Milwaukee Journal, the county medical examiner’s report indicated that other workers had complained that the same machine had problems the year before.[63] Grohmann, on the other hand, contends that this was a tragic accident and an isolated incident in an otherwise safe working environment, noting his strong commitment to safety at his ACE/CO facilities.[64] The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined ACE/CO $55,000 ($83,000 in 2010 USD) for this and other serious incidents it had deemed as “willful violations” of labor safety regulations. After a long court battle, this fine was eventually cut down to a $3,500 settlement ($5,150 in 2010 USD) that downgraded ACE/CO’s violations to OSHA’s less critical “serious” category.[65]

Unhappy with how ACE/CO’s executives, OSHA, and their current union failed to directly address their grievances, a group of ACE/CO workers turned to the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America (UE).[66] On January 5 and 6, 1995, ACE/CO workers very narrowly voted to join the UE union, 193 to 183 votes.[67] ACE/CO filed numerous objections to this election to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), and refused to recognize or negotiate with the new union. However, an NLRB review later determined that ACE/CO committed several unfair labor practices at the time of the election, including denying workers their annual wage increase, giving preferential treatment to anti-union workers, and expressing its ambition “‘to do everything possible’ to remain union-free” in its employee handbook—words allegedly repeated by Grohmann himself in the heat of a later election campaign.[68] Grohmann contends that these charges were only half of the story. ACE/CO had indeed dropped the flat across-the-board annual wage increase, but did so in favor of a merit pay system that he argued had better rewarded hard work. Grohmann asserted that he always paid workers prevailing wage in order to stay competitive in the labor market, but that ACE/CO also needed to remain competitive in the sales market, and he had established this system as a way to allow for both.[69] Although the NLRB ordered the reversal of these practices, ACE/CO appealed this order, and fought these charges in court into the new century.[70] Regardless of ACE/CO’s relationship with its unions and workers, however, Grohmann successfully grew the firm into a major employer in Milwaukee, building it “from a small foundry of 35 employees to a company ten times that size when he sold the business [to Diversified Machine Incorporated] in [December] 2007.”[71] Grohmann explained in 2012 that the automobile industry—his primary clients—had become especially difficult to remain solvent by the late 2000s, and, since his children were not interested in pursuing the business, he decided to sell ACE/CO and focus more on his other existing business interests. In his words, the sale was “a logical step to retirement.”[72]

While ACE/CO and his other aluminum investments remained his foremost business concern for over forty-two years, Grohmann entered into other, unrelated ventures as well. For instance, Wisconsin Marine Bank, the south side bank that offered Grohmann the loan he used to purchase ACE/CO in 1965, requested that he join the bank’s board of directors in 1972—an impressive achievement at the age of thirty-six. He remained on the board for thirteen years.[73]

Like several of Milwaukee’s best-known German-American entrepreneurs who married into their businesses, such as Joseph Schlitz, Valentine Blatz, and Frederick Pabst, Grohmann also married into the Weisel Sausage Company through his wife, Carole Weisel, daughter the company’s owner, Carl Weisel, Jr. Founded in 1878, the Weisel Sausage Company was deeply rooted in Milwaukee’s German heritage as the oldest sausage-making firm in the city, as well as one of the “big three” ethnic sausage makers in the United States.[74] Having moved from its original downtown location to just north of the Milwaukee River on the city’s near north side, the company was passed down through the Weisel family until Carl, Jr.’s death in 1961, and Weisel company employees took over its operation in trusteeship over the next decade. Recognizing Grohmann’s business talents, the Weisel family offered him control of the firm after he had married Carole. Grohmann accepted the position as president of the company, but, not wanting to take attention away from his interests at ACE/CO and hoping to get out of the perishable food industry, he hired Ronald Walser to run the business’ day-to-day operations.[75] Grohmann remained president of the firm until 1977, when he and the Weisel family sold the business to the company’s general manager, Thomas G. Stanek. However, the Weisel company did not do very well after this sale, shuttering its doors in May 1979, after a little over a century of service, with little more than a sign that read, “Sorry, Out of Business.”[76]

Grohmann was also involved in the formation of the Central Control Alarm Corporation in September 1981—a venture located on Milwaukee’s near north side that provided electronic burglar, fire, and other security alarm services for area businesses and residences. The corporation was created through a merger of the operations of Central Watch, Incorporated and Johnson Control Central Station of Milwaukee, Incorporated—a subsidiary of Johnson Controls—headed by Grohmann, Robert W. Shirley, and R. Roy Longworth.[77] However, Grohmann limited his leadership role in the corporation, remaining only vice president and treasurer—perhaps reflecting a desire to keep his attention on his ACE/CO foundry operations as he had with his interest in the Weisel Sausage Company.[78] Central Control Alarm had certainly proved a profitable venture, though, having built a sizeable subscriber base of fifteen thousand customers, largely in Milwaukee, Madison, and Appleton, by the time it sold its assets and operations to Chicago-based Ameritech in May 1997.[79]

