Former Toro Chief David McLaughlin Dies

DILLINGHAM, Alaska -- David T. McLaughlin, whose presidency of the Toro Co. in Bloomington, Minn., during the 1970s was one of several controversial leadership posts, died Aug. 25 while on a fishing trip at a lodge in Dillingham, Alaska.

McLaughlin, a former president of Dartmouth College, was 72 and lived in Newbury, N.H.

The cause of death has not been determined, said Roland Adams, a spokesman for Dartmouth, but he noted that McLaughlin had had heart problems.

In 1970, McLaughlin was named president and chief operating officer of Toro, a manufacturer of lawn-care products and snowblowers, and the company's success was reflected in his promotion to chairman in 1977.

But when he laid off 325 employees in February 1981 with impending layoffs for about 1,000 more, he said the fault was all his.

He had driven an aggressive expansion in the late 1970s into new products such as flexible-line grass trimmers that were rushed to market, resulting in shoddy workmanship that tarnished Toro's reputation for quality. He courted mass merchants who discounted Toro machines, undercutting hardware dealers on which the company relied to service its lawnmowers and snowblowers. Then it snowed little for two winters, and 350,000 snowblowers sat in Toro warehouses.

Two weeks after the firings, McLaughlin resigned to become president of Dartmouth, his alma mater.

In the 1980s, he more than doubled the school's endowment, increased faculty salaries by 43 percent and oversaw new buildings at the campus in Hanover, N.H.

But the hard-driving businessman faced sustained opposition from the faculty, who were especially angry that he reinstated the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) on campus. Part of his rationale for bringing it back was to "open up another avenue of funding," he said in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor in 1985.

He resigned in October 1986 as the college started a 10-year fundraising campaign.

McLaughlin, who was born in Grand Rapids, Mich., was a football star at Dartmouth, and was drafted by the Philadelphia Eagles. He passed up professional football to earn an M.B.A. from Dartmouth.

After serving for two years as a pilot in the Air Force, McLaughlin climbed rapidly in business, first at Champion Papers and then at Toro.

After leaving the presidency of Dartmouth, he was chairman, then president and chief executive of the Aspen Institute of Washington, D.C., a nonprofit organization devoted to fostering business leadership, until 1997. From 1988 to 2001, he also was chairman of Orion Safety Products, a maker of highway safety flares, in Easton, Md.

He was chairman of the American Red Cross during relief efforts after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when many donors complained that their contributions were going to causes other than helping victims. He corrected what he called "a mistake" by dedicating all of the contributions to the Red Cross's Sept. 11 campaign to victims of the attacks.

Survivors include his wife, Judith; daughters Wendy McLaughlin of Minneapolis and Susan Jangro of Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.; sons William of Minneapolis and C. Jay of Easton, and 13 grandchildren.