Russ Banham

Russ Banham

Russ Banham (born September 20, 1954) is an American author and reporter formerly with The Journal of Commerce and later a freelance journalist writing for The Wall Street Journal, Inc., Forbes, The Economist, Euromoney, Financial Times, Chief Executive and several other business publications and trade magazines.

Banham is the author of 27 books, including The Ford Century, an international bestseller translated into 13 languages; Higher, a best-selling history of aerospace giant Boeing and the U.S. aviation industry; The Fight for Fairfax, a post-Cold War political and economic history of Northern Virginia as it became an Edge City to Washington, D.C., and the forthcoming Problem Solving, a co-authored history of Harvard Business School (with HBS Professor Emeritus Howard Stevenson).

Banham also is a former actor known for co-starring with Bill Murray in the movie “Meatballs” and a playwright and professional theatre director.

Education and early life

Banham graduated from St. John's University in New York City, where he studied Speech and Theatre. He later earned a Master of Arts in Drama Theory and Criticism from the University of Montana. On a prestigious Jacob K. Javits Fellowship at the university, he also earned a Master of Fine Arts in Directing and Playwriting, while teaching classes in drama for three years.

Early career

Banham's dream as a young man was to become a playwright or theatre director. Instead, he fell into acting after college, making his Broadway debut in The Merchant, which starred Zero Mostel as Shylock, and was directed by two-time Tony award-winning director John Dexter. Mostel died upstage right after the first public performance of the play in Philadelphia. Banham also appeared in several Off- and Off-off-Broadway plays, and co-starred in the ninth biggest movie of 1979, Meatballs, directed by Ivan Reitman and starring Bill Murray in his first film role. That year he was cast as Brad Hopkins in producer Norman Lear's short-lived television situation comedy, Joe's World, opposite Christopher Knight from The Brady Bunch. The series ran for 12 episodes on NBC before it was cancelled.

With prospects as an actor quickly dimming, Banham produced the world premiere of Oliver Hailey’s Kith and Kin at the Dallas Theatre Center and later at the White Barn Theatre in Greenwich, Connecticut, the latter directed by Tom O'Horgan, Tony-award nominee for the original production of Hair. He also produced the Off Broadway premiere of Hailey’s Red Rover, Red Rover, with Tony-award winners Phyllis Newman and Helen Gallagher, at the Park Royal Theatre. Both received mixed reviews and failed commercially.

At the same time, he began his career in financial journalism, writing articles for The Journal of Commerce. The daily business newspaper, then owned by Knight-Ridder, asked him to join its staff in 1983 as a reporter and editor covering insurance and risk management. Banham left the paper in 1987 to pursue work as a freelance journalist. He quickly found a niche writing for numerous business publications and trade magazines on a wide variety of economic and financial topics.

Enron

Banham’s CFO magazine profile of Andrew Fastow, one year before the Enron debacle came to light, was cited by writer Kurt Eichenwald in his book, Conspiracy of Fools. “Banham … captured everything pretty well: asset securitization, special-purpose entities, the reduction of balance-sheet debt,” Eichenwald wrote. Banham re-interviewed Fastow in 2019 after his imprisonment to determine if he had any useful advice to provide CFOs, given his experiences. Fastow insisted that he had complied with all the accounting rules but acknowledged that what he did was “unethical and unprincipled. … For that I deserved to go to prison.”

U.S. Embassy

Banham was submitted by The Journal of Commerce for the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Journalism. The nomination honored a series of articles he wrote disputing government reports that the Soviet Union had bugged the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Banham contended that the government had purchased a secret insurance policy underwritten by American International Group, Inc., and reinsured by Ingosstrakh, the Russian state insurer. In effect, the Soviet Union would be on the hook financially for the damage to the building. The articles were cited in the Congressional Review. The Cold War ended before the alleged eavesdropping devices were ever ascertained.

