Larry Hillblom

The “H” in DHL, the package express firm, stands for Hillblom. It’s an understated testament to an unlikely entrepreneur. Raised in a middle-class home in California farm country, Larry Hillblom worked his way from peach canneries to Berkeley’s law school. While there, he took a night job as a courier, hopping on commercial airlines and flying bags stuffed with commercial documents up and down the West Coast. It gave the perpetually disheveled 25-year-old an idea: express delivery from the mainland United States to Hawaii, and from Hawaii to East Asia. He met Adrian Dalsey (the “D” of DHL) in a grocery-store parking lot, and the two men decided to launch a trans-Pacific delivery service. Its couriers flew commercial airlines, their luggage stuffed with time-sensitive documents: bills of lading, original canceled checks, and signed legal papers. At a time when the Post Office took two weeks to get a letter from Los Angeles to Honolulu, DHL guaranteed overnight delivery. Plagued by suffocating regulators and relentless lawsuits, the company nevertheless thrived. When Hillblom died 26 years later, the company flew to almost every nation, employed 33,400 people, and had annual sales of approximately $3 billion. In the mid-1980s, Hillblom had stepped away from the day-to-day management of the company. He moved to Saipan and became a citizen of the Northern Mariana Islands, taking side jobs as a bartender, backhoe operator, pawnshop owner, and auxiliary justice of the commonwealth’s Supreme Court. Much of his free time was spent prowling the brothels of Southeast Asia. On May 21, 1995, Hillblom’s twin-engined SeaBee crashed into the Philippine Sea. The bodies of the pilot and a fellow passenger were recovered, but not Hillblom’s. To this day, some people believe he survived and lives under an assumed identity in Thailand. Hillblom’s will left his entire estate of about $600 million to the University of California for medical research. But the will was immediately contested by lawyers representing women in Vietnam, Micronesia, and the Philippines who claimed to have borne children by Hillblom. For two years, a brutal and often bizarre legal battle raged. In exchange for $1 million cash and a share of a French chalet, Hillblom’s mother eventually offered a blood sample so her DNA could be used to verify paternity claims. With that evidence, four women eventually received about $50 million each on behalf of the children they produced with Hillblom. After these paternity payments, legal fees, and taxes, approximately $240 million was left to fund the Larry Hillblom Foundation. It went to work on health problems. Today it is a leading funder of cutting-edge efforts to cure, treat, and manage both diabetes and diseases associated with aging.