USX Chairman Roderick Retiring : Shifted Firm to Oil From Steel During Challenging Years
David M. Roderick, the No. 1 man at USX Corp., will retire Wednesday after 10 years as chairman during one of the most tumultuous chapters in the steelmaker’s 88-year history.
Roderick, 65, presided over the nation’s largest steel company during the decade in which USX closed more than 140 steel facilities, sold $6 billion in assets and wrote off $3 billion in losses.
Roderick also weathered criticism for spending $10 billion to buy Marathon Oil Co. and Texas Oil & Gas Corp.--a major departure for the steel company founded by J. P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie. During his tenure, USX withstood a 1986 strike that idled 22,000 steelworkers in the industry’s longest labor dispute and fended off corporate raider Carl C. Icahn.
“I think he’s the best chief executive officer they’ve had in many, many years,” said steel analyst Gregory Drahuschak at Butcher & Singer Inc.
The Roderick story goes back to Pittsburgh’s tough North Side during the Depression. He grew up as the son of a Welsh postal worker and an Irish mother. He sold Collier’s magazine and caddied for pocket money. As one of the few Presbyterians in a heavily Irish Catholic neighborhood, Roderick hung out with other children at St. Francis Church behind his house. An avid baseball player, he also took up boxing and became a Golden Gloves amateur champ.
Joined Firm in 1959
“It was just a very competitive atmosphere,” Roderick recalled in a recent interview. “I mean, competition in the best way, not competing to the finish. It gets the blood moving, makes you feel alive.”
After beginning his career at Gulf Oil Corp. in Pittsburgh, he served in the Marines during World War II. Looking for bigger fish to fry, he left Gulf Oil to begin his rise at United States Steel, USX’s forerunner, in 1959 as assistant statistics director in New York.
“I knew steel was an important part of the nation’s industrial fabric. And as it turned out, I was very, very fortunate to have made that choice,” Roderick said.
“Being a Pittsburgher, when you go looking for a job, the big employer is the steel industry,” he said. “I felt the type of skills I had were needed.”
Roderick rose through the ranks at the steel company and is quick to credit managers who groomed him for bigger things.
Despite the grueling pace at the helm of USX, Roderick doesn’t begrudge the hours he feels were necessary to his success. And he would tell young people starting out that they must commit themselves wholeheartedly to their careers to make a mark.
“The people that get ahead, if we’d have to give a single characteristic, it’s commitment,” Roderick said. “I think it’s true in business and sports.”
Regular News Conferences
Roderick’s commitment to USX extended to serving as the voice of the company, a role he willingly assumed in a city where some chief executives would rather duck media appearances.
Perhaps more than the head of any other Fortune 500 company in Pittsburgh, he came to symbolize his company, especially when USX closed steel plants and proved a lightning rod for criticism about the steelmaker.
His accessibility was all the more surprising given the Old Guard attitude at USX. Roderick held a regularly scheduled news conference every three months. Top executives of the company would line the front row. “We got ‘em all here,” Roderick would say, pointing at the executives and urging reporters to quiz them.
He seemed to enjoy bantering with the media, zinging off one-liners to reporters. No one got special treatment: Roderick would let a reporter from a tiny rural newspaper question him as closely as one from a metropolitan daily, national business magazine or an industry newsletter.
Since Roderick became chairman in 1979, USX “witnessed more change in our corporation than occurred” in the preceding 78 years, Roderick’s successor, Charles Corry, told the annual shareholders meeting in May.
“Many of our traditional competitors in 1979 did not successfully meet the challenges of the 1980s and have either disappeared or become bankrupt,” Corry said.
“It’s a great tribute to the leadership that we have had that we not only met the difficult challenges of the 1980s but have emerged as a much stronger business enterprise than we were in 1979,” he said.
Roderick has earned the respect of industry watchers.
‘Corporate Mentality’
USX is in “the best financial condition it has been in in many, many years,” Drahuschak, the analyst, said. “The rationale that Roderick used to go so heavily into oil made sense: He wanted to lessen the (cyclical nature) of the steel industry.”
Roderick also has his detractors, however.
Jack Parton, president of United Steelworkers District 31 at the Gary Works in Gary, Ind., welcomed Roderick’s retirement.
“I understand he’s an accountant,” Parton said. “They get that kind of corporate mentality. And all they care about is the bottom line. They don’t care about human suffering. “I can’t say I’m disappointed to see him leave.”
