Comcast founder celebrates 90th birthday

The Fralinger String Band played, and the guy from cable TV's Cake Boss, Buddy Valastro, was there with a vanilla-and-fudge cake in the shape of the Comcast Center.

Employees, business partners, friends, and family besieged the guest of honor, hugging him and taking his picture.

"I can't believe people go to this much trouble, but it's a good excuse for a party," said Ralph J. Roberts, the great cable consolidator, as Comcast Corp. celebrated his 90th birthday.

The man who in 1963 cofounded the growing media giant in Mississippi still keeps a near-daily presence at company headquarters as a senior adviser to son Brian L. Roberts and other top managers.

His hearing doesn't seem as good as it was, and he shuffles when he walks because of a hip replacement, the result of a spill on an indoor tennis court in 2009. He laments that his doctors counseled against foxhunting.

But Roberts, with his white hair and distinctive bow tie (black with little white dots at Friday's party), has not let his hip slow down his business schedule.

In the last six weeks, he sat through four congressional hearings over the proposed $30 billion merger of Comcast and NBC Universal Inc., a division of General Electric Co. Brian Roberts, the company's current chief executive officer and chairman, testified at the Washington hearings.

On Thursday, a particularly long day, Ralph Roberts returned from a three-hour Senate hearing to host cocktails and dinner at the Comcast Center for 85 senior NBC Universal managers. The event, held in the same Comcast cafeteria as Friday's birthday party, was moderated by talk show host Charlie Rose.

The elder Roberts answered questions. His son was in New York.

"There is a little different culture between the two companies, as you might expect," Ralph Roberts said in an interview in his office before the birthday bash. "We're trading on the idea that we're a family company."

The broad outlines of Roberts' long life are legendary in American business.

He was raised in the New York suburbs and moved to Philadelphia in the 1930s, after his father passed away. Ralph; his mother, Sara; and his sister, Shirley, lived in Germantown.

Roberts attended the Wharton School and met his future wife, Suzanne Fleisher, at a dance. He marketed golf clubs, worked at an ad agency, and ran Pioneer Suspender Co., a men's accessory firm.

In 1961, Roberts sold the company and invested two years later in a six-employee Tupelo, Miss., cable system. His partners were Julian Brodsky and Daniel Aaron. Aaron died in 2003; Brodsky, 76, is nonexecutive vice chairman of the company.

In 1972, Comcast, then with $5.7 million in annual revenue, floated public stock with the intent to grow, and it was off to the races.

The company won a cable franchise in Philadelphia in 1984, and four years later its subscriber base topped one million customers. Comcast's revenue soared over $1 billion in 1993. It expanded through acquisitions and signing up new cable TV customers. Revenue was more than $10 billion in 2002.

Comcast relocated its corporate headquarters to the tallest building in Philadelphia in 2008 and announced its plans in early December to acquire 51 percent of NBC Universal, an acknowledgment that cable TV revenues were slowing.

Brian Roberts began the discussions with General Electric last March. Ralph Roberts met with GE chief executive Jeff Immelt in July at a resort and told him Comcast would not back out, even with the bad economy.

"When you have two companies that can feed off each other and make each other better, that is the ideal situation. We think this is a deal made in heaven," Ralph Roberts said, noting, though, that there are risks to the merger.

The deal needs government approvals. If Comcast obtains them and completes the merger, annual revenue could top $50 billion.

Raffi Amit, the Robert B. Goergen professor of entrepreneurship at the Wharton School, said a major accomplishment for Ralph Roberts was to successfully hand the company over to his son.

"He stands out among leading family-owned companies," Amit said. "Managing this transition is very difficult, and he has done it flawlessly."

Ralph Roberts said that he feels "pretty well" these days, and that he and Suzanne have a place on Rittenhouse Square and a farm in Chester County as a weekend retreat.

On Friday, a basket of roses with birthday balloons perfumed his office. They were from Charles Dolan, chairman of Cablevision Systems Corp. in New York.

A friend sent a "Colossal Gram" that hung from the wall, and the phone kept ringing. One of the callers was Comcast director J. Michael Cook.

On speakerphone, Cook told Roberts: "I'm not going to spoil your birthday by singing."