Heir, Renaissance man filled life with adventures

George Secor Stranahan, a Renaissance man and grandson of Champion Spark Plug co-founder Frank Stranahan, died May 20 in a Denver hospital. He was 89.

Known as a philosopher, physicist, barfly, photographer, rancher, and mountain man, George Stranahan was a businessman who flitted through careers in a life marked by adventures.

He died of a stroke and other health problems, wife Patti Stranahan, told the New York Times on Sunday.

George Stranahan, a Toledo native who spent most of his life in the Rocky Mountains, was one of the heirs of the fortune amassed by Champion Spark Plug Co., which was established in Boston in 1903 and relocated to Toledo in 1910. The business ultimately provided the Stranahan family with a multimillion-dollar fortune that has left a lasting impact on the Toledo area.

Mr. Stranahan rejected the life of privilege at an early age.

He had a thirst for knowledge, according to his son, Patrick Stranahan, who added that his father used his inherited money, as well as that he earned himself, to pursue whatever struck him as a worthy investment in businesses, nonprofits, side projects, activism, and other ventures.

“The thing about my dad, George, is that he was a phenomenal and fascinating person who just did what he wanted, where he wanted,” Patrick Stranahan said.

Though he was born and raised in the Toledo area, George Stranahan spent most of his adult life in the Rocky Mountains. At the time of his death, he was living in Carbondale, Colo.

He was born on Nov. 5, 1931, to Duane and Virginia “Diddy” Secor Stranahan.

George’s father, Duane Stranahan, served as vice president in charge of aviation at Champion Spark Plug. His mother, Virginia Stranahan, the daughter of a prominent banker, was a homemaker and hospital volunteer.

George Stranahan was one of the couple’s six children.

The family’s homestead at 577 E. Front St., Perrysburg, is now the 577 Foundation, which focuses on arts and the environment.

As a child, George Stranahan attended an elite Eastern prep school, the Hotchkiss School, in Connecticut.

The future entrepreneur described his childhood as lonely in an interview with the New York Times in 2001. He was more interested in studying physics than anything else.

Shortly after graduating from the California Institute of Technology in 1953, Mr. Stranahan married his first wife, Elizabeth Ann Lamb, in January, 1954. The new Mrs. Stranahan grew up in Perrysburg. She and her husband would ultimately have five children, including Patrick, before divorcing.

After his second marriage also ended in divorce, Mr. Stranahan met and married Patti Stranahan, with whom he had a sixth child, a son. They were married for more than 40 years.

She was by his side, guiding the helm, through most of his life’s biggest adventures, Patrick Stranahan said.

In the early years of his first marriage, Mr. Stranahan served in the Army during the Korean War. He taught radar and was mostly based out of New Jersey, his son said.

Patrick Stranahan described his father’s childhood as bohemian. He said he watched firsthand as his father’s interests changed and grew — anything from the mechanics of fixing a furnace to building a short-wave radio from scratch.

“We’d spend lots of time just watching in the dark room while he made prints and smoked a cigar often,” he said. “He had this infinite curiosity about how everything works.”

In 1961, George Stranahan received his doctorate from what is now Carnegie Mellon University, then the Carnegie Institute of Technology.

After a stint at Purdue University, he began working as a professor at Michigan State in 1965.

Education was a lifelong passion for George Stranahan, who created two charter schools for kindergarten-eighth grade students in the vicinity of Aspen, Colo., Patrick Stranahan said.

He described his father as “a giant tree in his community.”

For the most part, George Stranahan spent his young adulthood engaged in study.

The budding physicist spent three summers in the late 1950s in a remote mountain valley near Aspen, where he founded the Aspen Center for Physics.

At 27, after he had inherited $3 million, he assembled a group of funders, nonprofit executives, and fellow physicists. He put $38,000 toward the construction of a building.

The center would become pivotal in the development of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, for a long time the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, and the formulation of string theory, regarded by many physicists as the most promising candidate for a “theory of everything” that would explain all the universe’s physical phenomena.

In 1962, its first summer in operation, the Aspen Center for Physics hosted 42 physicists. Since then, 66 Nobel laureates have visited.

In 1972, Mr. Stranahan left his position at Michigan State University and cut back on his involvement with the Aspen center.

Right around that time, the physicist turned much of his 1,500-acre Aspen property into a ranch for raising cattle. He would quit the business after 18 years, suffering an estimated loss of $1 million despite raising a grand champion bull.

In 1980, Mr. Stranahan opened a bar near Aspen, Woody Creek Tavern, where he spent several years mixing drinks. The entrepreneur also became a single-malt manufacturer with the launching of his brand, Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey. He had a distillery installed in a barn on his property.

In 1989, Cooper Industries bought Champion Spark Plug for $800 million.

The Stranahan family had a 35 percent stake in the company at the time.

One year later, George Stranahan founded the Flying Dog Brewpub in Aspen.

Flying Dog’s labels are designed by illustrator Ralph Steadman, whose most famous collaborator also was a regular at Woody Creek, the late gonzo journalist-author Hunter S. Thompson.

Mr. Thompson either leased or bought the land he lived on from Mr. Stranahan.

“We talked a lot, drank a lot and dynamited a lot,” Mr. Stranahan said in a 2008 interview with the Denver Post. “If you’re a rancher, you have access to dynamite.”

While a number of stories about George Stranahan might have been embellished, Patrick Stranahan noted that his father did in fact love dynamite.

“He was a very calm, tolerant, well-mannered man, but if anything ever needed some dynamite blown up to mark an occasion, he did do that,” Patrick Stranahan said.

George Stranahan was preceded in death by his son, Mark Stranahan; brothers, Duane Stranahan and Stephen Stranahan; and sister, Virginia “Dinny” Stranahan Linder.

He is survived by his third wife, Patti Stranahan, and his son, Ben Stranahan, from that marriage. He is also survived by four children from his first marriage, Molly, Patrick, Stuart, and Brie Stranahan; a brother, Michael, and a sister, Mary Stranahan; and nine grandchildren.

Information from The Blade’s news services was used in this report.

Contact Ellie Buerk at

ebuerk@theblade.com.