A Smart Tower or another Portland pie-in-the-sky idea?
by Anna Griffin, The Oregonian
Tuesday December 30, 2008, 10:32 PM
I f Derek Hanna is for real, he just might save the world.
That's a pretty tall "if," however.
Hanna is the carwash heir hoping to build a 650-foot Space Needle-like spire along the Willamette River. His proposed "Smart" Tower -- that's shorthand for sustainable, modern art -- would come studded with wind turbines and solar panels. It would soar 10 stories above anything else on the city skyline and include a five-star restaurant, a shopping mall featuring eco-friendly stores and a robotic underground parking garage with plenty of spots for electric cars.
In architect's renderings, the tower looms over above Portland like a giant, glowing exclamation point.
Take that, recession!
"My dad really taught me to think outside the box," Hanna says. "That's all I'm trying to do here."
Hanna's father was Dan Hanna, inventor of the automated carwash and an all-around Oregon character. Derek, the youngest of four sons, takes after his dad in that he isn't afraid to talk big. He says private investors and bank loans will cover the tower's $80 million to $120 million cost. He predicts the thing will generate 1,000 new jobs, $150 million in economic development and enough renewable power to light every city park.
Impressive, huh? So why is the Robby the Robot in the back of my brain yelling, "Danger! Danger!"
Perhaps because Hanna's experience as a developer seems dwarfed by his ambition.
He's helped his brother, Kirk, owner of Mt. Hood Skibowl and the Collins Lake Resort, and built a few self-storage facilities with a California company. But his biggest Portland project, a $30 million boat storage house on the east riverbank, is snarled in permitting problems and has shrunk in size and cost since proposed two years ago.
Or maybe I'm skeptical because in Portland we occasionally allow a certain civic inferiority complex to cloud our good sense. Anybody want to buy a $140,000 taxpayer-built toilet that stops flushing in the snow? Anyone?
Hanna, 46, seems like a nice guy, and his puppy-dog eyes howl good intentions. He's already spent $100,000 of his own cash on outreach, and he and his consultants say all the right things about wanting input from neighborhood groups. They wouldn't dream of asking for public money in a recession, just a 99-year lease on some prime riverfront real estate.
Yet Hanna's figures turn squishy upon closer inspection. He predicts, for example, that the tower will attract 1 million visitors a year at $10 a pop. That's based on little more than the fact that the Space Needle draws 1.3 million people a year at $16 a head. But Seattle is a bigger city with far more to draw tourists.
Portland leaders have encouraged Hanna to keep building community support. They're talking about renting him the old McCall's Restaurant to advertise his idea now that other plans to make money off that building have sputtered.
And there are whispers around City Hall about putting a Smart Tower across the river to spur redevelopment near the Rose Garden and drive traffic to a taxpayer-funded convention center hotel.
For now, tower talk is cheap. There's no harm in letting Hanna try to drum up public enthusiasm for an idea that could give us all someplace to take out-of-town guests after we've done Powell's, Multnomah Falls and OMSI.
But let's also remember one thing: The longer Hanna talks about the project, the more momentum he builds, the greater the chance that he'll eventually come ask for public cash.
After all, saving the world is usually more expensive than it sounds.
Anna Griffin;
annagriffin@news.oregonian.com
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/orego...her_portl.html
More of the Smart Tower story
by Anna Griffin, The Oregonian
Wednesday December 31, 2008, 6:00 AM
Today's column is all about the Smart Tower and its mastermind, developer Derek Hanna. Personally, I think the idea is a little pie in the sky, pun sadly intended. But check it out for yourself.
For more info on the tower, visit Hanna's website. Or for a different, perhaps less curmudgeonly perspective (can a 36-year-old woman be a curmudgeon?), check out what Portland Spaces editor Randy Gragg had to say about it on his blog in September.
Hanna is a figure to watch, even if this thing fizzles out. (I don't expect the conversation to end anytime soon. As Peter Finley Fry, the land-use consultant Hanna has hired to help him navigate the bureaucracy, put it earlier this month, 'This is a young man's project. It's going to take a decade. Derek has time and energy."
He's definitely got his father's moxie. Follow the jump to a profile the great Spencer Heinz did on Dan Hanna in 1989.
