San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Philanthropist built Blackhawk, owned Seahawks
Kenneth Behring, a billionaire philanthropist who developed the elite Blackhawk gated golf communities in Contra Costa County, died Tuesday at age 91.
He was the founder of the Blackhawk Museum in Contra Costa County and the former owner of the Seattle Seahawks. He was the founder of the Wheelchair Foundation, which has delivered more than 1 million wheelchairs to disabled people around the world.
His son, David Behring, confirmed the death in a Facebook post Wednesday.
“My father passed away peacefully last night at the age of 91. He was both a Lion and a Dragon and could not have lived a fuller life,” he wrote. “He loved business, sports, travel, automobiles, family, adventure, life and helping others. His family and friends will deeply miss him and pledge to carry on his legacy. Our family is so appreciative of the hundreds of phone, text and email messages that have poured in today. I will write more reflections of him this weekend.”
Born in Freeport, Ill., in 1928, Behring grew up as a Depressionera kid in a struggling family of farmers. After graduating from high school, he attended the University of Wisconsin on a football scholarship. He dropped out of college after losing his scholarship because of an injury, going to work as a salesman at a Chevrolet and Chrysler dealership. He quickly
learned that he did not like being bossed around.
“The experience of working for others was not inspiring,” he wrote in the introduction of a book about his automobile collection, according to a 1988 Chronicle profile.
By age 21 he had started a used car business in Monroe, Wis. Soon after he managed to buy the local Lincoln-Mercury dealership, which he owned until 1956, when he moved to Florida to became a home builder. In Florida, Behring planned and developed the entire city of Tamarac and invested in a broad portfolio of assets, including lumber, shopping centers, hotels, warehouses and oil tankers, according to a 1988 Chronicle profile. In 1970, he took one of his companies public on the American Stock Exchange, raising $65 million, the equivalent of $439 million today.
In 1972, he moved to California, where on 4,700 acres he planned and built the Blackhawk community near Danville, as well as the Canyon Lakes Development in San Ramon. “You really have to take your hat off to Ken,” Bay Area developer David Martin told The Chronicle in 1988. “He went out there where most of us thought it would never work. It was a bold move to build so far from San Francisco.”
He purchased the Seattle Seahawks NFL team with a partner in 1988, selling the team in 1997 to Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen for $200 million. It was three years later that Behring said he found his purpose when he delivered his first wheelchair to a young disabled girl in Vietnam. In June 2000, he started the Wheelchair Foundation, which became a division of Behring’s Global Health and Education Foundation.
In a 2006 Contra Costa Times profile, Behring said he picked wheelchairs as a charitable cause in part because they produce immediate benefits for the disabled. “It’s something that changes a person’s life in a matter of hours,” Behring said. “I’ve been very fortunate, and I want to give back.”
He was a controversial figure in the East Bay in the 1970s when he was developing Blackhawk, a project that faced opposition because it was gated and inaccessible to all but the welltodo. For five years he battled residents and environmentalists opposed to the project. Eventually he won.
“Five years after we had bought the land, our strategy finally paid off,” he wrote in his autobiography. “By asking for everything, we received something, and that was enough to win approval of the project.”
Behring wrote two books, a 2004 autobiography, “The Road to Purpose,” and a 2013 followup, “The Road to Leadership.”
“I am a simple man who has lived a simple life and, in the process, learned a simple lesson,” he wrote in “The Road to Leadership,” according to an excerpt published in the Contra Costa Herald. “I was born poor. But I will die rich — with more money, in fact, than I ever imagined existed when I was a boy.” Behring summed up his philosophy in the 2006 Times profile.
“Money is only good if you can put it to use,” he said. “It is probably a nasty way to say it, but money is like manure. If you pile it up, it smells. If you spread it out, it grows things.”