David W. Grainger, who for almost 30 years was the chairman and CEO of Lake Forest-based W.W. Grainger, Inc., the industrial distribution company started by his father, helped the company grow to more than $4 billion in annual revenues at the time he stepped down in 1997.
Through his family foundation, which he served as chairman from 1979 until 2021, Grainger provided donations for projects at several universities and major institutions, including the Museum of Science and Industry and Rush University Medical Center.
“If he saw a problem, he had to fix it,” said Jere Fluno, a retired W.W. Grainger vice chairman. “And both our firm and so many other organizations on whose boards he served, like the Museum of Science and Industry, benefited from that.”
Grainger, 97, died on Jan. 9, said Gloria J. Sinclair, the senior vice president and secretary of the Lake Forest-based Grainger Foundation. He was a Lake Forest resident and previously had lived in Winnetka.
Born in Chicago, Grainger grew up in Hinsdale, where he attended Garfield Elementary School before graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1950 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in the process serving a year in the Army Air Force.
Grainger briefly worked for Indiana-based Franklin Electric, a supplier to his family’s company, before joining W.W. Grainger, Inc., founded in 1927 by his father, William Wallace Grainger, in 1952. The firm specialized in distributing electric motors and accessories.
Grainger was appointed chairman, CEO and president when his father retired after having led the firm for 40 years.
Grainger worked to expand the company significantly by inking national supply contracts with major corporations and also acquiring some distribution companies in industries that were not traditionally served by W.W. Grainger.
“With outside help we looked at 20 different distribution industries, winnowed it down to 10 and eventually chose four,” Grainger told the Tribune in 1993.
As a result, W.W. Grainger acquired general industrial distribution companies, developed a sanitary supplies business and bought a lab safety distribution firm. W.W. Grainger also purchased Parts Co. of America, a firm that supplied parts for the food service, hospital and hotel industries.
Fluno said Grainger understood that the “pinch point” for his company was with within its own back-office technology. David Grainger sought to bring and keep the company up to speed, so it could process customer invoices and pay suppliers as efficiently as possible.
“He brought in state-of-the-art technology,” Fluno said. “He also had the ability to manage people well and to pick good people.”
In 1992, W.W. Grainger began preparing for succession by forming a three-person office of the chairman, which included Fluno and Richard L. Keyser, who then was an executive vice president. In 1995, Grainger gave up the title of CEO when he promoted Keyser to be CEO, but Grainger retained the role of chairman.
In 1997, Keyser added the role of chairman, with Grainger becoming senior chairman. Grainger remained on the company’s board until leaving in 2007 after 54 years of board service.
Grainger also served on several other corporate boards, including Northern Trust, Baxter International and A.M. Castle.
In 2019, his family’s Lake Forest-based Grainger Foundation donated $100 million to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s engineering school, which was renamed the Grainger College of Engineering.
Grainger and his family’s foundation also were behind creating the first distribution management program at any major university, at the University of Wisconsin.
“He did so at a time when most universities were saying, ‘Huh?’ about supply chain technology,” Fluno said. “And in putting it together, it was not relegated to one college at the University of Wisconsin — it was an initiative of the College of Engineering and the School of Business. He required those two schools to get together. And it’s one of the premier programs (of its kind) in the U.S. today.”
Grainger was a life trustee of Rush University Medical Center and of Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. Dating to his days as a grade school student in the 1930s, watching trains on the old Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, Grainger was captivated by the railroad’s stainless steel Pioneer Zephyr streamliner passenger train as it zipped through Hinsdale, seemingly in an instant, on its way from Chicago to Denver.
The Museum of Science and Industry acquired the Pioneer Zephyr train in 1960 and parked it outdoors, next to the museum. Grainger eventually decided to personally help fund the museum’s efforts to house the streamliner inside a climate-controlled display shelter. During the mid-1990s, his family’s Grainger Foundation contributed more than half of the $5.25 million cost of restoring the 197,000-pound train and placing it indoors.
“This was something (the foundation) wanted to get behind,” Grainger told the Tribune in 1997. “It’s still a sight to behold. It just seemed like the right project for us, to restore it so new generations can appreciate the train and the story behind it.”
Grainger enjoyed golfing, traveling — including by private railroad car — and spending time at vacation homes in California and Michigan.
His wife of 64 years, Juli, died in 2014. He is survived by two daughters, Susan Grainger and Nancy Burgermeister; a son, Thomas; and four grandchildren.
Services are private.
Bob Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.
