Wallace Rasmussen

Wallace Rasmussen

Wallace Rasmussen was an American businessman and prominent philanthropist. Hired at Beatrice Foods Company in 1934 as an ice hauler, Rasmussen rose to the top and served as president and then chairman and chief executive officer of Beatrice from 1976 until his retirement in 1980. Most impressively, Rasmussen rose to the top of the nation’s largest food processing company and multi-billion-dollar business with just a high school diploma.

Early life

Rasmussen was born in Nebraska on July 11, 1914. The son of a Danish immigrant, he was born to Lars Berg Rasmussen (1869-1953) and Millie Wallick (1888-1983) and raised on a dairy farm.

Career

By the time Rasmussen graduated from high school at the age of 16, the Great Depression had ravaged the Rasmussen farm, leaving the family destitute. Working menial jobs, from delivering handbills door to door and cutting jigsaw puzzles to hiring himself out as a ranch hand, Rasmussen vowed “that if he ever landed work with a big company, he’d never let go of it.”

In 1934, Rasmussen landed a job as an ice hauler for Beatrice Creamery Company, in Lincoln, Nebraska, and, true to his word, he never let it go. Due to his mechanical ability and remarkable resilience, Rasmussen then rose through the ranks, landing positions from chief engineer and plant manager to various district and regional supervisory posts.

Possessed of a keen intellect and dogged determination, Rasmussen says he studied on his own, mastering each new job: “‘I only had a high school education, so I had to educate myself,’ he said. ‘Every time I got into something I might not know enough about, I’d go out and buy every book I could find on the subject.’”

By the 1960s, Rasmussen had landed at company headquarters in Chicago, Illinois, serving in several vice presidential positions. In 1976, he became president and CEO. And in 1977, he was named chairman and CEO of Beatrice Foods Co, which, by this time, had become America’s largest food processing company and a multi-billion-dollar business. During Rasmussen’s tenure at Beatrice, he added many high-profile acquisitions to its portfolio, most notably Tropicana Products, Inc. After 47 years with Beatrice, Rasmussen retired in 1980.

In 1986, the once formidable Beatrice Foods Co., was sold and subsequently dismantled.

Post-Retirement

After his retirement from Beatrice, Rasmussen settled in Nashville, Tennessee, where he sat on several corporate boards, including the board of Dollar General Corp. Cal Turner Jr., the former CEO of Dollar General, once said about Rasmussen: “If you’re trying to go into battle and do the right thing, he’s the guy you want by your side.”

Studs Terkel oral histories

Rasmussen was a frequent interview subject of Pulitzer Prize-winning author and oral historian Studs Terkel, well known as a chronicler of the lives of ordinary Americans.

In American Dreams, Lost and Found (1980), Terkel presents 100 interviews with a cross section of Americans, both well-known and unknown, who discuss their personal lives and ambitions. The chapter featuring Terkel’s interview with Rasmussen, aptly titled, “The Boss,” gives readers a glimpse into the life and thoughts of an American CEO.

In Coming of Age: The Story of Our Century by Those Who've Lived It (1995), Rasmussen is one of the 70 people, ranging in age from 70 to 99, interviewed by Terkel, providing different views of American life during the 20^th century. In his review of Coming of Age for the Sun Sentinel, James G. Driscoll marvels at the “contentious elderly Americans,” chosen as Terkel’s interview subjects, who ignore advanced age, dismiss heart attacks and hip replacements, and refuse to rot quietly in the back room.” Driscoll notes that the “cantankerous Wallace Rasmussen, 80, who retired as CEO of Beatrice Foods,” and “the rest of Terkel's elders are neither naive nor dewy-eyed. They're resilient, bending but springing back, as tough as they need to be.” Likewise, in her “Booklist Review,” Mary Carroll celebrates these extraordinary seniors, including Rasmussen, who “though some are pessimistic,” never lose hope and still “share a willingness to ‘do battle with dragons.’”   

In his book, My American Century (1997), Terkel selects the most memorable interviews from his eight previous books, including one with Rasmussen. In a review of My American Century for The Buffalo News, Stephen W. Bell says Terkel “gives readers the original America.” According to Bell, Terkel’s popular histories have usually avoided “supposed newsmakers and society shakers . . . find[ing] the unusual among the usual. . . . Take Wallace Rasmussen, a Nebraska farm boy who grew up to be chairman of the board of giant Beatrice Foods. He spent more time talking to workers on the factory floor than to corporate fawners.” According to John McClenahen, in a review of My American Century for IndustryWeek, Terkel’s tape recorder allowed him to forge “intimate connections” with a wide variety of people like “CEOs . . . [such as] … Wallace Rasmussen and . . . a couple of blue-collar workers” who “told Terkel and his tape recorder about business between 1972 and 1995 -- and what Terkel still wants other people to know about work and workers.” McClenahen then highlights what Terkel wants readers to know about Rasmussen’s views on work, quoting Rasmussen as saying: "It can appear to be ruthless at the time you do it. When somebody is not producing in a corporation, or even in a family, and he doesn't recognize he's holding up the works, someone has to make that decision for him. If you're going to be successful, you can't let any person stand in the way.”

In Hope Dies Last: Keeping the Faith in Difficult Times (2003), Terkel assembles a collection of interviews that share and communicate the common theme of hope at a time in history when many Americans seemed to question its existence. David Self, in a review of Hope Dies Last for TES, calls it a "genuinely remarkable book" of interviews with people of widely differing ages that shows how hope sprang up among the oppressed during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the political activism during the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War during the 1960s. Self says the book is filled with "inspirational characters" who "share some illuminating insights," such as a few "captains of industry" like Wallace Rasmussen who, says Self, “started out by peddling handbills for 10 cents a hundred and retired a multi-millionaire.”

Philanthropy

Although he achieved success with only a high school diploma, Rasmussen was a fearless proponent of higher education. After his retirement from Beatrice in 1980, Rasmussen devoted his philanthropic efforts to providing educational opportunities to hundreds of deserving students.

Besides five annual scholarships that he sponsored at Belmont University and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Nashville, Tennessee, he established the Rasmussen Foreign Student Exchange Program (now the Rasmussen Studies Abroad Scholarship) at Belmont University in 1994. In 1996, he funded and established another studies abroad program, the Wallace N. Rasmussen Scholarship at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.

In 1978, Rasmussen’s lifetime achievements were recognized when he was awarded a 1978 Horatio Alger Award, an honor bestowed upon outstanding Americans who, similar to characters in stories by Horatio Alger, Jr., traditionally have started life in “humble circumstances” yet, “in spite of this early adversity, or many would say because of it, they have worked with great diligence to achieve success and the fulfillment of their dreams."

Personal life and death

On December 17, 1936, Rasmussen married Grace Irene Moreland (1913–1993). Together, Wallace and Grace had two children: Walter Rasmussen and Ada Rasmussen Almering. Wallace Rasmussen died after a long illness at his home in Nashville, Tennessee, on September 21, 2008.

External links

• www.horatioalger.org/members/member-detail/wallace-n-rasmussen

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