By GLENN FOWLER
Robert Di Giorgio, former head of the Di Giorgio
Corporation, a billion-dollar family-owned
concern with interests in food, drug, building
materials and real estate businesses, died on
Wednesday in San Francisco. He was 79 years old
and lived in San Francisco.
He died of
complications from surgery performed in 1988,
his family said, and had been in nursing homes
for more than a year.
Mr. Di Giorgio joined the Di Giorgio Fruit
Company, from which the corporation grew, in
1937. The business was founded in the San
Joaquin Valley of California in 1920 by Joseph
Di Giorgio, who built it into the country's
largest grower of produce.
Robert Di Giorgio became president of the
company in 1962. Three years later, in the midst
of a bitter struggle by farm workers led by
Cesar Chavez to organize for collective
bargaining with grape growers, Mr. Di Giorgio
broke ranks with his fellow employers to declare
that the workers should be represented by a
union.
He favored the International Brotherhood of
Teamsters, but that union largely lost out to a
coalition formed by the A.F.L.-C.I.O. that
included the Chavez forces. Mr. Di Giorgio
agreed to a contract with the union and other
employers followed.
Mr. Di Giorgio, a native New Yorker, was a
graduate of the Lawrenceville School and Yale
University, and held a law degree from Fordham
University. He spent most of his working life
with the family concern, which grew to more than
30 divisions around the world. He became
chairman and chief executive in 1971 and retired
in 1982.
One of Mr. Di Giorgio's principal divisions
was the White Rose Food Company, the largest
independent wholesaler of groceries in the New
York metropolitan area. White Rose was sold last
year.
He is survived by his wife, the former
Patricia Kuhrts; four daughters, Ann Costigan of
San Francisco, Barbara Di Giorgio of Danville,
Calif., Christine Timmerman of Atherton, Calif.,
and Dorothy Moore of Menlo Park, Calif.; a
sister, Dorothy Gretsch of Jupiter, Fla., and
five grandchildren.
