The New York Times-20080129-Charles F- Luce- 90- Ex-Chief of Con Ed- -Obituary -Obit--
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Charles F. Luce, 90, Ex-Chief of Con Ed; [Obituary (Obit)]
Full Text (992 words)Charles F. Luce, the chairman and chief executive of Consolidated Edison, the giant New York electric and gas utility during some of its most difficult times, died Saturday in Torrance, Calif. He was 90 and lived in Bronxville, N.Y.
The cause was prostate cancer, said Joyce Hergenhan, a former company spokeswoman.
Mr. Luce headed Con Ed from 1967 to 1982 and dealt with the oil crisis of the 1970s, customer rage over rising rates, the 1977 blackout that paralyzed New York City and the settlement of a decades-long struggle with environmental groups over construction of a power plant at Storm King Mountain on the Hudson River.
A liberal Democrat and an environmentalist, Mr. Luce did not fit the standard profile of the big-business executive when he agreed to leave his post as under secretary of the interior in the Johnson administration to take over Consolidated Edison.
The metropolitan area's need for electric energy doubles about every 15 years, Mr. Luce said then. To supply these vast new quantities of energy at reasonable cost, but protect the city's environment from pollution and unsightly structures, is a king-size job.
It became particularly difficult in 1973, when fuel prices skyrocketed because of the Arab oil embargo, and Con Ed's rates followed.
Facing customer protests, Mr. Luce chose to soften the monthly billing blow by eliminating the company's April 1974 dividend. That prompted shareholder protests, and on May 24, 1974, Mr. Luce presided over a meeting at the old Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street at which customers and shareholders boisterously expressed their views.
A New York Times headline the next day said, Days of Anxiety for the Man Who Saved a Watt.
That was a reference to the Save-a-Watt program, which Mr. Luce had instituted soon after taking over as Con Ed chairman. It was a shift from the electricity industry's traditional marketing strategy, succinctly expressed as Live better electrically.
For 25 hours, starting on the evening of July 13, 1977, New York City could not live electrically at all. Two lightning strikes on major tie-lines in Westchester County led to the collapse of the entire system.
Some Con Ed officials attributed the blackout to an act of God. Although Mr. Luce did not utter the phrase himself, he became associated with it.
He kept cool in the face of Mayor Abraham D. Beame's accusations of gross negligence on the part of the company, saying, Respectfully, I think he's wrong, and calling for a fair review.
In the end, Con Ed had to concede that the systemwide expansion of the power failure after the local lightning strikes was largely its fault.
Four years before Mr. Luce became chairman, Con Ed had started seeking approval from regulators to build a hydroelectric plant on Storm King Mountain in Orange County, 55 miles north of New York City. Opposition to that plan and to proposals for other power plants along the Hudson River was fierce and unrelenting for nearly 20 years.
Then, in December 1980, 11 environmental groups, Con Ed and other utility companies reached what became known as the Hudson River Peace Treaty. Mr. Luce had asked Russell E. Train, a former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, to mediate the dispute.
Under the agreement, Con Ed abandoned efforts to build the Storm King plant. In return, the environmental groups and the federal Environmental Protection Agency dropped their demands that Con Ed build six costly cooling towers to protect fish from being sucked into power plants at Indian Point and several other sites along the river. The agreement was widely cited as a model for balancing economic and environmental needs.
Charles Franklin Luce was born on Aug. 12, 1917, in Platteville, Wis., a son of James and Wilma Luce. His father owned a furniture store and a mortuary.
As a teenager, Mr. Luce got some early exposure to the utility business as a meter reader for the local power company.
Mr. Luce earned a bachelor's degree and a law degree through a five-year program at the University of Wisconsin in 1941, then received a master's degree in law at Yale in 1942.
Unable to enlist for military service in World War II because of an attack of polio, Mr. Luce became a staff lawyer for the Board of Economic Warfare in Washington.
A year later, on the recommendation of a professor at Yale, he was chosen as a law clerk to Justice Hugo L. Black of the Supreme Court.
For 15 years after World War II, Mr. Luce practiced law in Walla Walla, Wash.
Then, in 1961, President Kennedy chose him to head the Bonneville Power Administration, which markets power from the Grand Coulee Dam and more than 20 other federal hydroelectric plants in the Columbia River Basin.
Mr. Luce also worked with Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall in creating the Pacific Northwest-Pacific Southwest Intertie, a vast power transmission complex. He negotiated a 1964 treaty with Canada for joint hydroelectric development of the Columbia River.
At Mr. Udall's request, President Johnson appointed Mr. Luce as under secretary of the Interior in September 1966. But within six months, Con Ed officials -- spurred by a Fortune magazine headline, The Company You Love to Hate -- asked Mr. Luce to take control of the company.
Mr. Luce's first wife, Helen Oden, died in 2001. He is survived by his second wife, the former Margaret Richmond; two sons, James, of Vancouver, Wash., and Charles Jr., of Boulder, Colo.; two daughters, Christina Gordon of Mansfield Center, Conn., and Barbara Luce of Portland, Conn.; and eight grandchildren.
Mr. Luce was an avid biker. As Con Ed chairman, he would regularly pedal around Manhattan on a three-speed bike, wearing a meter-reader's cap, inspecting company work crews and peeking into open manholes.
[Illustration]PHOTO: Charles F. Luce in 1977. He led Con Ed from 1967 to 1982, a period that included the paralyzing blackout of July 13, 1977. (PHOTOGRAPH BY DON HOGAN CHARLES/THE NEW YORK TIMES)