Bob Millstone (photo by Kevin A. Roberts)
“It’ll be ready,” builder Isadore Erwin Millstone promised more than once, calmly assuring Gussie Busch that the Busch Memorial Stadium would be complete in time for the 1966 All-Star game. And so it was—thanks to a merciless construction schedule that added $1 million to the cost. The construction firms absorbed the overage and honored their contract.
Millstone honored all contracts—including those sealed only by the damp, fervent handshake of someone who needed his help.
An early adapter of reinforced concrete, he worked large-scale, building the “Meeting of the Waters” fountain in front of Union Station; erecting a double-decker Highway 40 over downtown; paving the runways at Lambert; building the first open-air mall, Northwest Plaza, and the B’nai Amoona synagogue that’s now COCA.
Summed up: He built roads to the future; bridges both literal and figurative.
In 1948, when Israel became a state, David Ben-Gurion asked Millstone to build housing for the refugees pouring in from Europe. Yet despite his steadfast help and deeply rooted Judaism, he would later speak of his hope that justice and fairness would yield a solution for Palestinians as well as Israelis.
In St. Louis, he built public housing projects for the government and hated how segregated they were, both racially and economically. So he built his own version: LaClede Town. By the late 1960s, he was already giving away his income and a huge chunk of his considerable net worth every year, and he admonished anyone who was “unbelievably rich” for not doing the same. In 1995, he used his acceptance speech for the St. Louis Award to remark that it was time to merge the city and the county.
I.E. and his first wife, Goldie (who raised money to save dozens of Jewish children from Nazi Germany) supported endeavors in medical science, social services, education, the arts, religious scholarship, history, and spirituality. All the theater and book festivals and community lectures at the Jewish Community Center? I.E. donated the land on which they take place.
The Millstones’ son, David, substituted watercolor and collage for his father’s large-scale works of concrete. David was executive director of the People’s Art Center here before he moved to New York to do his art. He raised his family in Vermont, and by the time he returned to St. Louis, he’d been a restaurateur and gallery owner. He opened the Millstone Fine Arts gallery here.
Both David and his sister, Mary Ann, died fairly young. Goldie died in 1998; I.E.’s second wife, Helen, died in 2007. A few years later, at the age of 102, I.E. jumped from the Daniel Boone Bridge. His work was done. But his legacy is very much alive, carried forward by his grandson.
Bob Millstone was a senior trial attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice in D.C. when I.E. made his first ever request of him: Come home and straighten out the Bangert family’s construction company. I.E. had worked with the Bangert brothers on highway projects in the 1950s, and a long business association had deepened into friendship—and now the company was in a bit of a mess.
“I thought I ought to do it,” says Bob. He came home not knowing whether this was a six-month fix or a fiasco—and stayed for good. Renaming the company Millstone Bangert in his granddad’s honor, he stabilized it before leaving to start his own real estate and private equity firm, The Millstone Co. He’s also a managing member of Millstone Capital Advisors, and he only left his post as chairman of the Jewish Federation board to become president of the Jewish Community Relations Council. A member of Partners for Progress and a statewide political action committee called Good Government for Missouri, he serves on the board of Royal Bank, on the Regional Business Council, and on Wash. U.’s national councils for law and entrepreneurship. He and his wife make grants for the Millstone Foundation, and they do it with I.E. and Goldie in mind.
“They had an incredible wisdom that grew out of their love for their family and for other people. I.E. understood people, and he understood where society is going. He and Goldie treated everyone with respect, regardless of where they came from in life. And what they did professionally and in the community grew out of that.”
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