Biography|Stuart Graham — The Hill in Worcester Where He Took an Economics Degree

People treat the first American to run Skanska as a product of New Jersey jobsites and a Stockholm boardroom.

The degree that got him onto those sites was taken on this Jesuit hill in Worcester.

Stuart Edward Graham Jr. was born on 17 February 1946 in Kingston, Pennsylvania, across the Susquehanna from Wilkes-Barre.

Engineering News-Record later called him Wilkes-Barre-born.

The family obituary is more precise: Kingston, to Stuart Graham and Ruth Hourigan, the eldest of five.

He went through Forty Fort schools, then Cranwell Preparatory School in Lenox, Massachusetts.

From there he came to the College of the Holy Cross.

Fenwick Hall is the oldest building on the campus, the brick pile that still faces the city from College Hill.

Holy Cross is a small liberal-arts college, not an engineering school.

Graham left it with a bachelor of science in economics.

Company notices later shorten that to a B.S. in economics and stop.

The published record does not print a commencement day.

By 1969 he was already on a Sordoni payroll in the Wyoming Valley, listed in a 1979 local paper as employed by the firm since that year.

A later PPL Corporation board notice dates the start to 1970.

Either way the interval between this campus and a field superintendent's job was measured in months, not decades.

The economics training is the part of the story that does not look like a contractor's origin myth.

Skanska would later praise him for risk controls and procurement discipline, the habits of a man who had counted before he poured.

He stayed attached to the college.

The family obituary records years on the Holy Cross board of trustees, and after his death in 2022 the memorial gift was a scholarship fund in his name on this campus, not a plaque at a jobsite.

The hill is still a working college.

Fenwick Hall is the building a visitor can stand in front of without guessing at a demolished shed.

Photo: Georgeryp, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons