Irwin Jacobs: The Eternal Opportunist

In a community famously thin on charisma, Jacobs is charismatic. With Curt Carlson, Jeno Paulucci, and Carl Pohlad out of the game, Jacobs is one of the Twin Cities’ few remaining old-style wheeler-dealers, men who defined an era with their boldness, acumen, and ability to acquire—legally—awe-inspiring wealth. Jacobs is, and has been for almost 40 years, one of the Twin Cities’ most intriguing characters—and, paradoxically, one of its least socially assertive. His dizzyingly diverse, often below-the-radar enterprises and investments no longer include a big-league sports franchise (during the 1980s, he and Pohlad held a majority position in the Minnesota Vikings), and memories of his days as a controversial corporate raider have faded with other icons of the Reagan age. He does not star in television commercials, appear on party pages, or shill for political candidates. When he is spotted away from his IDS sanctum, odds are it’s while shopping with his wife at Costco or catching a movie with a gaggle of his kids and grandkids.

If, like Leonard Zelig, Jacobs has seemed ubiquitous lately, he will never be mistaken for Woody Allen’s cinematic nebbish. At 67, he looks at least 10 years younger than he is. He’s a husky six-foot-three, sports a year-round tan befitting a boat builder, and favors pricey-looking open-neck shirts and casual slacks even during business hours. He wears his wavy, still mostly dark hair long and swept back behind the ears, looking more like a buccaneer than a businessman. He walks and talks fast, often with an air of having several things simultaneously on his mind—which, of course, he does.

Mark Jacobs, his son and partner, says, “He’s like a kid on the playground. He still wants to play all day and not miss out on any of the action.”

“Action” is an apt word for Jacobs and always has been. This is a man, after all, who’s been involved in money-making ventures—adventures may be a better term—since he was a child. Sitting at his worktable six decades later, he happily remembers those early days working for his father, a Russian immigrant who owned and operated Northwestern Bag and Burlap Company on North Third Street in Minneapolis, buying and recycling sacks for grain and feed mills throughout the Upper Midwest.

“In the summer I’d go with Dad all the time,” Jacobs recalls. “He worked so hard to make a living for the family.” Besides Irwin, there were two older sisters and younger brother Sheldon. “We’d pick up a load of gunny sacks and come home so dirty we could scrape the dirt off our arms with a knife.” By the time he was 12, he says, he was calling on his father’s accounts with his own truck and driver. “I didn’t have a driver’s license, but my dad gave me his checkbook. I used to sign his name—Samuel Jacobs—on the checks. Everybody knew me because I’d been out there with him since I was 5.”

Irwin graduated from North High, then spent exactly three days at the University of Minnesota. He was “a born peddler,” he says—a kid obsessed with the “art of the deal” and determined to complete his education on the street. In his early 20s, he was also a husband and the father of a growing family—he and his wife, Alexandra Jacobs (née Light), would have five children in eight years.