Family business founders are often risk-taking entrepreneurs, but few can match the life-or-death exploits of Ben Abruzzo, who established a highly successful recreation and real estate business while making headlines as a record-shattering balloonist whose adventures captured the imaginations of millions of people around the world. His exploits in both arenas may be legendary, but they’ve been surpassed —both literally and figuratively—by the achievements of his sons, Louis, Benny and Richard Abruzzo, owners of the innocuously named Alvarado Realty Company in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The Abruzzo brothers came into control of the company in the worst possible way in 1985, when their parents, Ben and Pat, were killed in a plane crash that also took the lives of four close family friends. Louis, the oldest, was only 29 when the accident occurred. He had recently become engaged to be married. Benny was 27, Richard just 21, and the youngest sibling, Mary Pat (now deceased), was but 19. Despite the shock of losing their parents, the four pulled together to mount a ten-year battle to save the company.
“We thought of it as a collective challenge,” Benny says. “The word was ‘we’ need to survive this, not ‘I’ have to.”
And survive they did. Today, the company, which generates $30 million in annual revenues, is best known as the operator of the Sandia Peak and Santa Fe Ski Areas and the Sandia Peak Tram, the longest conveyance of its type in the world and a major attraction for New Mexico tourists. The company’s holdings also include nearly two dozen widely varied properties, including office buildings, shopping centers, apartments and even a small utility company. Until recently, it was one of the largest residential real estate developers in New Mexico. A fortuitous decision—mostly lucky timing, according to Louis Abruzzo, the president and CEO—led them to sell the last swath of undeveloped residential property they owned a year before the market crashed.
Scaling the heights
The company’s roots were put down by New Mexican developer and ski enthusiast Robert Nordhaus, who founded Alvarado in 1951. Ben Abruzzo, who had been stationed at New Mexico’s Kirtland Air Force base, went to work for him in 1955 and bought into the Sandia Peak Ski Area in 1959. The two men, both high-energy, high-vision individuals, turned a primitive one-tow-rope ski slope into a bustling outdoor recreation center with 30 ski runs. Along the way, they also developed residential Sandia Heights in the foothills outside Albuquerque, where today the utility company they started still serves some 2,400 homes on lots they sold over the years.
Perhaps their biggest accomplishment was the construction of one of Albuquerque’s best-known tourist attractions, the Sandia Peak Tramway, which at 2.7 miles in length is billed as the world’s longest aerial passenger tram. When they ran out of money getting the project literally off the ground, the men raised about $2 million using stock offerings, loans and lines of credit from very nervous bankers. The tram’s second tower, located at 8,750 feet, was built using helicopters because there were no roads that high up on the mountain. The tram opened in 1966 and has taken more than 9 million passengers on the 15-minute journey to the mountain peak, where they get an 11,000 square-mile panoramic view of the Rio Grande Valley.
To Louis Abruzzo, who was ten years old when the tram opened, the project was just another expression of his father’s and Nordhaus’s vision and drive. “During the ’60s and ’70s, they were on fire,” he says. “They were borrowing, and leveraging, and building, and expanding, and somehow they managed to do it and make it through.” Eventually Ben Abruzzo acquired controlling interest in the company, though Nordhaus remained on the board of directors.
Ben Abruzzo’s ambitions extended beyond entrepreneurial ventures, however. In 1978, he won worldwide fame when he and two partners completed the first successful trans-Atlantic balloon flight in Double Eagle II, a helium balloon they flew for 137 hours. Three years later, he was part of the team that made the first Pacific crossing in a balloon in Double Eagle V, sailing 5,768 miles from Japan to California.
“We were all a part of his ballooning activities as we were growing up,” says 45-year-old Richard Abruzzo. “He was flying hang gliders off the top of the mountain and landing in the front yard.” As often as not, his wife and children were with him.
“Growing up, we were all flying hang-gliders and stuff like that and never thought anything about it,” Louis says. “If a cliff was there, jump off it. If something had wings, fly it. Balloons, hang-gliders, sail planes, jumping off the crow’s nest of ships into the ocean—there just were no boundaries. We were coaxed along to try everything. I used to do drops from my dad’s balloon on a hang-glider. He’d take me up to 12,000 feet, then cut me loose and I’d fly my hang-glider down and think nothing of it. I was in my 20s.” He adds, “We grew up in a little different environment than most people. My mom had to just grin and bear it.”
All three sons are still outdoor enthusiasts, although not quite as active as they once were. Louis races bikes and still has a pilot’s license, but says he doesn’t use it much since he sold his aerobatic stunt plane three years ago. Benny’s passion is heli-skiing and rock-climbing. Richard skied competitively in college and followed his father into the skies as a record-setting balloonist. In 1992, he and a partner broke his father’s world record for the longest flight in a balloon (more than six days in the air) when they were blown off course during a trans-Atlantic race and ended up in Morocco. In 2003, he made the first transcontinental solo balloon flight, which took him from California to Georgia. Just four years ago, he nearly died after a balloon he was racing floated into thermal conditions that sent it into a power line in Kansas.
‘Very difficult times’
None of the boys’ exploits matched the challenge they faced in February 1985, though, when they suddenly found themselves in charge of a sprawling, high-profile business empire that had just closed on its largest (at the time) acquisition, the Santa Fe Ski Area. Ben Abruzzo was flying his wife, Pat, and four of her closest friends to Aspen for a ski vacation. Louis had just become engaged that Christmas, and he and his fiancée, Stacy, were picking out their wedding rings when he got the call telling him his father’s plane had gone down. Benny was in Santa Fe, where he had moved to run the ski area they had acquired the previous October.
