With Gratitude: Barker Steel and the People Who Made It Work

By Robert B. Brack

Robert B. Brack knew from an early age that his grandfather and father hoped he would join Barker Steel Co., the business started by his grandfather in 1920.

After graduating from college in 1960 with a degree in civil engineering, he went to work at the family business. But after a few years, he left to pursue his dream of teaching math and science.

Hed return to a more challenging role at the company about a year later. At the time, the firm had one location and was barely profitable with less than $1 million in sales and twenty-eight employees.

By the time this story ends in 2007, however, Barker Steel was one of the largest independent rebar fabricators in North America with twelve locations throughout New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, generating in some years more than $200 million in sales and employing more than five hundred people.

Learn valuable business lessons gleaned through four generations of a closely-held, family business, and discover how Brack, his family, and their teams built a successful and respected company in With Gratitude.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Archway Publishing
• Release date: Aug 9, 2017
• ISBN: 9781480846562

Robert B. Brack

Robert B. Brack was Barker Steel’s chief executive for more than twenty-eight years, leading the company as sales increased more than tenfold during a period of dynamic growth. A longtime active member of the Concrete Reinforcing Steel Institute, he served as chairman of the board in 1990 and 1991. In 2012, he received the institute’s first Distinguished Service Award. He is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a degree in civil engineering.

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Copyright © 2017 Robert B. Brack.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

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ISBN: 978-1-4808-4654-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-4655-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4808-4656-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017909832

Archway Publishing rev. date: 8/8/2017

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 1920–63: Early Years

Chapter 2 1964–67: Learning the Ropes

Chapter 3 1967–71: Laying the Foundation

Chapter 4 1971–78: Growing Pains

Chapter 5 1979–88: A Maturing Company Identity

Chapter 6 1988–91: Into the 1990s

Chapter 7 1988–93: Ebb and Flow

Chapter 8 1994–96: The Plan Unfolds

Chapter 9 1997: The Central Artery

Chapter 10 1997–99: Tragedy

Chapter 11 1998–99: Business Boom

Chapter 12 2000–2002: Planning Comes to Fruition

Chapter 13 2001: New World

Chapter 14 2000–2002: Changes in the Mill Landscape

Chapter 15 2000-2002: Changing of the Guard

Chapter 16 2003: A Developing Storm

Chapter 17 2004: The Perfect Storm

Chapter 18 2005-2006: Turning the Corner

Chapter 19 2007: A New Beginning

Acknowledgments

Appendix

Introduction

My maternal grandfather, Harold L. Barker, started Barker Steel Company in 1920. He bought mill reinforcing steel on consignment, fabricated it, and furnished a variety of projects, including the abutments for the Bourne Bridge, which crosses the Cape Cod Canal, connecting the Cape to mainland Massachusetts. In 1942, my father, Robert P. Brack, joined the company after having worked for nine years at the State Street Bank and Trust in Boston. I went to work at Barker Steel after graduating from the University of Massachusetts with a civil engineering degree in June of 1960. I knew at an early age that my grandfather and father wanted me to go into the business. They used to take me into the plant and office on occasion when I was four or five years old. Some old pictures from these visits show me holding a welding rod bar and handling the office phone.

Bob growing up in the business

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Deep down, however, I had always had an interest in teaching math and science. I left the family steel company after three years because I did not feel challenged in a job that at the time focused on clerical and drafting functions. Instead, I pursued my interest in teaching and secured a position at Wentworth Institute in Boston. The experience at Wentworth was transformative for me. The students in my Surveying, Strength of Materials, and Engineering Mechanics class were seeking an associate degree in engineering or a two-year certificate in building technologies. I enjoyed getting to know the students and coaching those who were struggling, watching their growth as well as my own personal growth. Even now I have several vivid memories, most notably perhaps of the tragic day in November of 1963 when it was announced during my Strength of Materials lab that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. And I still recall the early June commencement at Symphony Hall in Boston, marching in with the faculty and students to Pomp and Circumstance. After my first year, I was invited to return to Wentworth with a 10 percent salary increase. I also was in the process of finishing a master’s degree in education at Northeastern University.

But in June 1964, a call from my father took me by surprise. Bob, he said, the estimator and salesman has given his notice. If you would like to come back to Barker Steel and handle the estimating and sales, that would be great, but otherwise, with the history of my health problems, I am thinking of selling the company. I told him that I appreciated the offer and would get back to him in several days.

After my dad called, my late wife, Joan, and I struggled for over a week with the decision of rejoining the company. Joan, a third grade teacher on leave raising the family, was very supportive of my doing what I thought best for my career. We discussed the pros and cons of abandoning my venture into teaching. I did see challenge in handling Barker’s estimating and sales and eventually leading the company. Ultimately, feeling compelled to continue the legacy of the company, I chose to return to Barker. As a compromise, I continued to teach evening courses: Strength of Materials at Franklin Institute, and the next two years a concrete lab in the fall and a soil mechanics course in the spring at Lincoln College, which was part of Northeastern University. This compromise lasted until after the summer of 1968, when the combination of having a family life (including coaching farm league baseball) and the increasing demands of running the business made the evening teaching impossible.

