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Jim Lewis goes into the Army, and my work in WWII After WWII, I venture into fiberglass, Marrying Mike, and my heart problem Getting Dick Newpher to join me at Glastic
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The end of the war was coming, and I had to find something to do postwar. My friend Dick Newpher took me to the Owens Corning Laboratory in Newark, Ohio where the Owens Corning people showed me a fiber-glass-plastic material which was currently being used to protect air force planes from the fatal hazard of having an enemy bullet rip open the wall of a fuel tank when it got hit. Owens Corning was in the business of selling fiber glass, and, as was common in those days with a new and not-well-understood technology, was putting out a lot of effort to attract potential new users.
We flew there in my Piper Cub. There we saw many interesting examples of commercial things which could be made from fiberglass, and might be suitable for a private business to make and sell. I was inspired by what I saw there, and I decided I could create a business based on this new fiberglass-plastic material. The OCF Lab people showed us how to fabricate this stuff and they gave me an uncured sample of the plastic/fiberglass mix to take home to experiment with.
I was instructed to keep the packet cool because it would soon harden if kept at room temperature. They told me to put my bundle in a refrigerator as soon as we got home. Dick and his wife were having friends in for dinner the following evening. She had prepared a fancy meal in advance for a next day dinner party and had put it in the refrigerator. When the guests arrived the next day she served up her lovely dinner. Whoops! The meal tasted horrible and we all wondered why at first. Then I realized that the fiberglass-plastic sample had given off an odor which permeated everything in the refrigerator! I felt very guilty about this so I insisted on taking the hostess and her friends out to dinner. They all responded to this offer very nicely so we all had an enjoyable evening.
The next day I began experimenting with this fiberglass stuff, and I soon had many ideas about things it might be used for. I decided this was "The" opportunity for me to start a business of my own. And also I was now ready for marriage. I had been dating "Mike" (real name "Anne Durette"), and when it began to appear that our dating was going nowhere she found herself a job in New York City. I soon missed her dearly and a couple weeks later I called her on the phone and proposed to her. She accepted immediately. And she promptly resigned from her job in New York and came back to Cleveland.
I told all this to a college roommate of mine who was then living in a southern Ohio city and he said, "Fly yourselves down here. We'll make arrangements for your marriage here. You can then proceed on an 'airplane honeymoon trip.'"
The marriage ceremony went nicely. We were near the Ohio River and the next day I flew us across into Kentucky intending to visit an Atom Bomb assembly plant in western Kentucky. When flying around Ohio I never had to pay much attention to my gas gauge because there were lots of small airports and I could easily drop into one whenever I needed to refuel. But after we crossed the Ohio river into Kentucky I found a very different situation. There was nothing to be seen but a dense forest of trees below us in all directions. After twenty minutes of this I suddenly became aware that my gas tank was nearly empty and that I did not have enough gas to get back across the river to Ohio. I was really scared. Suddenly I spotted in the forest below a small stream, and way below the endless array of tree tops, a freshly plowed field, which was a place to land. (Piper Cubs were the short-take off and land planes of their day. They were rugged and could land and take off at a very low speed, about 40 MPH.) So I put the plane down on the freshly plowed field, and waited for some people to show up. When they did, I asked for directions. (Mike remembers that they were died-in-the-wool hillbilly types. A grandma-ish looking old lady came up, looked at the plane and said, "Sorta favors a truck, don't it.")
I got the directions I needed and set out to take off from the field. But, the ground turned out to be a little too freshly plowed. We bounced along much longer than I thought, finally lifted off, but my landing gear caught a tree branch on the way out. We crashed. Mike and I were OK, other than some cuts and bruises, but I never flew that Piper again, never moved it even. I sold it to a band leader, I don't know what he did with it. So much for the airplane honeymoon. We took the train back to Cleveland.
Our first house was a duplex we shared with my friend, Bill Burton. It was on Winslow Road a block from the Van Aken Shopping Center, and there we lived when our children were born. About 1953 we moved to a large three story brick house on Fairmount Boulevard in Cleveland Heights.
I made fiberglass-plastic samples and called on many company engineers seeking possible applications. I sent a sample to a college friend of mine who was working for the Pullman Car Company in Chicago. When his boss saw this sample he said, "This would be wonderful for our passenger car arm rest side panels. How soon could you get them to us?"
I told him it would take about two months to start shipping these panels. I quoted $250 apiece this would put $13000 into my very slim larder.
I found a building with a large basement space and I promptly rented it. I purchased a large used press, and I hired several local employees to do the assembly work. I was about broke and it would take us about two months to get under way and start shipping.
I got an order for three hundred of these side panels.
A few days after starting up Glastic a bulging sore spot appeared on my left thigh. Gradually it shrank and disappeared. Then a week later I woke up with another bulge on my lower left leg. I went to a local doctor.
He said, rather sharply, "It's nothing. Don't worry about it."
But I wasn't OK. Not only was I getting lumps, I was losing energy, and Mike tells me I started crying at times without reason.
I told my friend Dick Newpher and he told his mother. She called me and said, "I want you to see another doctor I know immediately."
I did. He checked me over.
He said, "This looks serious. I want to see you in the hospital at 7 AM tomorrow morning."
My reply, "OK, for how long?"
His response, "At least four weeks."
I was shocked. I thought, "There goes my Glastic Corp.!"
I had a bacterial infection on one of my heart valves -- perhaps brought on by a weakness induced by some earlier bout with rheumatic fever in childhood. The infected valve didn't work well -- which was why I was losing energy and feeling odd emotions -- and every so often it would shed its coating of bacterial slime, which would lodge somewhere else in my body, and make the lumps I was feeling.
Three years earlier, that infection would have been fatal -- I would have been a dead man. But penicillin was just being released into civilian use, and I started getting shots. That early penicillin was leaps-and-bounds better than nothing at all, but weak and touchy by modern standards. I had to get a penicillin shot every two hours, and stay in the hospital. But the nurses treated me very well. I felt just fine after the first day. I was given a needle shot every two hours day and night; this was to continued for a full month. I may not have remembered the nurses their names, but I sure came to recognize their individual needle techniques. Mike, my good wife, stood by me through this trying time.
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Cleveland Plain Dealer article about married couples and their start-up businesses. (1947) |
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Oldest son Tom in a cowboy suit. (circa 1952. Note the plastic "glass". Those had just come out.) |
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Roger and Mike at a dance. (1956) |
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Jim Lewis goes into the Army, and my work in WWII After WWII, I venture into fiberglass, Marrying Mike, and my heart problem Getting Dick Newpher to join me at Glastic
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