THE KING OF THE CAR WASH
DAN HANNA'S MOTHER WANTED HIM TO BE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. BUT HANNA HAD OTHER AMBITIONS -- HE WANTED TO GIVE AMERICA CLEAN CARS
By Spencer Heinz
of The Oregonian Staff
Sunday, April 23, 1989
A journey to the center of carwash in America begins at a tunnel near a sign that says, ``Shammy Shine Gentle Touch.''
Deep inside, shammies slosh and jiggle.
``Hey,'' calls a motorist to the towel man out front. ``Will this go through here with traction bars on it?''
The towel man gives the patron what amounts to a short course on carwash, and when he young man has learned enough to graduate, joy mists the toweler's eyes. ``That's the kind of stuff I'm here for,'' he confides.
He is the only attendant with any gray hair. Unlike many others on the carwash crew, he is not in high school. He has brown eyes that hook and hold, and they watch the cars move through. This is another routine Sunday for Daniel C. Hanna Sr., who, at age 54, still washes cars for a living.
``People,'' he says, ``want a clean car.''
To help America keep cars clean, he often works 15-hour days, seven days a week. He might not need the money. The Dan Hanna who stands in the puddles with a towel on Sundays is the same Dan Hanna whose burgeoning empire has designed, built and sold automatic carwash systems for delivery to more than 20,000 locations in 71 countries around the world.
As sole proprietor of Hanna Car Wash International and associated companies, he is the dominant force in the world carwash industry. He pilots his Learjet to wherever he needs to be. ``Yesterday I was in Wichita,'' he says. But Sundays are special, because on Sundays, he usually returns to a carwash on Portland's 82nd Avenue to help clean the cars himself.
He wears khaki pants, a blue windbreaker, a necktie and watersoaked leather shoes with badly worn soles. He owns the biggest carwash outfit on Earth, but he moves like a shadow and does not say his name. Customers tell him more that way. And if one of them tells him, for example, to please get down and scrub the bugs off a bumper, then that is what Hanna does.
``I think one of the reasons I've been so successful in this business,'' he says, ``is because I've stayed connected with reality.''
He swirls his towels and connects.
``Look at that car!'' he says. ``It's so shiny!''
Daniel Charles Hanna was born Oct. 26, 1934, in Southeast Portland. His ancestry is Middle Eastern. When Dan was a year old, his father died after a construction accident, and his mother raised him, he says, to be president of the United States.
Although that position was filled, the world in the mid-1950s still lacked a truly automatic carwash, and since he loved to work on cars, he told his mother that he wanted to fill the void. ``I broke the news to her,'' he recalls, ``by saying, `Mom. A lot of people really want to have a clean car.' ''
At 18, Hanna began to design and build a carwash. He married a Franklin High School girl, Betty Simonis, and in 1955, they opened and operated their first carwash near The Bomber service station on Southeast McLoughlin Boulevard. Betty helped dry the cars. By 1960, they had four carwashes. By 1970, 15.
By the early 1980s, with about 100 patents, Hanna companies reportedly controlled more than 60 percent of the international carwash-building market. His list of customers now includes General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, BMW and Porsche. Hanna figures his equipment washes 1 million of the world's estimated 300 million vehicles daily -- a premise that makes him contemplate McDonald's annual production of five billion burgers. ``We've done 10 billion cars,'' he says.
One employee describes Hanna as ``the most focused person I have ever met in my life.'' He uses his power in an understated way. He says please and thank you quietly. He reads a book a week on topics such as motivation and delegation, and he often says, ``If I can enrich the lives of everybody I contact, I'm going to be able to live and grow and reach the goals I've set for myself.'' Those goals are to wash more cars, and that gets him into the cycle of nature and back to his ethic of work: ``When people think they can achieve more than what they put into it, they're out of balance.''
``You are working with an individual,'' says R.R. Gus Trantham, executive director of the Chicago-based International Carwash Association, ``who started out at the lowest levels of the carwash industry and now is the leading manufacturer, as well as one of the leading authorities in the world on the carwash industry.''
Although Hanna commands respect, persons who do not feel the same tend not to want to shout it out. Like the self-decribed ``little guy,'' the Pacific Northwest carwash operator who asked that he not be named because of the competitive leverage that he thought Hanna could exert. A former purchaser of Hanna equipment, he said he had received virtually no response to his many urgent calls for service.
