Word: celotex
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Next day at a stockholders' meeting in Chicago, Chairman Sewell L. Avery of U. S. Gypsum Co., which does about 50% of the nation's plaster business, was asked about the entry of Celotex Corp. m the field (TIME, March 6). Said Chairman Avery: "Monopoly in the U. S. is a joke...
...Celotex was Bror Dahlberg's creation. In 1911, having been everything from a high-speed typist to freight-rate counselor, he found himself vice president of Minnesota & Ontario Paper Co. One of its by-products was a rigid insulating board called Insulite. Dahlberg, several M. & 0. associates and Insulite's inventor, one Carl Muench, next devised a similar board made out of bagasse, the fibrous residue of chewed-up sugarcane, named it Celotex and began making it commercially in 1921. By 1929 annual sales of their brown insulating board had reached $1,479,000 and President Dahlberg...
...instead of diversifying Celotex's product, he took a flier in sugar, bought up swamps and plantations in Florida and Louisiana. Depression took the Florida properties and in 1932 Mr. Dahlberg's Celotex went into receivership. At this point, looking far from Napoleonic, Bror Dahlberg met quiet Wallace Groves...
Mack and Groves had a new idea for Phoenix. Instead of buying up good investments at bargain prices in the manner of Floyd Odium's Atlas Corp., they would buy up ailing or bankrupt industries cheap, cure them and sell them high. Celotex looked good to them and in 1934 they acquired common stock control...
...Celotex came back fast. This time President Dahlberg's Napoleonic ambitions were put to more constructive use-diversifying Celotex's products to give it a general line of building materials. It made $736,000 in 1936, $1,267,000 in 1937. This is still cottage size next to the manorial 1937 profits of its two biggest competitors, Johns-Manville Corp ($5,450,000) and U. S. Gypsum...