Histories and Biographies

In 1996 Banham was approached to write his first book, a 100-year history of USF&G, a major national insurance company. He followed it up with similar chronicles of Coors Brewing Company, Conoco, Hawaiian Airlines, Guardian Life, Dover Corporation and Appleton Paper Company, among others. The Coors book, Rocky Mountain Legend, reached number four on the Denver Post's regional bestseller list.

Banham also wrote three authorized biographies: on discount brokerage magnate Ernest Jacob Olde, Houston developer Kenneth Schnitzer, and Gary Milgard, founder of Milgard Manufacturing, the third largest producer of windows in the U.S.

In 2019, Banham co-authored a history of Harvard Business School (with HBS Professor Emeritus Howard Stevenson) called Problem Solving. The book features the stories of more than 200 HBS alumni applying their leadership and problem-solving skills to change the world for the better.

Histories of Ford & Boeing

In 2003, Banham was asked to write the official 100-year history of Ford Motor Company. He obtained vital access to Ford family artifacts and company archives, culminating in The Ford Century. The book received favorable reviews in the New York Times and other publications. "A tale that churns through every decade of the 20th century makes for a rich pictorial bath, all the more so since somebody got at Ford's inner archives and has made imaginative use of them." New York Times Book Review - Bruce McCall (12/08/2002). The book recently was selected as one of the five best books ever written about Detroit. More than 750,000 copies of the book are in print around the world.

Banham also is the author of Wanderlust, a tale of the author's travels in an iconic Airstream travel trailer, writing about its history, design and cultural impact; The Fight for Fairfax, a post-World War II political and economic history of Northern Virginia, and Higher, a history of aerospace giant Boeing and the U.S. aviation industry. He obtained crucial access to the aerospace company's archives to produce “never-before seen photographs and inside stories … tracing the company from its start … in a boathouse in Seattle in July 1916 to becoming the world’s largest aerospace company and a technology innovator,” The Chicago Tribune writes.

Aviation Week hailed the book as a “meticulously researched overview,” adding that Banham “masterfully captures the broad history and spirit of the company as it has evolved over the decades.”

The Wall Street Journal's review of the book was equally favorable, stating, “`Higher' ably commemorates Boeing’s enduring achievement, gliding nimbly through its triumphs of design, engineering and manufacture and, not least, its memorable contributions to wars won.”

Theatre

Banham is also a professional theatre playwright and director, directing Othello, Macbeth, Henry V, Twelfth Night, and A Doll's House for Seattle Shakespeare Company; Merchant of Venice for Wooden O Theatre; Of Mice and Men, Mauritius and Superior Donuts for Seattle Public Theatre; Crooked for Theater Schmeater; and three of his own plays, adaptations of Ethan Frome, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (with Jennifer Sue Johnson) and Romance with a Double Bass (based on four short stories by Anton Chekhov), all for Book-It Repertory Theatre. Broadway World called Banham's direction of A Doll's House for Seattle Shakespeare Company a “crisp and engaging production. Once again he has assembled a stellar cast and crew and molded the story into a rock solid evening of theater.” He is a recipient of five Seattle Times Footlight Awards as the city's Best Director.

Personal life

Banham was raised in Flushing, Queens, and sold hot dogs at Shea Stadium as a teenager. He credits his writing skills to the nuns who introduced him to reading and grammar at Mary's Nativity Elementary School. His maternal grandparents, immigrants from Italy, could neither read nor write. Banham is married to the actress and teacher Jennifer Sue Johnson and has three children. The couple have homes in Los Angeles, Seattle and Idyllwild, California.

External links

• Official website
• Russ Banham at IMDb
• Meatballs
• Mark Waldstein, "He Said, She Said", Encore magazine
• Banham, "Party of Three", CFO magazine, May 8, 2006
• Meatballs, An Oral History, July 6, 2017, Eric Spitznagel, Vanity Fair.
• Meatballs with Russ Banham, I Was There Too,” podcast with Matt Courley.
• Boeing Brings 100 Years of History to Its Fight to Restore its Reputation. National Public Radio.
• Plane Crash Podcast. Podcast with Russ Banham as Guest, Discussing History of Boeing.
• Russ Banham Talks Airstream with Rudy Maxa.