Chicago mortgage banker and Mount Everest pursuer Albert Hanna dies at 89

Albert Hanna, a prominent Chicago mortgage banker who sought adventure climbing mountains all over the globe, has died at age 89.

Hanna ran his own mortgage banking firm, Mid-North Financial Services, for 22 years before selling the company to Chicago-based Draper & Kramer in 2004. Hanna retired in 2014.

Outside of business, Hanna was known for taking on the city of Chicago over its landmarks ordinance and for his unfulfilled dream to be the oldest person to scale Mount Everest. He came the closest as a 70-year-old in 2000—on his third of four attempts—turning back 330 feet from the Himalayan peak’s 29,029-foot summit.

Hanna died April 16, according to an obituary on Legacy.com that did not state a cause of death.

Hannah grew up in Mosinee, Wis., where his father ran a hardware store. He developed his passion for the outdoors as Boy Scout, an experience that had such an influence on him that he wound up donating $5 million to the Boy Scouts of America as an adult.  

“They helped get me to where I am today,” Hanna told Crain’s in 2014. “I learned about self-reliance and being independent. When you’re out in the woods all by yourself, hundreds of miles away from everything, you learn how to take care of yourself.”

After serving in Korea for the U.S. Army, Hanna settled in Lincoln Park with his wife in 1956, equipped with an MBA and law degree from the University of Wisconsin. He entered the mortgage business in 1960, according to Legacy.com. He was voted the Chicago Mortgage Bankers Association’s Man of the Year in 1997.

A busy career didn’t prevent Hanna from indulging his wanderlust. Hanna, who took up mountaineering at age 58, traveled, cycled, hiked and climbed in 65 countries and made it to the top of six of the “Seven Summits,” the tallest mountains on each continent, according to Legacy.com.

Everest was the only one of the seven peaks that eluded him. Struggling with a bronchial infection, he gave up on his fourth try in 2002, at age 71, turning back about 2,000 feet from the summit, according to a story that year in the Chicago Tribune.

“God talked to me at 27,000 feet, and said, `Go home,'” Hanna told the Tribune.