Richard and Mary Pat were in college and still living at home. Benny and his wife, Sandra, moved back into the family home with them to, as he put it, “provide them with a family environment for the first year or so while things settled and everybody got more grounded.” Louis and Stacy went ahead with their wedding in June because he felt his parents would have wanted them to.
“Having lost both parents simultaneously took the level of difficulty to the maximum,” Richard says. “But when you’re faced with tough situations, you just figure it out.”
In addition to the immense personal loss, there were very pressing business matters that required immediate attention. “We essentially had to go right back to work,” Benny explains. The newly acquired Santa Fe Ski Area required massive renovation of buildings, equipment, and the ski runs. “It was very difficult times,” says Benny, who was running both ski areas before the tragedy. “I just went to work every day, figuring that if I worked harder, it would help.”
“There were a lot of good people involved in these companies, and that helped tremendously,” Richard points out. “They were very much a part of getting us through those times.”
Bob Murphy, a key executive in the company, oversaw the residential real estate developments. Louis handled the commercial real estate and the tram, but also took on the largest task of all—dealing with the IRS and the estate. His father’s estate planning had been rudimentary at best. “My father didn’t put much value on all that,” Louis explains. “He was much more concerned about building wealth through real estate using leverage and inflation. There was some life insurance, but it was inside the estate so it was taxed. With all his balloon adventures, we had talked about his death, of course, but it was always assumed he would be the one who went.” No one anticipated the massive estate event that occurred when both parents died.
“That was really a difficult, grueling time,” Louis says. “We had to borrow to pay taxes, and it took a decade to settle that. The IRS assessment was two and a half times ours. We essentially liquidated [our personal assets] and used up everything else—homes, lots, cash and all the income the companies earned during that period—in the ten years it took to save the family business. But at the end of the day, we preserved ownership in the company.”
Difficulties with the IRS weren’t the only ones the brothers faced during that decade. “We kind of got stuck in that S&L crisis where we had loans called and needed to be refinanced,” Louis explained. “It stayed pretty challenging until 1995, when we emerged.”
Just after the financial problems were settled and the brothers thought the worst had been put behind them, their sister, Mary Pat, died. “That was very, very, very hard,” Louis says. “We were just coming out of the financial problems. She had some heart and other health issues, but when she died at age 31,it was quite a shock.” Mary Pat was working part-time in the marketing department for the tram when she passed away.
‘Walking away wasn’t an option’
The easiest route through all these travails might have been to liquidate and move on, but none of the brothers says that was even considered. “Our mom and dad gave us such a great example,” Benny says. “Their actions were such that walking away from something wasn’t an option. Dad always persevered, and Mom was always there to support him. While they were building the tram, he got into financial difficulties, but he saw it through. He even fell off the tram and was injured, but he survived that. The balloon in the ocean [Ben Abruzzo’s first trans-Atlantic attempt ended in near-tragedy]…. I could go on and on. The way we were raised as kids, you dusted yourself off and moved forward.”
They may have played hard, but they worked hard, too. “Dad was quite a taskmaster,” Richard says. “There was always a long list of chores. That could be as crude as throwing rocks off a ski trail to cleaning the bathrooms at the tramway to picking up cigarette butts off the top of the mountain.”
“We grew up in an adventurous household,” Louis adds, “but if we went skiing on Sunday, we went to church on Saturday night.”
Five years ago, Louis says, the family restructured the companies by unwinding 50 years of corporate tangles. During that process, they bought up several million dollars’ worth of outside stockholdings, although there are still some 45 non-family shareholders. More than 80% of the company’s stock is now in the hands of family members, according to Louis.
While they are conscientious about preserving the business their father left them, the brothers haven’t rested on their laurels. The ski areas and tram are solid performers and, while they are currently out of the residential real estate business, they now own three office complexes —one in Phoenix, the other two in Albuquerque. They own and operate neighborhood retail centers between 50,000 and 100,000 square feet throughout New Mexico, southern Colorado and Texas. A recent report by Compass Bank says Alavardo’s book value has grown four-fold since Ben Abruzzo’s death, accomplished while paying the shareholders about 40% of its earnings in the form of dividends each year.
“Fortunately for us, by luck and design we’ve entered this new economic era, which is not good or pleasant for anybody, but we’re well poised to get through it,” Louis says. “We’re looking for other opportunities. We’d probably like to buy some more retail and office properties.”
Even with their eyes firmly on the future of their business, the Abruzzo brothers take time to indulge their passion for outdoor adventure. They’re passing it along, too. In December, Benny put his grandson in a backpack and took him down a ski slope at the ripe old age of eight months.
Dave Donelson is a business journalist in West Harrison, N.Y.
Museum honors Abruzzos’ father
Among the civic organizations the Abruzzo brothers support is the Anderson-Abruzzo Albuquerque International Balloon Museum, which opened in 2005. The city-owned facility is named for their father and his longtime ballooning partner, Maxie Anderson. Louis Abruzzo served on the foundation board that provides financial support for the organization; Richard Abruzzo is taking his place.
The museum’s collection reflects not only the exploits of the two local balloon enthusiasts, but also the complete worldwide history of balloon flight from the earliest flights in the 1700s. The 59,000-square-foot facility contains more than 50 historic and contemporary gondolas, many accompanied by complete balloon systems, as well as interactive exhibits that allow visitors to test balloon fabric for strength, learn the difference between hot air and gas balloons, or use a flight simulator with a stereoscopic display that tests their ability to take off and land.
The museum is adjacent to Balloon Fiesta Park, where hundreds of vibrantly colorful hot air balloons ascend during Albuquerque’s world-famous annual balloon festival.
—D.D.