Norman "Red" Metcalf

Born in Wellington, Kansas in 1935, “Red” Metcalf has been constructing residential and commercial buildings since he the sixth grade, as both his grandfather and father built houses.

Metcalf’s family moved to southern California when he was five years old. Later, after one year of junior college in Oceanside, he became a journeyman carpenter and never returned to school.

From 1956 to 1959, Metcalf served in the U.S. Navy. At the end of his tour, he returned to work as a carpenter, framing houses in Carlsbad, California for about a year before Peter Kiewit Sons’ Lloyd Loetterle hired him as a journeyman carpenter on a barracks project at Camp Del Mar. From 1960 to 1969, Metcalf worked for Peter Kiewit Sons’ in southern California. In 1963 he chose to stay with Kiewit when most of his colleagues, including Loetterle, decided to follow Charlie Pankow out of the company and into the newly organized Charles Pankow, Inc. (CPI).

In 1969 George Hutton recruited Metcalf to work in Hawaii. Hutton and Metcalf were working together on the Hillcrest North Medical Center project when Charlie Pankow left Kiewit. Hutton left Kiewit, too, and after working on CPI’s first project, MacArthur Broadway Center, in Oakland, California, spent the rest of his career with the company in Hawaii, where he headed Charles Pankow Associates, a subsidiary of CPI.

Metcalf spent 16 years in Hawaii as a superintendent on projects whose construction contract values ranged from $650,000 to $58.1 million. A profile in the company newsletter characterized him as “a man of action” who “sets the pace of projects and provides leadership by example.”

In 1985, he was transferred to the Mainland, owing to a lack of work in Hawaii. After working on Shoreline Square, a three-structure complex in Long Beach, California that constituted the company’s largest project to date, Metcalf asked to return to Hawaii. There he worked until 1993, when Dean E. Stephan, president of the company, asked him to retire as part of cost cutting program in the context of a recession that hit Hawaii especially hard.

Metcalf moved to Carson City, Nevada, where he and son Tom, a 1980 graduate in civil engineering from Arizona State University, formed Metcalf Builders, Inc. Like Charles Pankow Builders, MBI is a commercial general contractor. As of 2010, the company employs some 45 people. Red serves as the company’s chairman; Tom is CEO.