Dick Walterhouse
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Dick Walterhouse never thought that he would work in construction, even though he had grown up in the industry: His father owned and operated Walterhouse Construction Company, a small general contractor and cement firm, located in Ann Arbor, that his father had founded. Rather, Walterhouse dreamed of playing baseball.
A stand-out high school athlete, Walterhouse was recruited by the University of Michigan to play both baseball and football. Several other schools wanted him to play basketball. Walterhouse decided to play baseball at Michigan. But he did not ignore his studies. In fact, in his senior year, he won the Big Ten Medal of Honor as the top student athlete in the conference. Walterhouse graduated in 1976 with a B.S. degree in civil engineering.
In his senior year of high school, Walterhouse had attended a tryout camp held by the Pittsburgh Pirates, and had been offered a professional contract (which he had turned down in favor of a baseball scholarship.) Now, in the 1976 draft, the Pirates took him in the nineteenth round. Walterhouse intended to play one summer and then return to school, perhaps to earn an MBA degree. He ended up playing four seasons of minor league ball, reaching the Triple A level in 1979, when the Pirates won the World Series over the Baltimore Orioles in seven games.
Therein lay the problem. A team loaded with veteran stars, such as Willie Stargell and Bill Madlock, had little room for up and coming players. Nevertheless, Walterhouse was invited to attend spring training in 1980.
Meanwhile, Pankow vice president Russell J. Osterman, a University of Michigan graduate, felt that it was time that the company hire a civil engineer from somewhere other than Purdue University—Charlie Pankow's alma mater and supplier of the majority of engineering graduates recruited during the 1970s. Osterman had played defensive right end on the football team—a career that included a victory over the University of California in the 1951 Rose Bowl—and hosted an annual Rose Bowl party. During the party of 1 January 1979, Osterman asked the associate athletic director if he knew of any student-athletes who might make a good fit for the firm. The latter offered Walterhouse's name. Osterman contacted him during the baseball season. In October 1979, Walterhouse joined Pankow, thinking that he would report to training camp, as he had been invited to do. He still works for Charles Pankow Builders, Ltd. (CPBL).
For the next seven years, Walterhouse worked his way up through the ranks, from field engineer to superintendent. His first assignment as a field engineer was the parking structure associated with the expansion of South Shore Plaza, a regional shopping center located in Braintree, Massachusetts. In 1983 he was promoted to project engineer and worked in that capacity on a parking structure in Oakland, California, the 411 East Wisconsin office building in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and 2101 Webster Street, an office building in downtown Oakland. His mentors during these formative years were long-time superintendents, Mike Liddiard and Alan Murk. During the 2101 Webster project, Walterhouse himself was promoted to superintendent.
Walterhouse gained his first experience with project sponsorship in 1986, when he assisted with the GTE headquarters annex project in Thousand Oaks, California. From 1987 to 1995, he worked as a sponsor out of the San Francisco office. His eight projects included Marathon Plaza in San Francisco, the Hotel Sofitel in Redwood City, California, and the Resort at Squaw Peak.
In 1995 Dean E. Stephan, Pankow's president and Southern California regional manager, asked Walterhouse to run Pankow Special Projects, a new division within the firm that engaged in tenant improvements, health care facility upgrades, seismic renovations, adaptive reuse of historically and architecturally significant structures, and other specialized products. The following year, Pankow Special Projects, Ltd. (PSPL) was established as a subsidiary company of CPBL.
Under Walterhouse's direction, PSPL expanded beyond its base in northern California, establishing offices in Honolulu, Los Angeles, Newport Beach, and Seattle. By 2000, when Walterhouse was named president of the subsidiary, PSPL's annual contract volume had reached $100 million. By 2008, when Walterhouse stepped down to take a position as chief risk officer for CPBL, PSPL's annual volume had reached $130 million.
In 2004 Walterhouse was one of six executive managers who formed a controlling general partnership as part of the company's reorganization in the wake of Charlie Pankow's death.
