Casino operator Grace dies at 69

Businessman had interests in regional gaming enterprises

? William M. Grace, a self-made entrepreneur whose wide-ranging business enterprises included gambling operations in four states, is dead of cancer at 69.

Grace died Sunday at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where he was undergoing treatment for leukemia, said Larry Seckington, corporate counsel for W. M. Grace Cos. Inc. of St. Joseph. Seckington said Grace had been there since January and was to have undergone a stem-cell surgical procedure later this year.

Casino interests of Grace’s businesses include the St. Jo Frontier Casino in St. Joseph, The Woodlands pari-mutuel dog and horse racing complex in Kansas City, Kan., the Mark Twain Casino in LaGrange, Mo., and the Lakeside Casino and Resort in Osceola, Iowa.

A Grace business also manages the Indian-owned Casino White Cloud in White Cloud, Kan., and he had opened the first casino in Arizona, where one of his companies operates a hotel linked with a tribal casino in Prescott.

His St. Joseph casino was among the first riverboat casinos in Missouri and its opening after the flooding of 1993 and the closing of a pork plant and medical business helped provide needed jobs for the area.

“We needed an uplift,” said Dick DeShon, a minority owner of the Frontier. “It created a lot of good jobs. Bill was a visionary and saw the opportunities.”

James B. Deutsch, a Jefferson City lawyer who has represented Grace’s Missouri gambling operations, said Grace’s approach was what lawmakers originally wanted from casinos.

“He was exactly what the authors of the original legislation had in mind, not major gaming enterprises but hometown enterprises with cruising riverboats,” Deutsch said.

Deutsch called Grace “a tough businessman but an honest guy. He always delivered what he promised.”

“He was always the voice of the small gambling operator in Missouri,” said Troy Stemming of the Ameristar Kansas City Casino and Hotel, president of the Missouri Riverboat Gaming Assn. “He constantly reminded us that we needed to carefully evaluate the spending of his money on our joint ventures, contrary to the rest of us who were spending our companies’ money.”

After buying The Woodlands out of bankruptcy in 1998, Grace sought time and again without success to get the Kansas Legislature to allow slot machines and other casino games at the race track, struggling financially ever since casino gambling came to Missouri.

A farm boy from Burlington Junction, Mo., Grace served in the Army and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Arizona, later teaching economics at Arizona State while working as a field service engineer for Reynolds Aluminum.

He returned to Missouri in 1966, starting the W. M. Grace Construction Co. in St. Joseph. Today the companies Grace started employ more than 2,200 people.

Before his death, Grace had designated Bruce Schmitter, a vice president, to lead the company’s gambling operations. Schmitter said Monday that future plans were uncertain.

Grace is survived by his wife, Kathy; two sons, Matt and Howard; a daughter, Heather Kaiser; and six grandchildren.