Melvin J. Gordon ran Chicago-based candy-maker Tootsie Roll Industries for more than 50 years and held the distinction of being the oldest CEO of any business listed on the New York Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq Stock Market.
Mr. Gordon, 95, died Tuesday, Jan. 20, in Boston after a short illness, said his wife, Ellen, Tootsie Roll Industries’ president and chief operating officer. He had homes in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood and in the Boston suburb Wellesley Hills, Mass.
Mr. Gordon never retired, remaining involved in all aspects of the publicly traded company’s operations and personally interviewing everyone from the foreman level on up.
Committed to keeping the company independent even as other confectioners have sold to larger candy players, Mr. Gordon also managed the company through a slew of successful acquisitions. In the process he broadened the company’s product line from its eponymous single-bite treat and its sibling lollipops, Tootsie Pops, to a diversified confectioner manufacturing two dozen or so candy brands, including Junior Mints, DOTS, Sugar Babies and Charleston Chew.
“The growth and profitability of the company was something he was very proud of, and I think he was also very proud of the integrity of the company,” said Tootsie Roll Industries Treasurer Barry Bowen.
Born in Boston, Mr. Gordon attended prep school at Rivers Country Day School in Brookline, Mass., where he played on five varsity sports teams and was the captain of two, according to a biography provided by the company.
Mr. Gordon received a bachelor’s degree in 1941 from Harvard College, where he played varsity football. He attended the Harvard Business School before serving in the Army at Camp Lee in Virginia during World War II.
While in the Army, Mr. Gordon edited the Quartermaster Journal, which was sent to quartermasters stationed around the world. He wrote an article for the publication explaining the concept of placing trailers onto railroad flatcars, the family biography said.
After his discharge, Mr. Gordon became CEO of Hampshire Designers, a publicly traded women’s apparel company based in New Hampshire. In 1950 he married a young Vassar College student, Ellen Rubin, whose father was president of Sweets Co. of America, a confectioner founded in 1896 that made Tootsie Rolls and Tootsie Pops. Mr. Gordon became a board member two years later.
In 1962 he became the company’s chairman and CEO, and he changed its name four years later to Tootsie Roll Industries. In 1966 the company, then based in Hoboken, N.J., moved its operations to Chicago, the candy manufacturing capital of the United States, leasing a large one-story building on the Southwest Side that had manufactured engines for World War II bombers. Tootsie Roll Industries today occupies 2.3 million square feet at that location on South Cicero Avenue.
Under Mr. Gordon’s leadership, Tootsie Roll Industries embarked on a variety of acquisitions, including Mason Dots in 1972, Cella’s Confections in 1985, Charms in 1988 and Dubble Bubble in 2004.
“He was very rigorous about analyzing those and making sure they financially made sense,” Bowen said. “It wasn’t just growth for the sake of growth, but he was interested in profitable growth. The interests of all shareholders were very important to him.”
Bowen recalled Mr. Gordon’s regular visits to the company’s plant to evaluate manufacturing processes.
“He was a get-involved guy who was very hands-on,” Bowen said. “He would be out in the plant observing operations and making recommendations for improvements, and then he’d be in his office working on a new display ad for a new channel of trade for the sales force. He’d just roll up his sleeves.”
Mr. Gordon also oversaw Tootsie Roll Industries’ vertical integration of its manufacturing and marketing process.
“We have our own sugar refinery and our own ad agency,” Mr. Gordon told the Tribune in 1990. “We make our own lollipop sticks. We even have our own trucking company, the Tootsie Roll Express.”
Mr. Gordon’s wife became Tootsie Roll Industries’ president in 1978, and the pair were co-CEOs, only proceeding with an initiative if both of them signed off on it. The duo also personally interviewed every employee from the foreman level up.
“We try to have a hands-on operation,” Mr. Gordon told the Tribune in 1995.
Bowen noted that Mr. Gordon’s focus on building a strong team meant that “the people in the company are people that he personally hired.”
“I feel as a result of that we have a strong management team to carry on the legacy that he built,” Bowen said. “He did more from age 75 until 95 than most men do in their lifetimes.”
Mr. Gordon’s leadership was not without its critics. In 2012, The Wall Street Journal published an article noting shrinking profit margins at Tootsie Roll Industries and criticizing its practice of not holding quarterly earnings calls and refusing to speak with journalists. The article also criticized Mr. Gordon and his wife’s supermajority voting control of the company, which precluded a hostile takeover by another firm.
In 1989, Mr. Gordon and his wife told Forbes magazine that they intended to eventually hand the company over to their children.
Outside of work, Mr. Gordon took an interest in what then was the Soviet Union. He visited the country with his family in 1934, and in the 1950s he wrote a book titled “Better Than Communism.”
Mr. Gordon and his wife donated $25 million in 2006 to the University of Chicago toward the cost of a new $200 million science building at 929 E. 57th Street on its Hyde Park campus. The university named the building the Gordon Center for Integrative Science.
Mr. Gordon also served on the board of the Rensselaerville Institute, a New York-based think tank. Also, across more than 70 years, he wrote some 65 big band jazz songs, many of which he recorded.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Gordon is survived by four daughters, Wendy, Virginia, Karen Gordon Mills, who served as the former U.S. Small Business Administration administrator from 2009 until 2013, and Lisa, and six grandchildren.
No information on services was immediately available.