``The man is an expert in talking in generalities and never giving you a specific yes or no,'' the operator has decided. ``I was never sure when I hung up the phone whether I was supposed to send him something or he was supposed to send something to me.''
If Hanna has not satisfied everyone on his way to the top, it is not for lack of effort. In a way that makes it sound like a verse from a creed, Hanna always says, ``I believe business is good products and service, reasonably priced, with a request for repeat business.''
Hanna's voice cannot be easily heard above the swooshing of the carwash, and that is partly because, on June 10, 1978, during practice for Portland's Rose Cup competition, he was driving a 760-horsepower race car when it lost a tire, bounded across a field and snapped in two against a tree. A priest gave him the last rites of the Roman Catholic Church, and because he was not quite dead, Hanna also received a tube in the windpipe that enabled him to breathe. Weeks later, after he emerged from a coma, he could only whisper.
If the accident has a lingering effect, it is that his voice might be even softer than before, and with that voice, Dan Hanna says that he will, by the end of the first decade of the new millenium, have created a business worth between $3 billion and $5 billion.
``We are now at the point at which we have the greatest opportunity we've ever had,'' he says that Sunday at the carwash. ``It's just going to depend on me knowing what the hell I'm doing and having the leadership ability to make it happen.''
is in the long run. In the short run, he needs to shine bumpers for the rest of the shift. After that, he faces a major challenge, to prepare his people for another carwash showdown -- the 1989 international carwash trade show in Las Vegas. If his team performs well in moral and financial terms, Hanna can sell millions of dollars of service and gear. For the next few weeks, every move he makes will be made with that in focus.
The temperature is too high. It is 6 a.m. and dark outside. It is the last Monday before the trade show, and inside his Milwaukie headquarters, Dan Hanna stands at a lectern and prepares his notes for the day.
``Jack,'' Hanna says. ``It's stuffy in here. Could you open that door?''
Jack C. Swanson, Hanna's administrative support man, walks to a hallway door. Sadly, it is winter out, and after some frigid minutes, instinct prevails and Swanson, who thinks the world of his boss, softly closes the door. Moments later, Hanna senses the climactic change and asks a rhetorical question. ``Jack,'' he says quietly. ``Is that door still open?''
The door is reopened because everything, even the temperature, has to be just so. That is part of the focus. Thousands of people are coming to Vegas, and Hanna must prepare. Almost four hours after arriving for work that day, Hanna stands at a microphone for the 9 a.m. start of the weekly product meeting.
``In the world arena,'' Hanna says softly, ``the only thing permanent is change.'' He hands out photocopied packets that contain inspirational readings and advisements for workers to always thank customers, to never take their business for granted and to always be neatly groomed because ``people look at people first.'' General Motors dealer-equipment officials, he says, have named Hanna ``Supplier of the Year.'' At one point, he says, ``I'm hopeful you all are going to study this packet through page 41.''
Suddenly, a correction. Someone in the crowd calls up a correction. It is Douglas Stowell, Hanna's service manager for the world. On page 12, Stowell points out, a multi-pronged program is missing two prongs. After a moment of examination, Hanna praises Stowell for spotting the error and hands the man a $100 bill.
``If information isn't accessible,'' Hanna says. ``it's devastating. It's demoralizing.'' After the meeting, Stowell explains: ``That's what he calls `information access.' I think that makes sure the people are paying attention, and that's very important.''
Toward sundown, Hanna is back at his lectern, and he receives his finest phone call of the day. Some New Zealanders want to see him. They have spent the day in Portland on a tour of Hanna washes, and now they want to see him.
Because Hanna has been at work since about 5:30 a.m., he figures that they figure that he will be weaker by now. ``They want to gang up on me,'' he jokes to one of his men. ``Maybe I'd better have a little something to build my blood sugar up.''
Someone delivers a plate of liver and onions. On a desk inside a nook five steps behind the lectern, he takes nourishment alone. At some point, he also does push-ups. The night will be a long one. But Hanna will be ready.
