RACINE - To Joanne Styles, the toy steam engine didn't seem like an age-appropriate Christmas gift for her younger brother. At the time, Roger Gettys Hill wasn't even in school yet.

A safer pick, one no kid would brush aside, might have been a baseball glove or some play soldiers. But his eyes brightened at the sight of the train, Styles said, and he proclaimed his passion for steam.

Hill, who died last week in Chicago at 82, could appreciate the risk his parents took in buying that gift. Risk-taking was part of his legacy. Rather than follow a job with John Oster Co. to Florida when leaders decided to move the company out of Racine in the 1950s, Hill decided to strike out on his own.

Family members said he sold a beloved sailboat to help finance a new company, then used the money to help grow Gettys Manufacturing Co. from a tiny consulting firm run out of a High Street storefront to a worldwide operation with roughly 500 workers at Golf Avenue and North Green Bay Road.

Gettys Manufacturing made huge advancements in industrial drives and controls until Hill and his wife, Emily, sold it in 1981. The plant has changed hands several times since, but the Oak Creek-based Elwood Corp. still runs a Gettys division at 2701 N. Green Bay Road.

"How is it that the little Racine-based company could lead such a global parade?" Hill asked rhetorically in 1978 while accepting an award as state small businessman of the year. "I can answer that in just four words: We are risk-takers. We told the industry their conventional wisdom was all wet, and we proved to them we had a better way of doing things."

Entrepreneurs also need the knowledge to make those risks pay off. His son, Roger Gettys Hill II, said Tuesday that he regularly turned to his father for answers on all sorts of topics.

"He was so well-educated; he was always my Google," Hill II said from Chicago.

Gary Veenstra and Linda Richmond said they have only fond memories of working for Hill at Gettys. Both still work at the Elwood facility.

"He'd say, 'Can you get on a plane and go to Milan or something?' " Veenstra remembered. "When Roger asked, you just knew it was important to the company."

Hill became influential in political circles, serving on national small business organizations and presidential councils. In the 1980s, state Rep. Jeff Neubauer vowed to tackle the "Hill Problem," named for Hill's vocal opposition to capital gains and other taxes he said served as disincentives for business.

Yet Hill could never be dismissed as an executive who was simply "trying to feather his own nest," said Neubauer, whose family was also close to the Hills: "Roger had a social conscience."

Family members said he was much more than a businessman. Hill's daughter, Wendy, said he became engrossed in theater performances and was a faithful supporter of her artistic career. She is an opera singer and performer in New York.

"This is not a man who phoned anything in," Wendy Gettys Hill said.

Despite a two-year bout with pancreatic cancer, Hill kept a job at a Hartford company where he held a controlling interest until a few weeks ago. His older sister, Joanne Styles of Whitewater, said even in the days before he died Hill wrote to her about starting a blog.

Even as he split time between Illinois, Florida and Hartford, Hill and his wife kept a home in Wind Point, family members said. They said the couple, both raised in Chicago, were especially attached to Lake Michigan, where Hill loved to sail.

"My wife and I often reflect upon the good fortune that led us to choose Racine as our adopted home," Hill said in accepting another civic award in 1971, "long before we had any thoughts of starting a business."