Edfred L. Shannon Jr., the longtime former chief executive of the oil-drilling firm Santa Fe International who made headlines in the 1980s when he brokered the sale of his company to a petroleum firm owned by the Kuwaiti government, died Sunday at his home in Whittier. He was 82.
A statement from his family said that he had recently been hospitalized in Whittier but had returned home a few days before his death. The exact cause was not reported.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday, October 01, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 51 words Type of Material: Correction
Edfred L. Shannon Jr. obituary: The obituary of Edfred L. Shannon Jr. in Saturday's California section said his father was a professor at Oklahoma State College in Stillwater. The school was called Oklahoma A&M at the time Shannon's father taught there. The name was changed in 1957 to Oklahoma State University.
Under Shannon's leadership, Santa Fe International grew from a small Santa Fe Springs-based oil drilling contractor recording steady and sustained growth. By 1980, it had revenues of $1.2 billion, and a year later the Kuwaiti government, through its Kuwait Petroleum Corp., bought the company for $2.5 billion.
At the time, it was the largest merger in U.S business history. The deal initially raised concerns about the sale of a valuable American firm to a foreign government. National security issues were cited on several levels, including the fact that one of Santa Fe's subsidiaries, Alhambra-based engineering firm C.F. Braun and Co., had designed nuclear plants around the country. But the deal quickly passed congressional scrutiny.
Shannon stayed on with the firm after the sale, serving as chairman and chief executive until his retirement in the early 1990s.
Shannon was born in Durant, Okla., on June 30, 1926. His father was a professor at what was then Oklahoma State College in Stillwater. The family moved to Morehead, Ky., when Shannon was in his late teens and he met his future wife, Ruth L. Boggs, at a basketball tournament there.
Enlisting in the Army on his 18th birthday, Shannon served with the first group of U.S. occupation troops in Japan in 1945. After his discharge two years later, he returned to Kentucky, married Boggs and headed to UC Berkeley, where he enrolled in a petroleum engineering curriculum.
After graduating in 1951, he landed a job with Union Oil Co. in Santa Fe Springs. Two years later he was recruited to join Santa Fe Drilling Co., which had once been a part of Union Oil. When Union decided to get out of the drilling business, the unit was purchased by a large group of members of the unit with a $250,000 investment.
