The notable career of one of Hamilton’s most formidable businessmen.
One of the most formidable businessmen of his era, Gordon Sohn Rentschler first made his mark on his Hamilton hometown before becoming a titan of banking and industry for the nation.
He was born into one of the city’s most important manufacturing families. The Rentschler name has been almost synonymous with the city of Hamilton since George Adam Rentschler arrived here in 1873. A native of Wurtemberg, Germany, he came to the United States as a boy with his widowed father and six siblings. He was educated in Newark, N.J., and learned the trades of the molder and patternmaker, which took him to various points in the Midwest. When the Indianapolis-based Variety Iron works moved to Hamilton, he came with the firm as a foreman, but he soon opened his own shop with a $200 loan. “His integrity and determination were the only collateral the Second National Bank had for the loan that was the start of a small foundry business,” his obituary recalled.
During his career, he was associated with several different companies, some of them with his name on them, and in 1904 built Hamilton’s first skyscraper, still known as the Rentschler Building.
He was a widower when he arrived, but married into the prominent Schwab family, and was the father of three young men who would build upon that empire in profound ways.
The oldest of his Hamilton-born children (he had two from his first marriage), Gordon S. Rentschler was born in 1885, and after graduating from Princeton as class president in 1907, returned to Hamilton to join his father in business in the manufacture of heavy machinery, including the famous Corliss engine, rolling mill equipment for various industries (including sugar), and ship engines.
His biggest mark on the city of Hamilton came in the wake of the Great Flood of 1913. As many of his operations suffered great losses during the flood, he eagerly became one of the first trustees of the Miami Conservancy District, appointed by Governor James Cox, and is credited with having secured the $35 million bond that made Arthur Morgan’s elaborate flood control program a reality. This endeavor brought young Mr. Rentchler to the attention of National City Bank president Charles E. Mitchell.
When World War I broke out, Rentschler went to Washington on behalf of the Hooven-Owens-Rentschler Company and made a pitch to build a Corliss engine a day for the nation’s battle fleet. He was told it wasn’t possible, that the shop wasn’t big enough, but he did it anyway, famously unloading pig iron from railroad cars alongside the shop’s laborers to help keep up the pace.
He became friends with Henry Ford when his shops started making machinery for the assembly lines there and is generally credited with convincing Ford to build a plant in Hamilton. When the nation went through a depression in 1921, he went to Detroit and obtained contracts for $4.5 million in new machinery. He returned to Hamilton and sublet some of the contracts to shops other than his own to help keep the local industry healthy.
So in 1921, when National City Bank had some issues with a depressed sugar industry, Mitchell called on Rentscher, who had developed some expertise in the area from the manufacture of sugar mill machinery. So he went to Cuba to iron out the situation and when he came back was appointed a director of the bank. Although the position had no salary, he became so dedicated to the bank that by 1925 he moved from Hamilton to New York, slowly began delegating his Hamilton duties, including his seat on the Conservancy board, to his youngest brother. He bought Mitchell’s Fifth Avenue house and Mitchell built a bigger one next door, though he never gave up his Hamilton home and returned frequently for the remainder of his life.
Rentschler, now 40, made quite the impression on the New York crowd. The playwright and journalist Laurence Stallings wrote a glowing, somewhat fawning profile on the young bachelor for the New York World, which included a detailed physical description: “Rentschler is about six feet tall, and weighs around 185 pounds. There is a slight stoop to the thick shoulders and a forward thrust of the neck. His brown hair is close-cropped and parted in the middle. Blue eyes peer alertly through thick-lensed spectacles. The nose is large enough to be called aggressive in its slight hook. His chin appears small because of the fleshy throat, but juts out to a firm point… Rentschler’s voice… is deep yet faintly nasal. It carries the easy assurance most successful men display. Above all, it is a friendly voice. The composite impression is one of boyish directness, unaffected and avid interest in the people and things around him, a naturally companionable disposition. He is a man most persons would like on brief acquaintance. One of his friends says, ‘You could travel with Gordon for a month and never know he had more than a hundred dollars.”
Two years later, he married rather late in life to Mary Coolidge Atkins of Boston on July 23, 1927, but together they had three daughters, plus another daughter from his wife’s first marriage.
In 1929, he succeeded Mitchell as president of National City bank, the second largest bank in the world at the time. He became a director of many different companies, including the City Bank Farmer’s Trust Company, the Union Pacific Railroad, the Home Insurance Company, National Cash Register, and the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. In 1946, President Truman appointed him to a special 12-member committee of industrialists and bankers to draft recommendations for rehabilitating foreign trade.
Although he had not been in the best of health when he returned to Cuba for a vacation in March 1948, he fell ill after visiting a sugar mill in Soledad and took to bed at the Nacional Hotel in Havana. He was making plans to return to the United States on the morning of March 3 when he suffered the first of three heart attacks on that one day. The third one killed him. Tearful obituaries graced front pages of newspapers across the country.
The hometown Journal-News eulogized him: “A natural-born leader, he forged to the front in whatever activity in which he was drawn to ad to each he gave of himself without restraint, displaying a judgment which secured success in the endeavor.”
His body was returned to Hamilton and he was interred in Greenwood Cemetery.