Later, he tells how well that meeting went: ``Really well.'' The New Zealanders agreed, he says, to buy 45 carwash units for about $2 million. His blood sugar level had risen to the occasion. The liver and onions had worked.
At 1:15 p.m. the following Saturday, which is two days before the trade show, Hanna enters his blue-green hangar and prepares to fly to Vegas. He passes a sector that sometimes holds a few of his cars. They include a Calloway Corvette, a Porsche 930 Turbo, a Jaguar XJ-S and a Lamborghini Countach. He runs them through his carwash tunnels to suggest the gentility of his process.
Hanna climbs into the cockpit, and Walter Robanske, the man who has carefully maintained the plane as Hanna's longtime friend and aviation department manager, stands in the hangar and prepares to close the hatch.
``OK, Walter, hold the fort,'' Hanna says.
``You bet,'' he replies. ``I got both six-guns loaded.''
The jet taxies onto the runway. In the pilot's seat, Hanna pushes two levers. The engines roar and strain to go, but he keeps both feet on the brakes. Rain beads shimmy on the windshield face. On June 10, 1988, Dan Hanna took this plane from zero to 10,000 feet in one minute and 13 seconds. That set a world record. And now the radio crackles again, the flight tower gives the go-ahead, and Hanna roars into the sky on another carwash mission.
For more than 20 years, this six-passenger Lear 23 has helped Hanna, like an airborne Johnny Appleseed, ow carwash around the world. In 1967, Hanna, then 32, walked into Learjet's Wichita headquarters. He told the receptionist he wanted a Learjet. He had come directly from a local carwash. His boots were wet. She asked the nature of his business. ``I wash cars,'' he said. How, she asked, can you afford a Learjet? ``I wash a lot of cars.''
He bought two Learjets about that time. He still owns one, and since then, he has flown several thousand hours, most of it in the early years while staking out his claims. Competitors could not keep track of him. During those early years, Hanna practically lived in the plane. Jack Davies, a marketing employee back then who frequently rode along, recalls the way that Hanna made it happen.
``The first day I went to work with him, he says, `Two things we have to do to start up the manufacturing process. One is get a Learjet, and the other is get a 360 IBM.' That was the first big computer that came out for businesses.
``His information was, `With the airplane, we're at the end of the world as far as the Midwest and the East are concerned. They don't know where Portland is. The airplane will save us 10 years in national marketing, and we'll be able to meet people personally.
`` `The computer -- we order it now, it's going to take us six months to get it, and another six months to program it. The program is gonna be wrong. It's gonna take us another six months to utilize it. By that time, the computer is gonna be behind.'
``I just looked at him,'' Davies recalls, ``and I thought to myself, `What hath God wrought?' ''
Flying night and day in the 1960s and early 1970s, they never had enough money. Once, at LaGuardia Airport in New York, they owed a cabbie about $12. Davies remembers Hanna telling the cab driver, ``I'm good for it, that's my Learjet over there!'' And the cab driver says to him, ``Yeah, and that's my 747 over there. Now where's my cash?''
Now an older Hanna with a well-established business is on another mission. An hour and 40 minutes after takeoff, he lands in Vegas and steps into a rental car operated by Davies, who now works out of San Francisco as a distributor for Hanna equipment.
``Just like old times,'' Davies tells Hanna. ``Twenty-seven years we've been doing this.''
The gang stops for fruit juice, tours a showcase Hanna carwash and motors over to check on preparations for the 9,000-person convention at the Las Vegas Hilton. Their lives are on schedule. All in the time that it takes to watch a movie, Hanna has gone from Portland to Las Vegas and established a trade-show beachhead.
Inside the Hilton, gamblers adrift on a sea of slots crank until their eyes roll back. Yellow lights shiver and wink, and a glittery tide of silver dollars clanks into a metal tray. ``It's my machine,'' a bony woman moans. ``This is my money! Ooooo!''
But with only two days left before the show, Hanna plans no time to play. Five flatbed trucks have arrived from the Portland plant. eir payload includes a full-sized Hanna carwash tunnel surrounded by dancing lights. A crew of 20 hustles to screw it together at the most prominent spot in the convention hall.
``We always get the biggest space every show,'' Davies says. ``Always have. Never been any different.''
