Alumni Profiles

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When Huntsman was a high school senior in Palo Alto, he was asked by the school principal to attend a recruiting session for Wharton, a place Huntsman had never heard of. Harold Zellerbach, W’17, then executive vice president of Crown Zellerbach Corp., was the recruiter; Dr. Ray Saalbach, Penn undergraduate admissions officer, was also at the meeting.

“It was a milestone in my life,” Huntsman remembers. “I had never heard of Wharton or Penn, but both Zellerbach and Saalbach were very gracious. Zellerbach said, ‘Jon, you would be a wonderful businessman. You meet people well and you interact well with strangers.’ I told him I had never been East in my life.”

Huntsman accepted the scholarship offer: $1,500 a year from Zellerbach and another $1,000 from the Northern California alumni club, arranged for with Zellerbach’s help. Between waiting on tables in sorority houses and delivering flowers in West Philadelphia, Huntsman made his way through Wharton.

That $10,000 investment by Wharton alumni in the 1950s proved to be money well spent. Huntsman was senior class president in 1959, president of Sigma Chi fraternity and the Kite and Key Club, and recipient of the 1959 General Alumni Society Award of Merit for leadership in undergraduate activities as well as the prestigious “spoon” award for the class of ’59. Huntsman also won Sigma Chi’s highest award that year — the International Balfour Award, among other honors.

“I was the product of rural public schools, yet I was always very much accepted at Wharton. I was always treated with respect and dignity,” Huntsman says. “I loved the interaction with people of different backgrounds. It’s a complete education, the best undergraduate and graduate education available, and it offers such a remarkable network afterwards in the business and financial world.”

When he announced his gift to Wharton last May, Huntsman credited the school with being “the place that got many of us started, the place that provided a balanced education to make us into what we are today. We can never forget those roots and the critical and meaningful role they have played in our lives.”

At Huntsman Corp. headquarters, the office of the chairman on the third floor presents visitors two striking images. One is a panoramic view of Salt Lake City; the other is a bronze Remington statue of cowboys running at full gallop. The statue is blanketed with what may qualify as the world’s largest collection of beanie babies, arranged and rearranged depending on which grand-child visited last.

The office is vintage Huntsman: a place where business gets done but where Jon and Karen Huntsman’s nine children and 37 grandchildren are always welcome and where the founder’s personal philosophy is as much a part of the corporate culture as the 20+ billion pounds of chemicals, plastics and packaging materials produced every year.

The company dates back to 1970, when Huntsman and his brother Blaine raised $300,000 in seed money plus $1 million in venture capital funds to start Huntsman Container Corp., the precursor to Huntsman Corp. Among the company’s notable successes was the use of polystyrene to make the “clam-shell” containers used for McDonald’s Big Macs.

In late 1970, Huntsman left the company to serve in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare and then as Special Assistant and Staff Secretary to the president of the United States in the White House. He returned to Huntsman Container Corp. in 1972, transferred the business to Salt Lake City, and spent the next few years overseeing the development of 80 new kinds of polystyrene packaging.

In 1982 he founded Huntsman Chemical Corp., renamed Huntsman Corp. in 1994 after the purchase of Texaco Chemical Co. Following a series of well-timed acquisitions and/or expansions, Huntsman Corp. today makes products that are found in everything from outdoor furniture, toys, clothing, medical devices, personal care supplies, detergents, textiles, batteries and carpeting to pharmaceuticals, car waxes, paints, appliances, computers, televisions, cameras and bicycle helmets, to name a few of the end uses recognizable to consumers.

Throughout nearly three decades of company growth, Huntsman says that he "has always erred on the side of my heart … We’ve written our own set of rules. We don’t follow bureaucratic guidelines established by someone else. They are golden rules that we hope others would apply to us if we were in a similar position.