Word: plywoods
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Wind. It was an ill wind, in fact a hurricane, which blew Ottinger into the plywood business. Part of his father's $100,000 had been used to buy a big grove of gum trees near Corbin, La., in an experiment to dye living trees to make the wood look like mahogany. The experiment worked but nobody wanted to buy the wood, so Ottinger lost his shirt. When a hurricane blew down so many nearby oak trees that Ottinger got them just for hauling them away, he found himself in the lumber business. He became such a lumber expert...
...Ottinger saw a big future in plywood, then considered good for little but chair bottoms and automobile floorboards. It also had a bad name because it warped and split. Ottinger started as a jobber in plywood, devised new uses for it, cleaned up in the recession of 1921 by buying vast quantities of plywood at the bottom of the slump, selling for a fat profit on the rise...
...Plywood had been grossing more than $1,000,000 annually for seven years when in 1932 Seattle bankers asked Ottinger to take over a big plywood mill that faced bankruptcy. His stiff terms: 50% of all profits and none of the losses. The bankers agreed, and wisely; the mill has made profits ever since. Ottinger bought other mills, acquired vast stands of timber...
Blown Good. By tireless promotion, heavy advertising and constant research in new techniques, Ottinger has done more than any other man to raise the once-despised plywood to its present lofty status. By binding plywood to metal, Ottinger and his technicians opened up new markets for the material (in trains, truck bodies and shipping containers). They perfected a thin hardwood veneer as flexible as cloth, turned out a wall covering that cannot be distinguished from solid paneling. They even turned out plywood pipe, got $5,000,000 worth of orders for it in World War II as a light, portable...
Ottinger, who is so full of nervous energy that he seldom sits still for five minutes, is not letting U.S. Plywood rest on its spectacular growth. This week he announced the completion of a new $600,000 hardwood-veneer mill in the Belgian Congo. Next month, at a new $2,000,000 plant in Anderson, Calif., he will start production of a new plywood, "Novoply," whose exclusive U.S. rights he bought from its Swiss inventor. It is, says Ottinger, the first successful use of waste wood chips as a satisfactory center for plywood panels, will cut production costs so tremendously...