(Baltimore Sun) — Ray Haysbert engineered a leveraged buyout before most people knew what it was. With a ton of debt and an ounce of equity, he bought Baltimore-based Parks Sausage from an affiliate of the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1980, presaging the leveraged buyout craze of the 1980s and today’s massive “private equity” deals. In corporate financing, as in other things, Raymond V. Haysbert Sr. was an outlier. As Parks’ right-hand man in the 1950s, he helped build the company into a regional brand. In the 1960s, he played a key role in making it the nation’s first black-owned firm to sell stock to the public. As controlling owner in the 1980s and 1990s, he became the dean of black Baltimore businessmen.
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