John E. Cahill; Head of Family Contracting Firm

John E. Cahill, 85, whose family contracting firm, Cahill Construction Co., helped build much of San Francisco’s picturesque skyline. Born in San Francisco, Cahill earned an engineering degree at Stanford and served as an officer in the Navy Seabees, constructing bases in World War II. After the war, he joined and rose to president of the company started in 1915 by his father, civil engineer John R. Cahill, who died in 1987 at the age of 102. Among the buildings constructed by the firm are San Francisco’s St. Mary’s Cathedral, a Hilton hotel, Opera Plaza, the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, and the commercial-residential high-rise Fox Plaza on Market Street. The firm won an American Institute of Architects award in 1959 for its Wells Fargo bank headquarters. Outside the city, the company built much of the San Rafael campus of Dominican College, on whose board Cahill served. A mountaineer in his youth, Cahill was credited with the first ascent of one of the Minarets, a series of rugged peaks in the central Sierra Nevada. Cahill was also on the board of the Catholic Youth Assn. and headed the president’s council of the Jesuit School of Theology. On Saturday in San Rafael of complications from Parkinson’s disease.