Hanna glides through, praises his workers and describes his trade-show goals. First, he wants his employees to get reacquainted with past customers. Second, he wants to give his field reps from around the world another dose of ``oral vaccine,'' which is what he calls his periodic pep talks. Third, he wants to find new buyers. ``Fourth,'' he says. ``I demoralize the competition.''
A few hours later, during a Saturday evening marketing conference in a penthouse suite at the Riviera Hotel, Hanna serves refreshments and some oral vaccine.
``We're not here by accident,'' he says, and he shares his words like a secret. ``We've been preparing for the opportunity we've got right now all our business lives.''
Hanna products are The Truth: ``I believe too much of our country is artificial.'' If you mess up, let the customer know: ``Francis did $4 million of business in Los Angeles. Four million! You know why? He's sensitive to the customer.'' Values are like a garden: ``You don't maintain your values, they slip away.'' There is a method to the future, and it is to open between two and 10 new carwashes a week for the next 10 years: ``That's 5,000 in 10 years, and then we're gonna live happily ever after.'' This is Super Bowl football weekend, and the Hanna pre-game commercial will be something not to miss: ``That's $330,000 for 30 seconds. Now that's what you call a demonstration of something. I'm not sure what.''
He chuckles at the strangeness of some aspects of this life. He calls his people ``fellas.'' They always call him ``sir,'' but somehow with affection.
``This was just a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful connection with you guys tonight,'' he says. ``I sense it. I do. And I thank you very much.''
In a quiet aside, one of the men, John from Denver, issues unfettered praise.
``They ought to do a case study on this man at Harvard Business School.''
The next day, during the national scream-therapy session known as Super Bowl Sunday, about 1,500 carwash professionals gather on bleachers in an auditorium to watch it happen on a herd of big-screen TV sets.
Throughout the room are Hannaites charged with viewing the Hanna ad. It suddenly appears. There is a rush to mentally adjust. At the rate of $11,000 a second, every moment is to be savored. Mario Andretti fills the screens. He is the most famous race car driver in the world, probably. Andretti and Hanna are friends. Hanna sponsors the Andretti car. And in August 1985 Andretti opened the nation's first Hanna franchise carwash in Allentown, Pa. And now the ad shows the shimmering interplay of this famous driver, the blue-green Hanna logo, a gleaming red car, sparkling beads of water and a blow dry at the finish. It is over all too soon.
`` Hanna,'' the ad concludes. ``The advanced process for washing cars.''
D.R. Cooley, the Hanna finance man, issues his opinion. ``It was powerful,'' he says.
After that, Joe Montana begins to set a Super Bowl record with 357 passing yards, but even more significant, from an auto-cleaning point of view, is the story related simultaneously near a hotdog stand by one of the conventioneers, Stephen Bulboff, 33, a Hanna franchisee from Deptford, N.J.
Bulboff says he used to be a ver. But he wanted to be in carwash. was back in 1981. He needed $200,000. A loan for half of that was approved, but he was unable to get the rest. Then he heard of the legend of Dan Hanna, and when he found him at a trade show in Chicago, he figured what the heck.
``I walked up and said, `Mr. Hanna, you don't know me, but my name's Steve Bulboff, and I'm $100,000 short to open a carwash.' He looked at me for a second, he smiled, he called a man over, and he said, `This is Steve Bulboff from New York.' I said New Jersey. He said, `This is Steve and he needs financing for his carwash.' ''
``Today,'' says Bulboff, ``I own 10 automatic carwashes, four self-service carwashes, I have two Hanna franchise carwashes, I just bought a home for $1 million, I drive a Ferrari Testarossa, and I'm doing very well, and I have a few more carwashes in the works. The guy made me. The guy literally made me.''
Moments after the Super Bowl ends, Hanna calls to order another meeting just across the hall. The Winter Convention & Exposition of the International Carwash Association will begin in only 15 hours, and he needs to administer some oral vaccine.
About 200 field representatives and top officials fill the room, and with his Shammy Shine Gentle Touch voice, Hanna gives them nourishment. Some members of the crowd enjoy their cigarettes, and a wisp of smoke finally triggers an alarm. It bleats like an animal just about to die. Hanna stays at peace.
