John Eng: a cornerstone of the construction industry.

• Author: Anjum, Shehla
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Building Alaska

Most contractors pay attention to the details of impending work and evaluate specifics in advance, but few crawl around a job site on a blustery New Year's Day to figure out a problem months before the startup date. An exception is C. John Eng, who says projects often occupied his mind long before the work commenced. Eng, a former owner of the Anchorage construction firm Cornerstone General Contractors, remembers an occasion from the mid-1970s when he was with Kiewit in Omaha, Nebraska, working on a retrofit of an existing Kellogg cereal plant.

"On New Year's Eve I suddenly woke up and realized I had not done a complete comparison to make sure that the openings in the steel roof structure matched the ductwork that penetrated the roof from the rooftop heating and cooling units," he says.

New Year's Day saw Eng braving snow, ice, and -20 F weather, sliding beneath the equipment, checking the ductwork, and comparing the drawings. Except for one location everything matched. But, says Eng, "At the time, I beat myself up a bit for not being more thorough, but later an acquaintance put it in perspective and pointed out that I had realized the situation six months before the project start on the 4th of July."

Early Career Days

Eng, sixty-nine, co-owner of Cornerstone for twenty years before selling his share in the company, grew up in Waco, Nebraska, a small town of less than three hundred about forty miles from Lincoln, the state capital. After high school he studied construction management, a new field of study then, at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1970. After college, Eng went to work for Omaha-based national contractor Kiewit, then known as Peter Kiewit Sons' Inc. Eng had some prior experience in construction from working for his father, who owned a lumberyard and a small contracting firm.

Kiewit moved Eng to Seattle to serve as a project engineer and an estimator on a highway bridge. Two years later the company sent him to a ballistic missile base in Montana, but that turned out to be a short-lived assignment because President Richard M. Nixon negotiated the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with the then-USSR. Kiewit transferred Eng back to Omaha and later to Casper, Wyoming, where he worked on a large events center. After a decade with Kiewit, Eng decided it was time to find a new direction. Those years at Kiewit were valuable, Eng says. "I worked at the building group and became experienced in estimating and negotiating. I learned a lot about good management techniques."

The desire for new experiences led Eng to Alaska in 1980. His fascination with the state began long before that--in third grade--when he had an assignment to put together a book on Alaska, including a short history.

His experience with Kiewit helped him obtain work with Coffman White Engineers, a Washington-based construction management company. He worked later for Howard S. Wright and Strand Inc., two Seattle-based construction companies with operations in Alaska. He stayed with Strand for eight years, leaving in 1993. Once again, Eng was ready for something else.

Cornerstone Construction

Mark Palmatier, a former partner at Cornerstone, has known Eng since 1992. He remembers why Eng decided to form a new company. "John likes to think outside the bubble and had a vision of...