The Newsletter: A look at maritime industry's Saltchuk Resources

A rare look inside Saltchuk Resources, the privately held Seattle company with 16 operating companies mostly in the maritime industry. Examples? It owns Totem Ocean Trailer Express, Foss Maritime, HT&B/Young Brothers, the major inter-island shipper in Hawaii, plus half of Roche Harbor Resort.

Together the companies do about $800 million a year and employ more than 4,000 people, according to Michael Garvey, Saltchuk chairman. Garvey spoke yesterday at the final dean's breakfast sponsored by the UW School of Business and Dean Yash Gupta.

Garvey provided some scope on the size of the company. It moves enough containers a year to stretch from here to 120 miles south of San Francisco. It helps 30,000 ships a year on the West Coast with Foss tugs. Some of its ship call at Kuwait City to assist the war effort in Iraq. It moves Delta 4 rockets from the Southeast to Florida or California.

Saltchuk itself is very small — only about 10 employees at corporate headquarters. Garvey said he runs the business by doing two things very well — allocating capital efficiently and picking great leaders to run the various operations.

Garvey is a founding partner in the law firm of Garvey, Schubert and Barer and also has been principal or sole owner of several well-known local companies including Ste. Michelle Winery, K-2 and Vernell's Fine Candies.

The breakfast also was one of the last public meetings for Gupta, the business school dean the past five years. Late last month, he said he would quit the UW to become the dean of the business school at the University of Southern California.

Gupta said he would remain active and involved with the school until his departure June 30, including continuing to work on a major drive to raise money for new business school facilities.

A search committee is expected to be named soon to begin the process of looking for a new dean. That might take awhile. USC looked for two years before hiring Gupta. An interim dean from among the business school faculty is likely to be named while the search is under way.

A key anniversary for the UW and downtown this week — the 100th anniversary of the Metropolitan Tract. In 1861, Arthur Denny, Charles Terry and Edward Lander gave the 10-acre "Denny's Knoll" to the UW, where it built its first campus.

When the university moved in 1894, the UW turned to the tract, now in the middle of a growing Seattle, as a mechanism to raise money to build its new campus.

In 1904, the tract was leased to the Metropolitan Building Co. and development began in earnest. From 1904-1926, it built the Metropolitan Theatre next to the Olympic Hotel and Garage, as well as the White, Henry, Steward, Cobb, Douglas, Stimson and Skinner buildings.

Unico Properties assumed the lease for the tract in 1953 and also marks 50 years of a successful partnership with the UW. Unico built four high-rises: the Washington Building (now Puget Sound Plaza), IBM Building, Financial Center and Rainier Tower and Square. It continues to study other new projects for the heart of downtown represented by the tract.

In the past 50 years, the tract has generated more than $350 million for the UW, about a third of its endowment and funding nearly 10 percent of the UW's building projects and land purchases.

Stephen H. Dunphy's columns appear Tuesdays-Fridays and Sundays. Phone: 206-464-2365. Fax: 206-382-8879. E-mail: sdunphy@seattletimes.com. More columns at www.seattletimes.com/columnists