``Now, that's a message from heaven,'' he says. ``We just got a signal that we're really on track.''
Speaking softly, he says he has no problem with ``economic combat.'' He also believes in ``natural compensation'' for efforts expended. And soon he notices that field reps in the crowd have grouped themselves according to their national sectors of responsibility -- North, Central and South.
He says that is worthy of reward. Eligible crowd members, he announces, each will receive a $500 credit slip on Hanna merchandise.
``Order is the first law of nature in heaven,'' he says. ``I appreciate you being sensitive to that order. Best $500 I ever spent.''
He tells why order counts. ``The future,'' he says, ``is predictable.''
At nearly midnight, Hanna drifts into the convention center to make a final check. His carwash exhibit is ready. Lights blink and wriggle around the marquee. Tomorrow the battle will be joined, and he tells what carwash means to him.
``A lot of product, a lot of marketing, a lot of people,'' he says. ``I think that is what is so attractive about it.''
He loosely estimates the replacement value of his Milwaukie headquarters at $100 million. And he projects $100 million in sales this year. Hanna and his wife have raised four sons, and he earns enough to put food on the table. Why, some ask, does he continue to work seven days a week? ``The desire to learn more and do more is the excitement.''
Hanna does not smoke or drink. But he makes no fuss about those who do. Neither is he pushy about religion, but he sees himself as a spiritual person who believes in a God who is all things. On this hallowed trade-show eve, Dan Hanna smiles and shares a little secret.
``I say a prayer for my competition every night, because if they weren't there, someone else would take their place.''
Just like on a music box, when the trade-show doors come open in the morning, that triggers all the machinery and salesmen into a swooshing, blinking, frenetic froth of incredible carwash concepts.
In various competing sectors, you have your high-pressure oscillating bumper blasters, your spot-free rinse systems, your Jimmy Butts Mat Cleaner, your blond-haired models and more than anything else, you have your brightly lighted Hanna display that is bigger than all the rest. Peddlers and patrons wheel and deal as shammies do the hula.
But this is a day of reckoning. Hanna is the world's biggest maker of carwash equipment. But in a floor-space layout reflective of real-life conditions, two runners-up -- Sherman Industries Inc. of Palmyra, N.J., and Belanger Inc. of Northville, Mich. -- have also erected their own spectacular carwash tunnels on either side of his.
Frederick M. Grauer Jr., the 46-year-old senior vice president and owner of Sherman Industries, tells what he feels about Hanna: ``I love competing with Dan. We're like two mako sharks in a pool.''
He acknowledges that Hanna has the manufacturing lead, and he terms him a visionary and a man who deserves respect as a carwash pioneer. On the other hand, Grauer says he believes Hanna's management style is ``dictatorial,'' that he seems unable to easily delegate authority, and that he seems not to want to associate with competitors.
``I wish I did know him better,'' Grauer says. ``And I hope nothing ever happens to him. Because I'm not sure that his organization could survive without him, and I would not want that to happen.''
Meanwhile, Grauer's hair remains all black. He figures time is on his side. He smiles and says, ``I'm younger.''
This is carwash warfare. If Hanna is one who prays, and maybe sometimes preys, Grauer does the same in return.
But Hanna has heard it before. He counters that he always tries to delegate authority, that his business could survive practically anything, that it actually did better during the car-wreck time when he was out of action, that his employees already have received an everlasting supply of oral vaccine (``I kick their butts unmercifully if something isn't done right for the motorist''), that he just loves it when competitors start fretting about what Dan Hanna is doing because that leaves him free to serve their customers, and that his ultimate goal is to work himself out of a job. But he tells his competitors something else.
``I just tell them, I've got a special dispensation! I'm gonna be here a hundred years!''
Back in Portland a few days later, real life resumes. What goes up comes down. The trade-show glitz is gone.
Hanna blends into his lectern. He administers oral vaccine. Finally, on a Sunday, he goes to Mass and back to the carwash, and under the Shammy Shine Gentle Touch sign, he gets down on the ground again.
The ground is where life starts and ends.
It is the natural order.
Natural compensation.
``You see, I've had an idea,'' he says. ``Washing cars. And here it is.''
SPENCER HEINZ is a staff writer for The Oregonian.
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/orego...wer_story.html
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