Arthur Rutenberg Homes

Arthur Rutenberg

My first business , I started when I was 21, with three of my brothers, a retail business, house wares, gifts and later it morphed into furniture. We made a living. What I learned was it took about the same length of time to sell a $10 item as a $300 item. So I learned that selling higher-priced items is probably a better business than selling low-priced items. That's what pushed me into wanting to build houses.

Flying is about the only hobby I still have. I still fly myself, although every year at my physicals the FAA gives me a hard time because I'm reasonably bionic. I've had five bypasses and a couple of stents. But I'm still licensed to fly. What I fly now is a little Cirrus SR22, just a nice single-engine airplane. It's a flying computer is what it really is. You go in there and press the buttons and it flies.

After high school , I wanted to go to an engineering school, but Northwestern's engineering school didn't at that time take many Jewish kids because they couldn't place them. There was too much of a bias then toward Jewish employees in the engineering field. I went to the school on a Saturday to look around, and I ran into a guy who wanted to know what I was doing wandering around the halls. No one else was there. I told him I was thinking about applying and so he took me for a walk around. We sat in his office and talked and he asked me if I wanted an application. He handed me one, and he initialed it. I found out later he was the dean of the school, so I got in.

Arthur

Arthur

A.R.T.H.U.R., the life and opinions of a digital computer

Arthur and the world record

Arthur, a short sketch of his life and history in English verse of the first half of the fifteenth century