Evansville native, Trident Seafoods billionaire Chuck Bundrant dies at age 79

Charles "Chuck" Bundrant, who graduated from Evansville's North High School and went on to become a billionaire in the seafood industry, died Sunday at age 79.

Bundrant passed away at his home in Edmonds, Washington, according to the Seattle Times.

Bundrant graduated from North in 1960, when the school was still located on Diamond Avenue at Stringtown Road. While at North, he and some classmates worked at the former grocery store on Stringtown across from the school, said Bill Jaggers, a classmate.

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Only a year after graduating, a 19-year-old Bundrant made his way from Evansville to Seattle in a 1952 Ford station wagon. He wanted to earn money in fisheries to pay his way through college in Tennessee, the Seattle Times reported.

He began his career working in a cannery earning $1.59 an hour and leveraged his earnings to purchase his first fishing vessel.

He launched into a lifelong career in the Alaska fisheries, and in 1972, he co-founded Trident, a privately held company.

Trident’s website describes the company as North America’s largest vertically integrated seafood company, with a fleet of more than 40 company-owned vessels, including catcher processors, trawlers, crab boats, tenders and freighters.

The company also has 11 Alaska seafood processing plants, three in Washington, one in Minnesota and one in Georgia. Trident employs about 9,000 people at the peak of summer harvests, according to the Seattle Times.

Trident is now led by Bundrant’s son, Joe Bundrant, who became chief executive officer in 2013, when Chuck Bundrant became board chair.

An obituary in the Seattle Times described the elder Bundrant as an innovator and risk-taker.

In 1973, his boat, the 135-foot Billikin, was the first Alaska vessel to catch, cook and freeze crab.

In 1981, Bundrant built a fish-processing plant on Akutan, in Alaska’s Aleutian chain that could be slammed by storms packing 100-mph winds, the Seattle newspaper reported. At the time, fishing fleets from Japan, Russia and Korea dominated area trawl harvests.

But 1976 legislation had given U.S. processors and U.S. fishermen first claim to the harvests within the 200-mile zone, and Bundrant saw opportunity on the remote volcanic island, the Seattle Times said.

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Akutan is now a centerpiece of Trident’s Alaska operation with a huge capacity to process pollock — a staple of McDonald’s fish sandwiches — and other seafood.

Bundrant also was involved in lobbying Congress on matters pertaining to fisheries.

John Connelly, president of the National Fisheries Institute, told the Seattle Times that Bundrant was a dreamer, and a man of few words, but when he spoke, that “gravelly voice was listened to from Cordova (Alaska) to Capitol Hill.”

Bundrant stayed close to his Evansville roots, keeping in touch with family and friends, and contributing greatly to North High School.

His name adorns several places on North's new campus off U.S. 41, most notably the football stadium. Bundrant Stadium opened in 2012.

He was part of the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corp. Foundation Hall of Fame's inaugural class, in 2010.

Bundrant a few years ago invited Jaggers and some other classmates to visit him in the Pacific Northwest. A private plane dispatched by Bundrant carried the group to Alaska, where the old friends enjoyed a few days of sightseeing, and, of course, fishing.

"We wound up fishing for two or three days on a boat, caught a lot of salmon and brought it back," Jaggers said.

Surviving members of North's class of 1960 will miss their friend, Jaggers said. "He was very successful, very down to earth and we hate to lose him."