Low-Key Mccaw High-Powered Executive -- People Say He's Tough But Fair

He's been called the "Invisible Man."

John Elroy McCaw Jr., co-founder of McCaw Cellular Communications Inc. and now co-owner of the Seattle Mariners, has cultivated a reputation in the media as private, quiet and publicity-shy.

His picture rarely appears in the press. He still refuses interviews.

But, as a businessman, McCaw has been anything but quiet.

Some of those who have dealt with McCaw, or watched him work a deal, say he is smart and tough.

And, they say, he is fair, particularly in the many negotiations that marked his career at McCaw Cellular.

Those qualities - and McCaw's estimated net worth of nearly a half-billion dollars - may have been key reasons he became part of the Baseball Club of Seattle.

McCaw stopped playing an active role in McCaw Cellular's daily activities in December when he gave up his post as the company's executive vice president for acquisitions.

In his 15 years as an officer, McCaw negotiated most of the deals - large and small - that made the family company into the nation's largest cellular telephone company.

He has been credited as being the driving force behind McCaw Cellular's 1987 sale of its cable television systems for $755 million - a move that concentrated the company in the cellular phone business.

He orchestrated the company's $3.38 billion hostile takeover in 1989 of Lin Broadcasting, a deal that put McCaw Cellular at the front of its industry.

On the other end of the spectrum, he negotiated many smaller deals, like the company's $1 million purchase of a tiny cellular phone network in Yakima in 1988.

"John was firm, but very fair," said Tolbert Moore, the Yakima network's previous owner. "And he was a real nice person."

Robert Ratliffe, McCaw Cellular's vice president, corporate affairs, has known John McCaw for years. He described McCaw as "a very low-key guy who's much more comfortable in Levi's than he is in a coat and tie."

McCaw, 41, is the third of the four McCaw brothers who built McCaw Cellular to its current size, starting with a small cable television station in Chehalis/Centralia that had been owned by their father, after whom John McCaw was named.

Like his brother, Craig, now chairman of McCaw Cellular, John McCaw attended Seattle's Lakeside Preparatory School. His classmates may have included other Lakeside luminaries like Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who attended the school at about the same time.

The McCaw brothers' father, John Elroy McCaw Sr., was known as an innovator with complex business interests. He owned a network of radio, television and cable-TV stations across the country, including KJR and KCPQ in Seattle.

His WINS radio station in New York was one of the first in the country to play rock-and-roll.

His father was also a director of Lear Jet - a position that may have led to the love of flying shared by all of the McCaw brothers.

But after John McCaw Sr. died unexpectedly of a heart attack in his sleep in 1969, the family was forced to sell the bulk of his holdings to pay the enormous debt he had built up.

They were left with one cable television system, Twin Cities Cablevision, in Chehalis. Craig McCaw ran the company while attending Stanford. John McCaw joined him after graduating from the University of Washington in 1974, with a psychology degree.

The McCaws saw the potential of cellular telephones and began developing the system that operates today. The company went public in the 1980s, generating the net worth that made investment in the Mariners possible for McCaw.

People close to McCaw say he has been a baseball fan since childhood, when he was a Little League pitcher. George Schuchart, president of Schuchart Corp., a Seattle construction company, and another Lakeside alum, said, "back when I first met him, sports were a big part of our lives. He did play baseball and was always a good player. As he grew older he got away from sports."

But Schuchart says he expects John McCaw to become heavily involved in the Mariners - particularly considering his responsibilities at McCaw have been diminished.

The long process of buying the M's has frustrated McCaw, Schuchart says. "In his role at McCaw, he was able to make things happen because of his position. But in this deal, there were so many outside influences that it was out of his hands, and that frustrated him."

But Schuchart adds that the Mariners will probably not become McCaw's sole business. "I think he's looking for whatever the next opportunity will be. I've talked to him about it, and he doesn't know what it is yet. But I don't expect it to be baseball."