Henry J. Kaiser

Kaiser was born on May 9, 1882, in Sprout Brook, New York, the youngest of four children and the only son of Franz (a shoemaker) and Anna Marie (née Yops) Kaiser, ethnic German immigrants. His father, who later anglicized his name to Frank, came from Hanau in Hesse and emigrated to the United States in 1872, at about the age of thirty. He settled in Canajoharie, in upstate New York, where he was taken in by the Yops family—fellow emigrants from Steinheim who farmed in the area—and there met their daughter Anna Marie, later known as Mary. The couple married on January 5, 1873, and settled a few miles away in Sprout Brook, where Frank kept a cobbler's shop; they had three daughters—Elizabeth, Anna, and Augusta—before Henry's birth.

Kaiser was baptized two years after his birth as Heinrich Kaiser. The middle name "John" does not appear in the baptismal record, and Kaiser himself adopted both it and the anglicized form "Henry" in later years. The family was of modest means, and around 1889, apparently for economic reasons, it moved west to Whitesboro, a town of about 1,600 residents near Utica on the Erie Canal. Kaiser was especially close to his mother and his three older sisters. His mother died in 1899, a loss that some accounts cite as an early influence on his later interest in health care.

Although his father was Roman Catholic, Kaiser was raised in his mother's Protestant faith, attending the Methodist church in Sprout Brook. He later became a Presbyterian and in 1939 was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, in which he served as a lay reader. He left school after the eighth grade, at about age thirteen and without a diploma, a step generally attributed to the family's financial circumstances.

Kaiser's first job was as a cash boy in a Utica, New York, department store at the age of 16. He worked as an apprentice photographer early in life, and was running the studio in Lake Placid by the age of 20.

Kaiser relocated to Spokane and became a top salesman at a hardware company. He used his savings and started a construction company in 1906 which fulfilled government contracts.

In 1914 Kaiser founded a paving company, Henry J. Kaiser Co., Ltd., one of the first to use heavy construction machinery. His firm expanded significantly in 1927 when it received an $18-million contract to build roads in Camagüey Province, Cuba. In 1931 his firm was one of the prime contractors in building the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, and subsequently the Bonneville and Grand Coulee Dams on the Columbia River.

While doing business among the Six Companies, Inc. and remotely related to his interest in motor boat racing, he set up shipyards in Seattle and Tacoma, where he began using mass-production techniques, such as using welding instead of rivets.

Kaiser met his future wife, Bess Fosburgh, the daughter of a Virginia lumberman, when she came into his photographic shop in Lake Placid, New York, to buy film. Fosburgh's father demanded that Kaiser show that he was financially stable before he would consent to their marriage. Kaiser became a top salesman at a hardware company in Spokane, Washington, returning ten months later with enough money to placate his future father-in-law. They married on April 8, 1907, and had two children, Edgar Kaiser, Sr. and Henry Kaiser, Jr.

Fosburgh died on March 14, 1951. Kaiser married her nurse Alyce Chester (reportedly with his wife's blessing) on April 10, 1951. He adopted her son, who as Michael Kaiser, attended Lafayette Public Vallecito School. Kaiser moved his family to Hawaii in 1955.

On August 24, 1967, Kaiser died at age 85 in Honolulu. He is interred in Mountain View Cemetery in the Main Mausoleum, in Oakland, California.

He was outlived by his second wife, Alyce Chester Kaiser, who inherited half his fortune, and the other half went to "the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, which was created to support the Kaiser medical program." His elder son, Edgar, who had been president of the Kaiser Industries Corporation since 1956, was substantially wealthy even though it was a fraction of his father's.

One of Kaiser's grandsons, Edgar Kaiser Jr., became president of Kaiser Steel from 1981 to 1984, and briefly owned the Denver Broncos professional football franchise. Another grandson, Henry Kaiser is an Antarctic diver and experimental guitarist.

Kaiser Family Foundation

In 1948, Kaiser established the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation (also known as Kaiser Family Foundation), a U.S.-based, nonprofit, private operating foundation focusing on health care issues. Originally based in Oakland, California, it later moved to Menlo Park, California. At Kaiser's death, half of his fortune was left to the foundation. It was reorganized and restructured in 1991, under CEO Drew Altman. The Foundation, not associated with Kaiser Permanente or Kaiser Industries, operates independently as a think tank, making facts and analysis available to policymakers, health care groups, the media and the general public.