Many people are remembered as ones who built Calgary, but Sam Hashman holds particular claim to that title.

The planetarium. Mount Royal College. Westbrook Mall and Marlborough Mall. Royal Bank Building. Calgary Place, whose 31 storeys made it the city’s tallest in the late 1960s.

He’d started Hashman Construction in 1950, a 21-year-old with a $5,000 loan backed by his in-laws that helped him erect a four-plex apartment.

Two decades later, he was one of Calgary’s most prominent developers, helming a firm with $130 million in projects and a private jet that got him hopping daily from a mall in California to a skyscraper in Vancouver to a hotel in Toronto, and eventually back to his wife and four daughters in Cowtown.

“His passion kept him going and allowed him to leave behind a great legacy that can be seen in every major city in Canada,” Marlene, one of his daughters, said Monday at his funeral.

Sam Hashman passed away Saturday of natural causes, at his Florida home. He was 82.

He moved away from Calgary more than 35 years ago, after a stint as the president of real-estate colossus Trizec’s western Canadian branch.

A recent letter from Hashman Construction’s former sign painter reminded the family of the mogul’s lasting influence in his birth-town.

Marlene read the thank-you note Monday over the phone from Fort Lauderdale, of the poor sugar-beat worker who created billboards for Hashman properties in Saskatoon and Winnipeg and Toronto. He later began his own real-estate venture.

“‘At home I would often speak of you and your accomplishments,’” Marlene read from the letter. “‘My wife would say: Mr. Hashman is your inspiration.’”

Hashman possessed that developer’s zeal for risk-taking, once constructing a shopping plaza on Macleod Trail, kilometres south of where the city’s suburbs had spread.

“People would say, ‘You’re out of your mind, that thing will never work,’” a former employee told the Herald in 1994. “To everyone else it looked like a gamble, but to Sam it was a sure thing. And it was. I never knew him to blow one.”

Hashman’s family also went through one of Calgary’s most harrowing criminal sagas. In 1972, masked men abducted his eldest daughter and demanded a $500,000 cash ransom.

The millionaire developer, on the kidnappers’ instructions, picked up a rental car and dropped off in a downtown parkade a suitcase stuffed with the ransom money, all in $20 bills.

The kidnappers were soon caught in a manhunt that involved nearly the entire Calgary police force.

After moving his family to Florida, Hashman continued in real-estate but also pursued other passions: he began buying yachts and refurbishing them. He did the same with private planes, at one point almost sold a jet to Oprah Winfrey, recalls Dina Hashman, his wife of nearly 60 years.

“He made a business out of everything he did,” she recalled.

He is survived by his wife, four daughters and six grandchildren.