As a University of Southern California student in the late 1940s, John Shea may have seemed an unlikely candidate to run his family’s construction company, a venerable outfit that had helped build the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge.
By his own later admission, he spent little time on his civil-engineering studies and was most interested in playing varsity tennis or gambling on backgammon and poker games, some of which lasted all night.
One evening, he blew his entire savings, more than $2,000, on a craps game at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, he said in an oral history recorded by one of his sons.
His mother had to talk him out of quitting school in his senior year.