Winton M. "Red" Blount, former U.S. Postmaster General and founder of Blount Inc., died Oct. 24 at age 81.
Blount formed a company in 1946 with four war-surplus bulldozers and took it from building fish ponds in rural Alabama to building internationally recognized projects. The company, based in Montgomery, Ala., helped build the Superdome in New Orleans and King Saud University in Saudi Arabia. It built many projects for NASA, including a platform at Cape Kennedy used for space shuttle launches. It became a $1- billion company in the early 1980s, and for a while consistently ranked near the top of ENR's list of Top 400 contractors.