A quiet force: King helped revitalize city behind scenes
Coming of age in the 1950s, Tom King thought he’d make a pretty good engineer. “I grew up during what I call the ‘Sputnik Era’. Anybody who was a halfway decent student was going to be an engineer,” says the newly retired president of the Lilly Foundation. “When I saw what engineers did, I discovered I wouldn’t make a very good one.” Instead, King found himself a niche constructing some of the most complex local economic development projects of the…