Year Inducted: 1991
The Henry C. Goodrich Chair of Excellence in Civil Engineering at the University of Tennessee attests to the dedicated career of an Alabama civil engineer. Henry Goodrich entered Erskine College in 1937 to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a doctor. Soon, however, his interests and aptitudes led him to engineering. The line for the chemical engineering program being long, he opted to pursue civil engineering—a life of building things. As a student in his college’s cooperative education program, Mr. Goodrich learned both engineering and management skills. After graduation in 1942, he enlisted in the Naval Reserve and spent two years working to construct the Panama Canal.
Mr. Goodrich came to Birmingham in 1945 as a draftsman for the Rust Engineering Company (today’s RUST International Corporation). His leadership and engineering skills were quickly recognized, and he was asked to assume the direction of major projects in the pulp and paper industry. During his tenure at Rust, Mr. Goodrich was personally responsible for the negotiation of $1.6 billion in building contracts.
While heading the company’s engineering division as it grew from eight to eight hundred employees, Mr. Goodrich in 1963 engineered the first computer-designed space tower for NASA. The structure is the largest movable piece in the world and is rolled around missiles at Cape Canaveral to provide service access. A requirement of the space tower project was that a Rust
Engineering representative pass Florida’s licensing exam for engineers. Mr. Goodrich attacked the task and succeeded, twenty-five years after his college graduation.
After serving as senior vice-president and director of Rust, Mr. Goodrich, at 48, changed careers, entering manufacturing and commodities. He took a position as executive vice-president of Inland Container Corporation in Indianapolis, Indiana, and over twelve years fostered a major expansion of that firm, becoming president, chairman, and chief executive officer along the way.
When the company was sold, the challenge that had absorbed him was gone. So, Mr. Goodrich gladly accepted an offer to lead Southern Natural Resources through a transition that included, among other things, changing the company’s name to Sonat. During his five-year tenure with Sonat which he previously had served as a member of the board of directors-the firm built the world’s largest enclosed semisubmersible offshore drilling rig, the Henry Goodrich.
Upon retirement in 1985, he began a new career as a professional director. He serves on seven corporate boards, including that of Time, Inc. A philanthropist and community activist, Mr. Goodrich is involved with the Boy Scouts of America, United Way, engineering education, church activities, and his family. He is married to the former Billie Grace Walker, and they have three children.
