Rosser Edwards

A Columbus, Ohio native, Ross Edwards matriculated in 1956 in the civil engineering program at Purdue University. He graduated with a B.S.C.E. in 1960. He stayed on to get a master’s degree in construction management and structures because he had met Gloria, who would become his wife, and she had two more years of study in the School of Pharmacy.

Upon receiving his M.S.C.E. in January 1962, Edwards moved to Los Angeles, where he took a job in the Arcadia-based building division of the Southwest District of Peter Kiewit Sons’, headed by Charlie Pankow.

After working for a time as an estimator, Edwards was assigned as project engineer on the construction of Shorecliff Tower, a 13-story apartment building designed by Quincy Jones and Frederick Emmons for Ralph Kiewit, Sr., and Ralph Kiewit, Jr. On the job site in Santa Monica, Edwards worked under superintendent Harold Henderson and with slipform foreman Red Metcalf.

In May 1963, two months before the building team completed Shorecliff Tower, Charlie Pankow, Robert Carlsen, Lloyd Loetterle, and Ralph Tice founded Charles Pankow, Inc. (CPI). By the time that the apartments were ready for occupancy, the mass exodus of men out of the building division to join CPI was gathering momentum. The exodus included Henderson, who became superintendent on Central Tower (“Turk and Eddy”), a housing project in San Francisco.

Edwards, however, stayed on. At age twenty-six, he took the opportunity to advance his career as superintendent on the Valley Music Theater in Woodland Hills, an innovative project that involved pouring a concrete dome over an inverted bowl of compressed earth. On this project, Red Metcalf was his general foreman. Both men had decided not to tether their careers to the start-up firm.

But Peter Kiewit wound up the building division with the dedication, in September 1964, of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, one of the buildings that comprised the Music Center for the Performing Arts in downtown Los Angeles. So Edwards followed Bill Keller, who had taken over the building division after Charlie Pankow departed, to Christie Company. After completing a medical building in Pasadena and several smaller jobs, Keller left Christie to form his own company. About this time, in the summer of 1967, Pankow queried Edwards’s interest in coming to work for him. Edwards agreed. Upon hiring him, Pankow assigned Edwards to the Borel Estate in San Mateo, where CPI was building a set of office buildings for William Wilson III, Miller Ream, and Gilbert Bovet, partners in the Borel Development Company. While Harold Henderson ran the job site for the second of four office buildings, Edwards took responsibility for the construction of Borel Square, an 80,000-square-foot “Town and Country” shopping center located on the southeast corner of the property.

Upon its completion in 1968, Edwards shipped out to Bay Shore, Long Island, where he supervised construction of a Penney’s department store and auto center for Winmar, the development arm of Safeco Insurance that would become the Pankow company’s most important client for more two decades. After remodeling McCurdy’s Department Store in Rochester, New York, Edwards returned to the Borel Estate, working on the final two office buildings completed on the property. Before their completion, Harold Henderson died. Edwards assumed the superintendent’s role. Both office buildings were completed in 1970.

About this time, Edwards asked Charlie Pankow to name him head of CPI’s Northern California region. When Pankow rebuffed his request, Edwards followed through with the idea of forming a company, which he had been discussing with developers Wilson and Ream.

Edwards recruited David Boyd, his friend from his days at Purdue and colleague at both Kiewit and CPI, to join the developers in establishing a new construction company. On 19 January 1971, Boyd, Edwards, Wilson, and Ream incorporated Webcor.

Like Pankow, Webcor focused on commercial construction. They delivered projects using design-build, thereby contributing to the diffusion of the methodology. Focused geographically in Northern California, Webcor became renowned for building the headquarters of some of Silicon Valley’s leading firms, among them Electronic Arts, Oracle, Siebel Systems, and Sun Microsystems.

In 1994 Webcor absorbed A. J. Ball Construction, the eponymous firm headed by Andy Ball. In 2000 both Edwards and Boyd retired, leaving Ball in charge. In 2007, in the context of a deepening recession, Ball sold a controlling interest in the company to Obayashi, a Japanese construction company.