A. N. Pritzker, 90, Head of Vast Business Empire, Dies

Billionaire philanthropist A. N. Pritzker, founder of one of the nation’s foremost business empires, including the worldwide Hyatt hotel group, died Saturday at the age of 90.

He had been hospitalized since Jan. 3 and had undergone surgery for an intestinal obstruction. A spokeswoman at Michael Reese Hospital, Andree Celovsky, said death was due to “cerebral vascular occlusion,” a type of stroke.

Pritzker scorned traditional ways of doing business and often boasted of how he made billions by ignoring the advice of lawyers and experts.

As more and more companies turned to public sale of stock to build revenue, Pritzker took the opposite tack, believing it was more important at times to have room to negotiate.

“We don’t believe in public business,” he said. “Any public corporation that seeks vast expansion has a conflict with shareholders. . . . We take a book loss on a building or a hotel, but how do you keep the shareholders fully informed of what you’re doing? You can kill a deal revealing information.”

Forbes magazine recently put the Pritzker family’s worth at $1.5 billion, and one recent count of its holdings, most of them under the umbrella of the family-owned Marmon Group, numbered 266 companies and subsidiaries.

The best known of the group are the 140 Hyatt hotels, Braniff Airlines and McCall’s magazine, but the Pritzkers also own casinos, a law firm, cable television systems and companies that make everything from railway box cars to aluminum forgings for missiles.

Even after relinquishing control over most of the enterprise five years ago to sons Jay, 62, and Robert, 58, Pritzker continued to keep tabs on the family’s progress from behind a paper-cluttered desk on the 30th floor of a Chicago bank building. A third son, Donald, died of a heart attack in 1972 at the age of 39.

Working in shirt sleeves, Pritzker handled many of the family’s philanthropic activities from his office, dispensing about $4 million a year to various charities and causes.

Those gifts ranged from a $12-million check he gave to the University of Chicago for its Pritzker School of Medicine to a $50,000 annual stipend he arranged for his grammar school after learning that gangs had changed the character of his old neighborhood.

Pritzker’s father, Nicholas, came to Chicago in 1881 from a Jewish ghetto near Kiev, a Russian immigrant so poor he was taken in by Michael Reese Hospital and given a $9 overcoat.

“Best investment they ever made,” Pritzker said. “I paid them back for that coat--about a million times.”