G. David Hurd

G. David Hurd was chief executive officer of Principal from 1989 to 1994, according to the Iowa Business Hall of Fame. Hurd, born in Chicago on Dec. 14, 1929, graduated from Michigan State University in 1951. He came to Des Moines in 1954 to work for Banker's Life, now Principal Financial, and stayed with the company for 40 years before retiring in 1994, although he continued to serve as director of Principal Mutual Life Insurance Co. He was inducted into the Iowa Business Hall of Fame in 1994. Last year, he was presented with the 2015 Eychaner Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. Hurd and his wife were active nature advocates. In 2013, they started a $500,000 endowment fund to maintain the Broken Kettle Grasslands preserve near Sioux City. Twenty years previous, Hurd gave $500,000 to The Nature Conservancy in Iowa to acquire the first 642 acres of the preserve. Now at 3,217 acres, Broken Kettle is Iowa's largest remaining native prairie and is home to bison and rattlesnakes. He suffered from Lewy body disease, said Mary O'Keefe, a former Principal executive. According to the Mayo Clinic, the disease is a type of dementia and is the second-most-common type of progressive dementia. People with LBD can show Parkinson's disease-like symptoms, such as rigid muscles. His wife of 40 years, Patsy, died in 1999 because of breast cancer. He remarried, to Barb Brubaker, a woman who responded to a personal ad he placed in the newspaper, but she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and was eventually admitted to a residential care facility in 2009 after Hurd was unable to care for her. Brubaker died in 2011. He is survived by his third wife, Trudy, whom he married in 2012.