Name: Mario Bertolini
Date of Birth, Place:
December 27, 1934 In New Haven,
Connecticut
High School: East Haven High, New
Haven, CT
College: University Of Connecticut –
Civil Engineering Degree, 1958
Family: Wife,
MJ is a retired psychotherapist and five children: John is
an ER doctor, Maura is a housewife, Jennifer is a housewife
and teacher, and Peter and Mary work at
Blakeslee.
Hobbies: Golf, fly fishing and
tennis.
First position in Concrete Industry:
Project engineer in heavy construction for C.W.
Blakeslee and Sons.
Significant mentor early in
career: None, he learned the ropes by trial and
error.
Greatest Projects: Volvo Tennis Stadium
in New Haven, CT and a 500,000 square foot housing project
in Brooklyn, NY.
Most Significant improvement to
precast industry: PCI certification and developing the
reputation that precast materials are as good a quality
product as any other building material.
Upcoming
challenges for the industry: Expanding our markets into
all types of buildings and bringing in new blood with strong
management skills.
Advice to those new to the
industry: We are only limited by what designers think we
can do.
More about Mario Bertolini:
Early
in his career, Mario Bertolini almost made a decision that
would have changed his life forever. A young graduate of the
University of Connecticut’s civil engineering program,
Bertolini was hired by C.W. Blakeslee and Sons in 1958 as a
project engineer for the company’s heavy construction
division. At that time heavy construction was a big industry
in Connecticut and he led projects doing road work and water
work and he loved what he did.
Everything was going
fine until 1960 when C.W. Blakeslee was having trouble with
quality control at its prestressed precast plant outside of
New Haven. The president of the company asked Bertolini to
take over and he didn’t want to. “I thought I was going to
spend the rest of my career in heavy construction,”
Bertolini says. He seriously considered quitting but decided
in the end to give it a go. It was a decision that changed
his life.
Bertolini took over as the quality control
person in the small plant which had only seven employees at
the time. The industry was slow at the time but steadily
grew along with Bertolini’s career. In 1961 he was made
manager of part of the plant; in 1962 he took over
management of the whole plant and by 1965 he was made
production manager of a second plant that C.W. Blakeslee
opened to meet the growing demand for precast materials. “It
was an exciting time for the industry,” Bertolini says.
“Wherever we went we were plowing new ground.” Because the
industry was so new every project was a first for them. The
best part was taking jobs that were designed for steel and
converting them to concrete, he adds. “The engineers were
just as excited as we were. It was all cutting edge
stuff.”
As the ‘60s neared the end, however another
big change was afoot. C.W. Blakeslee was sold to
Westinghouse Electric in 1969. Westinghouse was interested
in building multifamily homes as an avenue to sell more of
it’s housewares and appliance lines. They took over the
company and focused Bertolini’s plants on building complete
precast wall-frame housing systems.
Over the next six
years, they opened a third plant and completed several major
developments including a 500,000 square foot housing project
in Brooklyn. Then, in the early 70s the market fell apart
and Westinghouse had serious problems in its nuclear
division. To stem the loss of money, Westinghouse divested
itself of its core businesses and sold Blakeslee off in
pieces.
Determined not to lose his place in the
industry, in 1976 Bertolini found a private investor and
bought the precast division of the company, which he has
owned and operated ever since.
Blakeslee has
continued to be a major presence in the precast prestressed
concrete industry, steadily growing to a $50 million a year
business. The company has built hundreds of structures over
the years, including the Volvo Tennis Stadium in New Haven
in 1990 that at the time was the third largest tennis
stadium in the world. However, Bertolini doesn’t site any
individual project as his favorite. “I’m just a guy who
comes to work every day.”
During his career,
Bertolini was also president of PCI in 1989 and chaired the
PCI seismic committee from 1990 to 2002 which coordinated
and helped fund research into proving that precast products
are a viable material to use in seismic zones. Thanks in
part to the committee’s work over the years; a 40-story
building using precast materials was recently completed in
San Francisco in the highest seismic zone in the country.
“That’s a huge accomplishment for our industry,” he says,
but declares that it was not his efforts that made it
happen. “The engineers on the committee did all the work, I
just ran the meetings.”
Bertolini is proud of how far
the precast concrete industry has come over the years. “When
I was in college, the only thing we used precast for was to
build bridges and parking garages,” he says. “Today we are
on equal footing with other industries.”
He
attributes the industry’s success and expanding market to
its reputation for delivering quality durable materials. “We
realized in the 70s that for precast to be a major force we
have to produce the best quality products.” Blakeslee was
one of the company’s that led the fight for higher quality
and PCI certification, dragging others in its wake. But, he
says, the battle isn’t over. He wants to see the precast
industry gain even more acceptance in the building
community, which means more research and pressure to gain
consideration for projects such as schools and office
buildings. “We are only limited to what designers think we
can do,” he says.
He also thinks the industry needs
some new blood and that those coming into it must have solid
management skills. He suggests that along with engineering
educations, potential candidates should have MBAs so they
don’t have to learn by trial and
error.
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