Further exhibiting his diverse entrepreneurial abilities, Grohmann also held a controlling interest in the HomMed Company, a medical device manufacturing company established by Herschel Peddicord in 1999. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel explained, “[HomMed] sells and leases a device, invented by Peddicord, that allows doctors and nurses to monitor patients’ vital signs from their homes. The unit sends data over telephone lines and via wireless communications networks.”[80] In six years, HomMed grew from a startup to a significant enterprise with 108 employees and $28 million in sales ($32,300,000 in 2010 USD), becoming a “market leader for the device [it] sells.”[81] Out of its seventy-five local investors, Peddicord held only an 18 percent stake in the company, with Grohmann and other investors holding 70 percent. “Industrial and technology giant” Honeywell International Incorporated purchased HomMed in 2004 for $128 million ($148 million in 2010 USD), making it Honeywell HomMed, which still operates out of Brookfield, Wisconsin, to this day.[82]

Social Status

Just as Milwaukee’s well-established industrial tradition and history of German immigrant entrepreneurs made the city an especially lucrative environment for Grohmann’s business ventures, the prevalence of German heritage among Milwaukee’s citizenry made the city’s social networks extremely receptive to even the most recent of German immigrants like Grohmann. Despite their prevalence, though, many of the these German ethnic networks became indiscernible as generations passed and German ethnicity pervaded all levels of Milwaukee’s social, economic, and political operations. Indeed, Grohmann does not recognize Milwaukee’s German ethnic heritage and social networks as important factors in his entrepreneurial and social success, nor does he attribute much of his entrepreneurial abilities to his own German heritage.[83] This is an indisputable notion in that Grohmann’s migration and business endeavors were conducted largely in the realm and rationalities of global capitalism and Cold War politics, having made many personal decisions based on what made sense professionally and politically. However, the value of established German ethnic networks to Grohmann’s business ventures in Milwaukee is perceptible to some extent in that a lone immigrant like Grohmann who did not have immediate family networks in the area to rely on was able to establish himself and build a successful enterprise in the city quite quickly and with relative ease. Perhaps further testament to the prevalence of these networks is the short amount of time between Grohmann’s immigration in 1962, and his marriage to Carole Weisel – the daughter of a German sausage manufacturing family that had been established in Milwaukee for several generations.[84] Eckhart and Carole were first listed as married in Wright’s Milwaukee City Directory in 1963.[85]

The Grohmanns made their home in Shorewood, Wisconsin, a small suburban community located on Milwaukee’s north side. They started out in a relatively small home on Edgewood Avenue across the street from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus.[86] However, as their wealth grew, they were able to upgrade to larger homes on Newton Street in 1967, then on Lake Drive in 1970, moving into the home of Carole’s mother, Irma Weisel, after her death.[87] The Grohmann’s Lake Drive home was well known for its elaborate Christmas displays, a tradition that was started by Carole’s late mother. Carole and her three children began decorating their home in late November every year. “Inside, virtually every room is dressed for the holidays,” a 1981 Journal article reported—including five “cathedral-sized” Christmas trees (over eleven feet tall) decorated in different themes and traditional German advent wreaths with real candles hung from the ceilings.[88] The most famous feature of the Grohmann’s display, however, was a large, sprawling Hawthorn tree in the front yard that had each branch delicately wrapped in a total of twelve thousand tiny white lights. “The tree is a regular stop on bus tours for the elderly and the handicapped,” Carole told the Journal. “Schoolchildren visit, carolers stop by, tourists take pictures and send prints and thank-you notes.”[89] During the 1973 energy crisis, the Grohmanns turned on their intricately lit tree only on Christmas and New Year’s Eve and Day.[90]

While Eckhart was wrapped up in the operations of his businesses, Carole developed a reputation in the community for her fine cooking. “I used to follow Carole around with a notebook,” Jane Hootkin, Carole’s neighbor and friend recalled in a 1987 interview with the Chicago Sun Times. “Everything she said was interesting. She knew so much about food, I wrote it all down. We had fun together.”[91] Exhibiting entrepreneurial ambition of their own, Carole Grohmann and Jane Hootkin turned their friendship into a business partnership, creating a cooking school called Le Bec Fin.[92] However, after enrollment in the school dropped significantly eight years after they had launched the project, they decided to focus their attention on creating a line of gourmet food products with new partner Betty Puccio, including frozen soups (which they were known for at the cooking school), and a series of barbecue sauces, basting sauces, and cranberry sauces and chutneys under the Wisconsin Wilderness label that remains to this day.[93] Eckhart and Carole Grohmann were divorced in 1982.

