Road contractor built business from ground up

Those Minneapolis streets under the wheels of your car? Steven Thomas of Rogers may have had a hand in putting them down.

Thomas, who grew up in northeast Minneapolis, died Feb. 11 in Robbinsdale of complications from cancer. He was 79.

He got a start in the road construction business as a laborer with the Minnesota Department of Transportation after service in the Korean War. Over the years, he started two construction firms. Progressive Contractors is still in business, and Thomas and Sons, which he founded in 1976, is still run by his wife and children.

Some of the city streets his firm rebuilt include parts of Hennepin and Nicollet Avenues and Washington Avenue near the Metrodome and in the Warehouse District. Thomas and Sons is now doing work near the new University of Minnesota football stadium.

After attending Minneapolis' Vocational High School, Thomas served as a Marine in the Korean War. In heavy fighting in central Korea in 1951, he was wounded and was awarded the Purple Heart, among other decorations.

After the war, he worked as a trucker and at St. Paul's Ford plant.

By the late 1950s, he caught on with MnDOT. He learned how to bid on contracts and lead work crews in a stint with a road construction firm.

"He would look at the site and visualize how it would work," said Dziedzic. "He had a natural instinct for estimating the job."

Thomas, the son of Lebanese immigrants, grew up earning pennies by catching pigeons under the Central Avenue Bridge, hawking newspapers on Hennepin and Washington Avenues and stacking Gold Medal flour sacks near the Mississippi River, said his wife, Carol.

Thomas, who moved to Minneapolis from Lebanon when he was about 7, would get a lot of laughs telling the story about his elementary school classmates who taught him swear words to call the teacher. They didn't tell him the meaning of the words.

He told his wife, "I spent a lot of time in the corner," she said, adding that these were the same people who became his lifelong friends.

His son Dan, of Rogers, said his father would let his employees do things their own way if they worked hard.

That's why "guys liked my dad," said his son.

Building the company "took a lot of guts," said his son. "He came out of nowhere."

In addition to his wife of 53 years and his son Dan, he is survived by another son, Steven of Minneapolis; a daughter, Shari of Plymouth; a sister, Catherine Westling of Alexandria, Minn., and five grandsons.