JOE ADORJAN (Jan 1957)

Joe Adorjan started working at the early age of fourteen at a bakery from 4 P.M. to 6 P.M. on weekdays and 2 A.M. to 10 A.M. on Saturdays.  He earned his lunch tokens at RHS by cutting ice cream in the school cafeteria every morning.  He feels his early experience set his work ethic for the future.

At age seventeen, he joined the Naval Reserve and after graduation, he went on active duty.  After getting out of the Navy, he went to work for Century Electric as a lab technician.  His goal was to save enough money to go to college.  He graduated from St. Louis University in 1967 and went on to earn a Master’s Degree in economics and finance.

From 1968 to 1990, Joe held a variety of management and executive positions with Emerson Electric, including Senior Vice President of Corporate Development.  He was promoted to Executive Vice President in 1983, then became Vice Chairman and went on to become President.

He was the presidential appointee to the President’s Export Commission and Chairman of the U.S. Subcommittee on Encryption.  In 1999, he was elected chairman of the St. Louis University Board of Trustees and also served on the board of Ranken Technical College.

In 2005, he was appointed Honorary Counsel General of Hungary and in 2007, he formed a scholarship program, the Hungarian-Missouri Educational Partnership.

Although he traveled extensively, he says his most interesting trips were to Antarctica and searching for mountain gorillas in Uganda, where half of the six-hundred surviving gorillas are found.