Lee Malloy - Guardian Award 2016

CHAIRMAN* - DUNLOP & JOHNSTON

Lee Malloy was the kind of guy you’d love to have worked with or for. In the words of one colleague, “Lee was the type of leader who pulls rather than pushes. He was out front.”

Whether leaders are born or made, Lee’s leadership qualities were surely refined by his World War II military experience. He served in Europe, earned the Purple Heart and the Bronze Star, and earned the rank of Captain.

After the war, Lee entered the construction industry and worked for a few different companies before finding his way to Dunlop and Johnston in 1955. Starting as a project superintendent, Lee rose to vice president within two years, though he continued to be active in the field — “out front”. By 1967 he was Chairman of the Board of the company that built the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the Cleveland Clinic, Saw Mill Creek Resort, and numerous schools, churches, and other hospitals.

Many are the contractors to whom Lee gave a hand on their way up in the industry. Lee understood that beyond the concrete, steel and iron of a project, the construction industry was a relationship business. He was wise enough to understand that there are constant problems on the job and that working with others was fundamental to solving them. Moreover, solid relationships were what got you repeat business. Lee wanted, and got, clients for life.

An industry pioneer, Lee’s career spanned the era when bookies, numbers runners, and workers with alcohol or guns were not uncommon on jobsites. Still active at the time of his death in 2001, Lee was still leading in a new industrial century full of safety protocols and software.

Lee served CEA as director and Vice President. He was president of the Concrete Contractors Association and a trustee of the Concrete Contractor Pension Fund. On the national level he was a director and Vice President of the American Society of Concrete Contractors and a member of the American Concrete Institute.

Fellow inductee Rich DiGeronimo had this to say on learning of Lee’s death in 2001: “Lee Malloy was a man’s man. Tough, fair, and if you knew him, compassionate.”

*Awarded Posthumously