Word: scrapmen
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Rich in folklore, controversy and profits, the scrap industry is an unglamorous giant that has been spoofed, needled and assailed by writers from Charles Dickens to Garson (Born Yesterday) Kanin. The public insists on calling its chief product junk, but this affront has not prevented scrapmen from making millions by marketing the oddments that other people throw away. To the steelmakers they sell rust-worn barbed wire from the farms, torn-up tracks from the railbeds and used appliances tossed out by housewives. They move mountains of junked cars into grasping incinerators that burn off paint, cushions and fixtures, then...
After earning tall profits and extravagant criticism in times past, scrapmen are now faced with soft demand and sluggish prices. No company has been hit harder than Manhattan's Ogden Corp., the world's biggest scrap company. Last month Ogden reported that sales-30% from scrap and the rest from other activities-dropped from $436 million in 1961 to $406 million last year; its Luria scrap division lost money for the first time in its 74-year history. Ogden's candid President Ralph Ablon, 46, admits that the scrapmen's current troubles stem partly from their...
...source of scrap), are using many a junk-worthy car for storage of coal. But the chief reason is that the nation's steel mills, breaking one production record after another, are now using scrap at the rate of at least 30,000,000 tons a year, and scrapmen are gathering only 24,000,000 tons a year...
...another front, the New Deal and steelmen worked hand in hand. To Baltimore went 500 scrap dealers for their annual convention last week. When they gathered, the price of No. 1 steel scrap was $23.50 a ton, and heading up. Up rose Price Commissioner Leon Henderson, addressed the scrapmen like a Dutch uncle. Said he, referring to his deal with the scrapmen last fall: "The Government didn't ask for a written guarantee. We went away from the meeting with the feeling that we would get a large volume of scrap at decent prices but . . . the price has been...
With him at Baltimore was Businessman William Loren Batt, the SKF (ball bearings) president who is a Stettinius deputy commissioner. Mr. Batt was no less downright with the scrapmen than New Dealer Henderson. Said he: "I see it as your patriotic duty to receive and sell as much scrap as you can and as rapidly and cheaply as possible. . . . The President has said that the nation would be intolerant of strikes that tie up defense business. I think he would add, were it not obvious, that the nation will be equally intolerant of careless, selfish management...