Editor’s note: The Late, Great Tom Roeser wrote this column which was published in the Chicago Sun-Times on May 21, 2005.
By Tom Roeser
We have the same surname. We both have sons named Tom. We both have daughters named Jeanne Marie. He once lived in Park Ridge; I still do. We’re both Republicans. He’s worth more than $100 million; I’m worth — aw, skip it. There the similarity ends. We’re not related, even distantly. And at age 81, John Otto Roeser is infinitely more accomplished than I.
For one thing, this Barrington resident is commonly recognized, as Woodstock Democrat state Rep. Jack Franks says, as an engineering genius. He was born in Chicago and went to Oak Park High School (“God, what a good school it was. I had an English teacher who put culture in my head. I hated her, she hated me. She had her way with me”). He went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and enlisted in the Army at age 19 for World War II. Sent to the Philippines, Roeser was a maverick, and once directed his combat engineer outfit to flush out Japanese (“I should never have got involved in that; finally had enough sense to get us out of there before we had our heads shot off”).
Back home, he got his engineering degree from the U. of I. and went to Western Electric’s famed Hawthorne Works, then under the influence of W. Edwards Deming, the famed “curmudgeon of quality” who under Gen. Douglas MacArthur had preached the gospel of statistical control of manufacturing processes to Japan. Roeser absorbed it in a gulp, and went to work for the toughest boss he ever had: Harold T. Ames, who owned 12 companies and had headed Duesenberg and Cord Motor Works. At age 25, Jack built a business in aircraft switches for Ames, then moved on to Illinois Tool, putting them in the switch business. After taking out 50 patents, Roeser started his own business, Otto Controls, named after the father he reveres.
A pilot, Roeser flies airplanes and invents for them. A wiry sailor, he has mastered the run to Mackinac Island. An intellectual among engineers, he had to overcome reticence to become a salesman. He hit the road selling people something worthwhile, building sales organizations that won three national awards, competing with GE, Cutler-Hammer, Honeywell: “If you can get there and give them a quotation faster than GE, you can get the business. I don’t care how many blast furnaces they’ve got.”
Roeser designed components for the B-36 bomber for Douglas aircraft and Boeing. He walked out of Convair with a contract that made him a multimillionaire. Today, Otto Engineering is the largest maker of control switches for aircraft, having patented the Cobra model in all fighter planes and aircraft, the biggest manufacturer of cockpit controls in the world, expanding into farm and industrial machinery as well. He says, “Little Otto has grown up.” His 500-plus employees in his immaculate Carpentersville plant idealize and josh him. Since the mid-’80s, with the same energy that enabled him to outbid GE and give his workers good jobs, Roeser has been engrossed in political reform.
He ran in the 1994 GOP primary against Jim Edgar, getting only 25 percent of the vote (mobilizing conservatives, he says, is like herding cats). Labeled by some as ultra-conservative, he is, rather, a revolutionary, funneling generous amounts into charitable projects — his favorite being St. Elizabeth’s, a black grade school on the Near South Side.
More than anything, Roeser resembles the man he never met, Deming, the “curmudgeon of quality,” who died at 92 after stomping off the lecturer’s platform. Like Deming, Jack Roeser has become a lightning-rod curmudgeon of quality for his party: determined that the Illinois GOP clean its stables.
Job one, he says, is getting rid of Bob Kjellander as national committeeman. Kjellander made a $800,000 commission off the Blagojevich administration’s $10 billion bond issue. Job two: massive educational reform, including school vouchers. Job three: relentlessly cut spending and taxes.
Is he for President Bush? Not entirely. Why not?
”I’m a constitutionalist, for Chrissake,” referring to Bush’s approval of the McCain Feingold campaign law limiting speech. And, “He’s spending way too much.”
A phrase-maker (one wealthy donor, he says, is ”too institutional to have a sharp edge. Without a sharp edge, your skates slip”), Roeser stands apart from establishmentarians in the GOP. All alone, sitting center stage among his employees, disdaining a private executive suite in his company known for generous wages and benefits, this ever-youthful curmudgeon of quality fights for transparency in his party and government with the same energy as when he visualized his first breakthrough invention 60 years ago.
