Longtime Motorola CEO Robert Galvin dies at 89
Robert Galvin, the man who built his father's radio company into an international technological giant, and moved the company to Schaumburg from Chicago, has died.
“Without a doubt, the world lost one of the all-time greats,” Greg Brown, CEO of Motorola Solutions Inc., said in an interview. “He was one of a kind.”
Galvin, who was Motorola's CEO for 29 years, was 89. The Barrington Hills resident died Tuesday night of natural causes, his family said.
Galvin was named CEO in 1959 at the death his father, company founder Paul Galvin. He remained in the post until 1988 and stayed on as chairman until 1990.
He took a company with annual sales of $290 million in 1959 and turned it into a wireless pioneer with revenue of $10.8 billion in 1990.
Galvin was born in 1922 in Marshfield, Wis. He went to high school in Illinois and then to the University of Notre Dame before joining Motorola in 1944.
He led the expansion of Motorola's walkie-talkie and paging businesses and the company developed the first mobile phone prototype in 1971 under his watch.
That led to the commercialization of Motorola's DynaTAC in 1983, which was the forerunner of popular phones like the StarTAC that made Motorola a handset leader in the 1990s.
It was Galvin who relocated the company's headquarters to its current site in Schaumburg. Brown said the Chicago area remained the center of the global corporation because of both Galvin's own roots in the region as well as his trust in the Midwestern work ethic.
Schaumburg Mayor Al Larson said that whenever he travels to conferences anywhere else in the country and is asked where Schaumburg is, all he has to say is that it's where Motorola's headquarters are and there's instant recognition.
Larson added that the decision of many other companies — including a large number of Japanese corporations — to also move to Schaumburg is probably attributable to Galvin's long-ago decision.
Galvin, who pushed the company into new markets in Europe, Latin America, Southeast Asia and China in the 1980s, recalled in a 1991 interview with the Daily Herald how he taught Akio Morita, then chairman of Sony Corp. to windsurf on the lake at his Barrington Hills farm.
In retirement, Galvin focused on establishing two research institutes devoted to electricity, transport and related infrastructure issues, as well as writing, according to the family's statement. He is survived by relatives including his sons Chris and Michael, daughters Gail and Dawn and 13 grandchildren.
A wake is scheduled for Monday in Skokie, followed by a funeral mass the next day in Winnetka.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests that gifts be directed to the Robert W. Galvin Center for Electricity Innovation at Illinois Institute of Technology, 10 W. 35th St. Suite 1700, Chicago, IL 60616, attention of Betsy Hughes.
Ÿ Daily Herald news services contributed to this report.