J.E. Corette Scholarship
John E. (Jack) Corette, former CEO and Chairman of the Board of Montana Power Company until his retirement in 1978, was a native of Butte, Montana. Jack was born in Butte on April 20, 1908. He attended Immaculate Conception Grade School, Butte High School, The University of Montana, and the University of Virginia Law School, graduating in 1930. In later years, Jack received honorary doctor of law degrees from Montana Tech, Carroll College and the College of Great Falls.
An avid sportsman, Jack played tennis, rode horseback, hunted birds and went skiing with his children and grandchildren into his eighties, enjoying Montana’s natural beauty. Jack always introduced himself as Jack Corette of Montana, which earned him the nickname “Mr. Montana”.
Jack died at the age of 85 of natural causes in California.
The following information is an excerpt from an article by John Stucke of the Missoulian.
With prescience, forthrightness and the gift of public speaking, [Corette] helped make Montana Power a Montana company. For 46 years he made sure the Butte business was a leader in the state with a national presence.
As boyhood chum and professional partner John J. “Jack” Burke put it: “The reason he was such a great business leader was a strong vision of where the industry was headed.”
Corette was born in Butte in 1908, the same year the Hauser Dam collapsed and John D. Ryan began plotting to consolidate many water projects into Montana Power Co.
Corette joined the company as a 26-year-old lawyer in 1934, then became a vice president in 1944. He was an executive for the company when American Power & Light spun it off as an independent publicly traded company.
It was Corette who knew early on that Montana Power would need additional natural gas reserves. So he negotiated the purchase of huge gas fields in southern Alberta.
“It was a helluva buy - $10 million,” Burke remembered. “Some of that gas is still flowing into Montana.”
In 1952, Corette took the reins as CEO and president.
He had sold the company’s gasoline businesses, knowing it would be a loser for the company. Instead, he developed two more hydroelectric projects near Great Falls and pinned the company’s future hope on Montana’s vast coal reserves to the east – more than a decade before coal seemed the answer to the energy crises of early 1970s.
Under Corette’s direction the company built the Colstrip plants.
Burke, who served on Montana Power’s board of directors, said it was Corette’s ability to peer into the future that made possible the state’s industrial expansion and diversity during the 1950s and 1960s.
Chemical plants and cement makers, timber mills and pulp makers – all with huge power demands – provided Montana with high-paying jobs and a broader tax base.
“All those kinds of industrial developments occurred with cheap energy from Montana Power,” Burke said. “Jack drove so much of that.”
Corette retired as CEO in 1973, then relinquished his board chairmanship in 1977.
Besides his Montana Power career, Corette was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis from 1953 to 1961. Then he served as a director of the First Bank System until 1976.
He also was on the board of the Pacific Gas Transmission Co. for two decades, beginning in 1957. And he sat on the boards of other companies with substantial interests in Montana, including the Northern Pacific Railway Co. from 1962 to 1970, and Burlington Northern Inc., beginning in 1970 when a number of railroad companies merged into the Burlington system.
He was a member of The Business Council, and was director of the Edison Electric Institute. Corette, handsome and athletic, was married to Elsie Pauly, the daughter of influential sheep and cattle ranchers in the Deer Lodge Valley.
After her death, Corette married Sally Murphy Sheridan of Missoula. He died in 1994.