Michael Mungo dead at 82

Michael Mungo, one of the first home builders to anticipate the demand for suburban homes in Lexington County, and a longtime member of USC's board of trustees, died early Sunday. He was 82 and had congestive heart failure.

In 1954, Mungo put to use something he had learned in a college government class and invested in land near the Broad River, building 119 brick, ranch-style homes in Riverside Forest.

The Mungo home-building business was born.

It is run now by Mungo's sons, Steven and Stewart, who grew it into one of the largest home-building companies in the nation.

In the second half of his life, Michael Mungo established a foundation to benefit select Christian and charitable causes.

Son Stewart said he and his brother were called about 2 a.m. to Lexington Medical Center, where their father died.

He had been in relatively good health, going fishing just a few days ago.

"He was a leader in the industry, especially in South Carolina, but that took a back seat to whatever he did for the community," Mark Nix, director of the Home Builders Association of South Carolina, said Sunday.

Nix recalled that, three years ago, Mungo led a fundraising drive to get 1,600 members of the S.C. National Guard, training in Mississippi, home for Christmas.

"He never wanted people to know how much money it was," Nix recalled, "but he's the one who said, 'You tell me how much money you need, and I'll make it happen.'

"Those are the kinds of things he did."

Mungo may well have been the longest-serving member of the University of South Carolina board of trustees. He began his tenure in 1968 and still held a seat at his death.

He remained engaged in the university's business.

At last month's meeting, board members were discussing whether to borrow money for a package of construction projects.

Someone asked about the interest rate, and while the board's financial advisers consulted their BlackBerries and iPhones, Mungo gave the answer, president Harris Pastides said.

He was within a tenth of a percent.

"He saved the university lots of money ... by using common sense and by using the experience he amassed as a businessman," Pastides said.

Mungo was especially proud of the mark he made on the board in 1970, when he calmed a clash between police and students protesting the Kent State shootings, and again in 1990, when he pushed out flamboyant president Jim Holderman and his extravagant spending habits.

He was hurt, though, when the Legislature did not return him to the board in 1978. His hiatus was brief; he was voted back in four years later.

"I like ideas and concepts," he said in a story published in The State last year. "I used to call them dreams."

Mungo said a desire to shake off the poverty of his childhood drove him to build the company that eventually made him a millionaire.

He was born in the country town of Bethune, in Kershaw County, in 1928.

His father, Walter, was a logger and lumber dealer. Michael was one of seven children.

When he was 11, his father died. His mother, Beatrice, moved the children to Rock Hill, where Michael worked in a cotton mill, pushing a refreshment cart selling Cokes, cigarettes and B.C. powders, an old-fashioned remedy for headaches.

After high school, Mungo served two years in the Army, then enrolled at the University of South Carolina, an institution that remained central to his life.

He attended law school for one semester, envisioning himself as "a great criminal lawyer," he said. But he was disappointed by the course work and gravitated toward government and psychology instead.

Mungo became convinced plaster was a thing of the past and, to pay tuition, started a drywall hanging business with his brother, Walt.

After a brief stint selling lots for a local real estate business - "I can flat sell, little lady, I'll tell you that" - he realized he wasn't suited to working for someone else.

He was in his mid-20s when he began his home-building business.

Mungo married twice, first to Mary Meech Mungo, who quit teaching to raise their boys, and then to Jennifer Brewer Mungo, a college professor and speech therapist. Both women died of breast cancer.

Michael Mungo suffered a heart attack when he was 50. He turned The Mungo Co. over to his sons.

"What he taught us was it's important to reinvest in your community, to support the nonprofits in your own backyard," Stewart Mungo said.

Michael Mungo said people always commented on the tulips, azaleas and camellias surrounding his home in Whitehall, the subdivision he built 50 years ago.

He never moved away from there.

"People don't talk to me about business, the university," Mungo said. "They talk about flowers."

This story was originally published April 12, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Michael Mungo dead at 82."