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Fritz Grupe — the celebrated developer, rancher, farmer, winegrower, Western art collector, humanitarian and champion carriage racer — is about to lead his visitor on a condensed tour of his 11,000-square-foot home. He has greeted him with a firm, warm handshake and an unprintable wisecrack about his private nickname for Rags, a foundling puppy which has joined in the welcome.

This is one of a half-dozen residences in a 1,300-acre compound Grupe’s four grown children and their families live in (or very near). The vast but cozy house, which features beamed ceilings and magnificent blond-wood floors made from repurposed lumber, makes the expansive quarters depicted on the “Dallas” TV series look like a starter home. 
Just before the tour moves into a room with a white rug so thick you can imagine Rags nestling within its piles undetected, it seems to abruptly strike Grupe that he’s not being a gracious host (he most assuredly is). So he gently takes his visitor by the arm and leads him to a counter in the den where he asks, almost conspiratorially, “Do you like chewing gum?” After receiving a nod, Grupe taps a mint capsule from a small bottle into the visitor’s hand then taps one out for himself. He appears to enjoy it immensely.

There are few things in life that Grupe doesn’t enjoy immensely. He loves his work and says he prefers “the process of accomplishing something over the accomplishment itself.” He clearly adores his vivacious wife of 60 years, Phyllis, whom he’s known since he was a college junior majoring in agriculture economics at UC Davis and she was a freshman working on a degree in psychology. He loves his four children and assortment of progeny. One great-grandkid, a dark-haired toddler named George, peeks around the corner and smiles shyly after his great-grandpa offers his visitor that chewing gum. “Well, hi there, George,” Grupe says, as though the tyke is a friend and peer, not a preschooler more than 80 years his junior. 

You learn in the course of a crisp country afternoon that this is how Grupe treats everyone, regardless of age, gender or culture: respectfully. Not surprisingly, it’s also how his family, friends, neighbors and business associates have treated him since he created his first master-planned home community, Stockton’s Lincoln Village, which came complete with a lake, at the age of 28. 

“Your first big project is the one you always think of,” Grupe says. It was the first of his many home communities that would feature lakes. His other signature projects include the Quail Lakes and Brookside developments in Stockton.” When I grew up on a farm in Linden, I swam in a reservoir,” he says. “I knew I’d always need to have water in the communities.”

Grupe was clearly onto something good. He’s built more than 50,000 homes since then, including master-planned communities in California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and Oklahoma. He owns a cattle ranch in Mariposa County (which extends into Madera County). He has about 180 employees. And for his work in turning Stockton from an industrial city with 153,000 residents into a place that 456,000 now call home, he even had a park named for him in 1975.

Along the way, the man born Greenlaw Grupe (but called Fritz from the get-go) became friends with electeds from both sides of the aisle and, notably, some of country music’s boldest-faced names, including Reba McEntire and Kenny Rogers. When he and Phyllis threw their first charitable fundraiser decades ago to raise money to build a therapeutic center for handicapped  children, they even persuaded then-movie, TV and singing stars Roy Rogers (branded “the king of the cowboys” by the studios) and his wife Dale Evans to perform. That hugely successful event also launched a friendship between both couples, but especially between Rogers and Grupe, who had a shared passion for hunting — and, as it turned out, chewing tobacco (another chewing product).

Evans, Grupe recalls, had been lightly chiding Rogers about his predilection for “chaw,” as its aficionados call it, and mock-remanded him for taking it with him on the Grupe Company’s private jet when Fritz came to pick them up for that fundraiser. 

“Well, at some point, Roy sees my can of Skoal (smokeless tobacco) in one of the seat pockets and asks for a ‘dip,’” Grupe says. “Naturally I said ‘sure,’ and before long we became hunting partners.”

But there was more than a shared love of hunting and habit of “spittin’” (as devotees call it) which cemented their friendship. “After the event, I fly Roy and Dale home and start to pay them their fee for performing and chatting with the donors,” Grupe says. “But Roy, who cares deeply about the cause of the kids we were raising money for, says, ‘Give our fee to the charity, Fritz.’” Grupe sighs deeply at the memory and the gesture. A moment later he says, “That was the Roy Rogers the world didn’t really know.”

Grupe could just as easily been talking about his own decency. “Fritz and Phyllis Grupe have been lifelong philanthropists, enhancing the quality of life in every community they’ve touched,” says Bert Sandman, former president, now retired, of A. Teichert & Son, Inc., the 138-year-old construction company. “I’m proud to have worked for him for many years.” 

The Grupe Company, Sandman says, did “very innovative things under Fritz’s leadership. They were early in the development of underground power and cable TV, eliminating the unpleasant-looking poles. In 1988, we began work on the very creative master-planned community called Brookside in west Stockton. The first order of work was moving a massive amount of dirt to build hundred-year flood berms around the project on three sides. Like many of his projects, it allowed for the construction of a lake with waterfront lots.”

Because of its proximity to the San Joaquin River, Sandman continues, the ground water was shallow. “The solution was a drainage system around the perimeter, excavating the drying material, then repeating the process until enough dirt was created.” In addition, the completed project included a Robert Trent Jones Jr. golf course. “The result was the creation of the highest point in Stockton (26 feet), and the lowest (minus 3 feet below sea level).” 

The Grupe empire

Having turned 87 this past October, Grupe — clad in a heavy plaid Western-style shirt over a dark T-shirt, blue jeans and boots — retains the posture and strut-like gait of a much-younger ranch hand marching off to get that herd under control for the boss. The difference, of course, is he’s the boss of an empire that includes real estate development, winegrowing, olive oil manufacturing, a cattle ranch in Mariposa County and animal breeding. 

Grupe shows his visitor a recent staff snapshot, which could pass as a photo-op for a United Nations subcommittee. Decades ago, he sold a home to the first Black resident of what was perceived as a whites-only community. “I’ve always found that when people share basic values, nobody pays much attention to skin color,” he says.

During a tour of the Grupe home, in addition to bronze sculptures and frontier paintings — including original works of Frederic Remington, the renowned artist and writer whose focus was Western Americana — one comes upon (and at his host’s urging, climbs upon) a shiny, steel horse-racing carriage. It’s the one that Grupe was steering when he won, at the age of 68, the 24-kilometer Equestrian Federation’s National Championship in 2005 in the category of pairs driving. Four years later, when he was 72, he won first place for advanced single-horse carriage racing.  

“I finally gave up carriage racing,” he says. “I felt I may be getting a little too old to suffer any more tip-overs,” like the one that fractured eight of his ribs many years ago. What’s notable about Grupe’s slight lament for giving up the sport is when he did so. “Oh, I was about 81,” he says. A moment later, he climbs on and hops off the carriage to show his visitor — and maybe himself — that he can still do so with the grace he brings to business, family and community and the graciousness he shows when making sure a visitor is provided chewing gum. 

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