He also found allies in promoting his idea. Among them were Donald Grangaard, chairman of First Bank System, who joined the Fairview board of directors, and Robert Crabb, the man who managed real estate owned by local retailing fixture the Dayton Company. Dayton was undertaking a revolution of its own in the 1950s, building the world’s first all-enclosed suburban shopping mall in Edina. As it happened, the company had designated 15 acres of its new Southdale development as a “medical zone.”

Northwestern and Abbott hospitals had already turned down invitations to build on the site, but Dayton was intrigued by Platou’s ideas and worked out a deal with Fairview. “That was it,” Platou told a historian years later. “That made us.” The 1965 opening of Fairview Southdale Hospital—billed as the first full-service satellite hospital in America—“set a pattern for other hospitals throughout the nation to do the same.”

During the next 20-plus years, Platou oversaw numerous mergers and affiliations with other hospitals and the construction of new facilities. When Fairview acquired the University of Minnesota’s hospital and clinic in 1997, Platou, though officially retired, played a behind-the-scenes role in finalizing an alliance that had begun with informal discussions 30 years earlier.

And Platou did follow in his uncle Erling’s footsteps in one important way. Now 85, but seemingly indefatigable, he is president of the University of Minnesota medical school Dean’s Board of Visitors and a senior advisor to the Minnesota Medical Foundation, which Dr. Erling Platou—a prominent U of M faculty member and a foster parent to Platou—helped found.

“Uncle Erling and his friends would talk about it over Sunday dinner,” Platou recalls, with another loud laugh. “I thought a foundation was a corset. Now here I am, 70 years later, doing the foundation’s work.”

Platou is a driving force behind the foundation’s effort to raise more than $125 million in private funds to complement state money for a world-class biomedical research park. He shuttles between his campus office and the Minneapolis Club to meet with community leaders and contributors, and has little doubt the fundraising mission will be accomplished.

“That’s what I’m working on now, and we’re going to get it done,” Platou vows. And that, of course, will be another story.

TIMELINE

1923 Carl Platou is born in Brooklyn.

1942 After their mother’s death and father’s departure with the Navy, he and brother Harald live with an uncle, Dr. Erling Platou, in Minneapolis.

1943 A University of Minnesota student, Platou enlists in the Army. He is discharged in 1945 with a Purple Heart, Bronze Star, and other honors.

1946 Returns to the U of M to earn a bachelor of arts degree; later earns a master’s degree in the university’s new hospital administration program.

1952 Hired as administrator of Fairview Hospital.

1959 Secures 15 acres for a new Fairview hospital as part of the Dayton Company’s new Southdale shopping mall development in Edina.

1965 Fairview Southdale Hospital opens, and is followed by other new hospitals, mergers, and affiliations.

1989 Platou retires as Fairview CEO.

1997 Facilitates the acquisition of the University of Minnesota Hospital and Clinic by the Fairview system.

2005 Named senior advisor to the dean of the U of M medical school.

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