In addition to being an astute and successful entrepreneur, Eckhart Grohmann also became a major booster of private higher education in Milwaukee. For instance, serving as a corporation member in 1974 and then as regent in 1990, Grohmann has had a long history as a major benefactor of the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE).[94] Grohmann and his second wife, Ischi, also made a substantial donation to the school, contributing to the building of their Kern athletic and fitness facility in downtown Milwaukee.[95] As a thank you for his years of service, MSOE awarded Grohmann with an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree in 1999.[96] Grohmann also joined the advisory board of the Medical College of Wisconsin’s Cardiovascular Center in 2008. According to the organization’s website, board members like Grohmann help provide or secure funding for research, training, and equipment purchases needed at the medical college’s various centers.[97]

Besides his financial support, Grohmann also made a contribution to MSOE that was much more personal in nature: his extensive private art collection. According to Grohmann, he began “searching for artwork depicting industry and individual workers and craftsmen in their workplaces” in the 1960s. Inspired largely by his experiences at his grandfather’s quarries and his own entrepreneurial pursuits, most of his collection came from European painters.[98] In addition to collecting art that portrayed work, Grohmann also commissioned several pieces depicting work on the shop floor of ACE/CO from German industrial painter Hans Dieter Tylle.[99] Recognizing that many MSOE students lacked exposure to the hands-on work experiences of the past due to modern automated production processes, Grohmann decided to donate his collection to the school in 2001, “thereby opening [students’] eyes to the historical evolution of work from its earliest beginnings.”[100] Along with his collection, Grohmann also donated a building in which to house it, establishing MSOE’s “Man at Work” collection at the Grohmann Museum, which opened its doors on the corner of North Broadway and East State Streets in downtown Milwaukee in October 2007. Unlike most other art museums, however, the Grohmann Museum’s permanent exhibit contains the art collection of only one person, and arranges its motif around the subject of this art—work—and not its aesthetic qualities.[101] “The Grohmann Museum might thus be called a vanity museum,” a Wall Street Journal reviewer noted. “But it's a vanity museum out to make the point that work is noble and dignified, a conviction reinforced by its location on the campus of the Milwaukee School of Engineering, … rather than along some tourist trail.”[102]

Grohmann’s museum endeavor became the center of some controversy shortly after it opened, though, as it was realized that it had artworks depicting Nazi building and engineering projects in its permanent display. While critics quickly labeled the pieces “Nazi Art,” and demanded a historical contextualization to these paintings, Grohmann and the museum directors stood firm, citing both the private nature and work-centered theme of the collection. “We don’t know that any was actually commissioned by the Third Reich,” Grohmann said in an interview with The Art Newspaper, “and to be honest I wouldn’t care. It is a totally subject-oriented collection for the purpose of teaching at the technical university. I don’t politicize pictures.”[103]

Aside from his anti-union stance, Grohmann has largely kept his political affiliations out of the public eye. However, he did make small donations to the campaigns of several state and local Republican candidates over the last couple of decades, as well as to the Wisconsin Committee to Elect a Republican Senate, to a total amount of $2,500.[104] Grohmann’s antipathy towards unions undoubtedly factored into his donations to the campaigns of Republican State Senators Scott Fitzgerald and Alberta Darling over the years, two key allies of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s statewide anti-union crusade after his election in 2010.[105]

Conclusion

As a shrewd and successful immigrant entrepreneur, Grohmann was indeed a product of his life experiences. His family’s fortitude in the face of the tumultuous challenges posed by the Second World War certainly inspired and informed Grohmann’s ability to overcome the significant difficulties he encountered establishing a successful enterprise in the midst of a global financial crisis and urban social and economic restructuring. While his endeavors required a great deal of hard work and resilience, his success in these ventures was largely assisted by some distinct advantages. Already a member of the entrepreneurial class, Grohmann immigrated to the United States to achieve greater access to entrepreneurial opportunities than he could at home in Germany. He settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—a city known for the names of its German industries and its German cultural heritage—and gained immediate entry into the city’s well-established business and social networks. Having amassed significant wealth as a versatile business leader, Grohmann also reinvested in the city, becoming a booster of private higher education in Milwaukee and a contributor to the city’s arts community through his “Man at Work” Collection at MSOE’s Grohmann Museum. However, as indicated in his conflicts with his ACE/CO workers and the controversy over Nazi art at his museum, he viewed his interests as private, and was not interested in allowing other parties to dictate how he applied them. Perhaps this, too, was a product of his life experiences. Having endured Nazi social and economic projects and Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe, he established a capitalist realm of his own in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Notes