Mary Cunningham Agee

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Mary Elizabeth Cunningham Agee is a former American business executive, author, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. Her well-publicized office romance with Bendix Corporation CEO William Agee torpedoed Bendix's attempt to acquire Martin Marietta in 1982, and in the process destroyed Bendix, too. One Martin Marietta director said at the time, "We'll burn this company to the ground before we let that [woman] have it." She also helped her husband, William Agee, destroy Morrison-Knudsen Corporation.

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[edit] Biography

Mary Elizabeth Cunningham was born in 1951 in Falmouth, Maine to an Irish Catholic construction company executive and his wife. Her father had a drinking problem and at age 5, her parents split. Her mother took the four children with her to Hanover, New Hampshire, where a cousin who was a Catholic priest, Rev. William Nolan, offered a safe haven.

Studious, hard-working and eager to please others, she excelled in high school, participating in softball, gymnastics, and chorus, and joining the more brainy clubs: French, Latin, science and world affairs. She graduated in from high school in 1969.

She spent her freshman year at Newton College of the Sacred Heart in Massachusetts, and then enrolled at Wellesley College in 1970. She graduated magna cum laude in 1973 with a Phi Beta Kappa key and a bachelor's degree in logic and philosophy.

She met her first husband, Howard "Bo" Gray, Jr., an American Express executive (and African American), during a college mixer in her senior year. They divorced after six years. Years later, Mary would say the marriage sprang from "her youthful idealism," but their differences were too great for a long-term marriage to succeed.

She enrolled at the Harvard Business School in 1977, and earned an MBA in the spring of 1979. She declined the most well-paying job offers (32 in total) in New York City so she could work for a well-regarded CEO at Bendix in Michigan.

After considerable national publicity, she resigned in October 1980 after just 15 months at Bendix, and moved to Seagram's in New York City. She married William Agee in June 1982, the second marriage for both.

For many years she has been devoted to Catholic charities and causes, including the pro-life Nurturing Network (see [[1]]) since 1985.

Mary, William, and their two children, Mary Alana and Will, live in northern California.

[edit] Popular culture

The war between Bendix, Martin Marietta, and Allied was the source of the buzz phrase "Pac Man defense" (i.e., eat your opponent before he eats you).

[edit] External links

  • [2] - A managerial perspective

[edit] References


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