John Eulich

By the 1980s, Eulich was one of the biggest industrial and office builders in the country — on par with Trammell Crow and J.L. Williams as the CEO of one of North Texas' top commercial property companies. Eulich, who was 86, died after a brief illness. Eulich spent the first 12 years after graduating from University of Kansas as a traveling salesman for a dress company that sold its wares to merchants in West Texas. He soon became the firm's top salesman. The Kansas City native officed out of his car, driving the dusty roads to sell clothes to tight-fisted store keeps. He was married to his college sweetheart — Ginny Walsh — and regretted all the time away from home. With a grubstake of $50,000 in savings, Eulich began moonlighting as a real estate developer. in 1959 he founded Vantage Cos. — named after the dead-end Dallas street near the Trinity River where his office was. Eulich went on to build millions of square feet of warehouses and eventually office buildings — mostly in Texas and the Southwest. At the peak, more than 7,000 people worked for Vantage companies, developing everything from warehouses in suburban Dallas to hotels and office towers along the highways of Dallas and Houston. The company's projects totaled more than $7 billion nationwide. The real estate crash in the 1980s dramatically slowed Eulich's development business. At one point he had one of the largest collections of Western paintings and sculpture in the U.S. In 1998, Sotheby's sold most of his art collection in one of the largest auctions ever of Western art.