A Man with a plan to reform Illinois’ GOP
Editor’s note: The Late, Great Tom Roeser wrote this column which was published in the Chicago Sun-Times on May 21, 2005.
By Tom Roeser
We have the same surname. We both have sons named Tom. We both have daughters named Jeanne Marie. He once lived in Park Ridge; I still do. We’re both Republicans. He’s worth more than $100 million; I’m worth — aw, skip it. There the similarity ends. We’re not related, even distantly. And at age 81, John Otto Roeser is infinitely more accomplished than I.
For one thing, this Barrington resident is commonly recognized, as Woodstock Democrat state Rep. Jack Franks says, as an engineering genius. He was born in Chicago and went to Oak Park High School (“God, what a good school it was. I had an English teacher who put culture in my head. I hated her, she hated me. She had her way with me”). He went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and enlisted in the Army at age 19 for World War II. Sent to the Philippines, Roeser was a maverick, and once directed his combat engineer outfit to flush out Japanese (“I should never have got involved in that; finally had enough sense to get us out of there before we had our heads shot off”).
Back home, he got his engineering degree from the U. of I. and went to Western Electric’s famed Hawthorne Works, then under the influence of W. Edwards Deming, the famed “curmudgeon of quality” who under Gen. Douglas MacArthur had preached the gospel of statistical control of manufacturing processes to Japan. Roeser absorbed it in a gulp, and went to work for the toughest boss he ever had: Harold T. Ames, who owned 12 companies and had headed Duesenberg and Cord Motor Works. At age 25, Jack built a business in aircraft switches for Ames, then moved on to Illinois Tool, putting them in the switch business. After taking out 50 patents, Roeser started his own business, Otto Controls, named after the father he reveres.
A pilot, Roeser flies airplanes and invents for them. A wiry sailor, he has mastered the run to Mackinac Island. An intellectual among engineers, he had to overcome reticence to become a salesman. He hit the road selling people something worthwhile, building sales organizations that won three national awards, competing with GE, Cutler-Hammer, Honeywell: “If you can get there and give them a quotation faster than GE, you can get the business. I don’t care how many blast furnaces they’ve got.”
Roeser designed components for the B-36 bomber for Douglas aircraft and Boeing. He walked out of Convair with a contract that made him a multimillionaire. Today, Otto Engineering is the largest maker of control switches for aircraft, having patented the Cobra model in all fighter planes and aircraft, the biggest manufacturer of cockpit controls in the world, expanding into farm and industrial machinery as well. He says, “Little Otto has grown up.” His 500-plus employees in his immaculate Carpentersville plant idealize and josh him. Since the mid-’80s, with the same energy that enabled him to outbid GE and give his workers good jobs, Roeser has been engrossed in political reform.
He ran in the 1994 GOP primary against Jim Edgar, getting only 25 percent of the vote (mobilizing conservatives, he says, is like herding cats). Labeled by some as ultra-conservative, he is, rather, a revolutionary, funneling generous amounts into charitable projects — his favorite being St. Elizabeth’s, a black grade school on the Near South Side.
More than anything, Roeser resembles the man he never met, Deming, the “curmudgeon of quality,” who died at 92 after stomping off the lecturer’s platform. Like Deming, Jack Roeser has become a lightning-rod curmudgeon of quality for his party: determined that the Illinois GOP clean its stables.
Job one, he says, is getting rid of Bob Kjellander as national committeeman. Kjellander made a $800,000 commission off the Blagojevich administration’s $10 billion bond issue. Job two: massive educational reform, including school vouchers. Job three: relentlessly cut spending and taxes.
Is he for President Bush? Not entirely. Why not?
”I’m a constitutionalist, for Chrissake,” referring to Bush’s approval of the McCain Feingold campaign law limiting speech. And, “He’s spending way too much.”
A phrase-maker (one wealthy donor, he says, is ”too institutional to have a sharp edge. Without a sharp edge, your skates slip”), Roeser stands apart from establishmentarians in the GOP. All alone, sitting center stage among his employees, disdaining a private executive suite in his company known for generous wages and benefits, this ever-youthful curmudgeon of quality fights for transparency in his party and government with the same energy as when he visualized his first breakthrough invention 60 years ago.