When I returned to work with the company in July 1964, Barker Steel had one location, which was in Watertown, Massachusetts. The company was barely profitable with less than $1 million in sales, producing only 4,580 tons of fabricated rebar with just 28 employees. At the point where this story ends on November 5, 2007, Barker Steel was one of the largest independent rebar fabricators in North America with 12 locations throughout New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, generating in some years more than $200 million in sales while producing more than 200,000 tons of fabricated rebar and employing more than 500 employees.

I want to share the story of this business, held closely by a small family, spanning over four generations and eighty-seven years; its growth in a very competitive steel industry, at times high risk; the entrepreneurial nature of the growth; and the collaborative style of management that was such an important part of our success. I’ll chronicle the challenges the company faced, along with the critical decisions, the successes, the setbacks, and the failures. But most importantly I’ll highlight the relationships that evolved with employees, customers, vendors, bankers, and professionals—and within my family. Their characters and roles are woven into the fabric of With Gratitude as the company grows in a dynamic marketplace. And there are many others who deserve recognition to whom I do not give justice.

I have written With Gratitude for my family, employees, business associates, and people interested in a classic business story. This is a story about relationships, values, success, and loss—not only from a company viewpoint but also from a personal viewpoint. And I share this story with great gratitude to all who were instrumental in the growth of Barker Steel Co. Inc. over its 87.5-year history.

Chapter 1

1920–63: Early Years

T he Barker Steel Company, founded by my grandfather Harold Barker, was a small company in Somerville, Massachusetts, and its prime business was the fabrication of steel bars that were used to reinforce concrete in the construction industry. My grandfather, who had finished three years in a civil engineering program at the University of Maine, was known for hopping a freight train from Orono to Boston to visit Rhea Minkle, whom he later married. They lived initially in Winthrop, Massachusetts, and eventually moved to Newton, Massachusetts. They had one child—my mother, Evelyn Isabel Barker. Before going into business for himself, my grandfather had worked for the New England Telephone Company.

I know little about the history of his business in the 1920s and 1930s. The earliest record I have found is a letter dated March 3, 1920, showing that my grandfather bought 500 tons of reinforcing bars from Lackawanna Steel in western New York on consignment. This meant that if the steel was put on the ground at the mill, he was billed as he took it, or if the steel was shipped to a location in the Boston area, he was billed as he took delivery. He was at risk if he did not get paid by his customers within the time frame he had to pay the mill.

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During these early decades, Barker Steel furnished reinforcing steel for several projects in Massachusetts: concrete structures at the Metropolitan State Hospital in Waltham, the Harriet Baldwin School in Brighton, the Boston City Hospital Medical Building, the John Hancock Building in Boston, the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, and the Newton Wellesley Hospital.

I remember my grandfather’s stories about how challenging times were during the Great Depression. He shared with me the difficulty of collecting payment from some customers, telling me how he sometimes had to knock on a customer’s door at six in the morning, before the customer left to go to a jobsite, to get payment that was past due.

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Harold L. Barker at original office building, 42 School Street

In the mid-1930s, FDR’s New Deal and Works Progress Administration brought more public work for Barker Steel to bid on and supply. The shop in Somerville was now too small to handle the upswing in business. In 1938, my grandfather relocated, opening a new plant on School Street in Watertown, Massachusetts, opposite the Watertown Arsenal. The rear of the land that he purchased for the new shop had been the grazing area for army cavalry horses at one time when the army had an active cavalry unit stationed at the arsenal. This property on Watertown’s eastern edge, originally an apple orchard, was being industrialized in the 1930s with companies like B. F. Goodrich and Lewis-Shepard. The enclosed building was 200 feet by 50 feet, with traveling cranes extending to the rear over the Boston and Maine Railroad, siding 70 feet and then extending out 80 feet in front of the building for convenience of truckload shipments.

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Watertown shop, circa 1940

With the beginning of World War II, the demand for construction dropped. As a result, my grandfather stopped fabrication of reinforcing steel and started a welding business, reconfiguring the shop to make it capable of handling the welding production operation. He also brought in machine gas cutting equipment and spot and welding equipment, which allowed him to take on the fabrication of units such as the components for landing craft and other naval vessels. With the shop, welding equipment, overhead cranes to handle the components, and certified welders already in place, the company qualified to do contract work with the United States Navy. My grandfather promoted the business through an advertising campaign that consisted of distributing postcards, one of which promised, We can help you! Another said simply, Smash That Bottleneck! Others outlined the capabilities of the shop, such as the one with a picture of the no. 6 Oxygraph welder and a tagline: The shop is equipped with ample automatic flame-cutting machines. Barker Steel became part of the war effort.

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Early 1940s postcard campaign

In 1942, my grandfather Barker asked my father if he would like to work for Barker Steel. I suspect that the paperwork required with government contracts tipped the balance on the work my grandfather could handle. My dad, who in his tenure at the State Street Bank had worked as a teller and a member of the accounting group, was very quick with numbers. He could add a fifteen-column spreadsheet faster in his head than the best keypuncher could on an adding machine. After finishing high school, my father had applied to Harvard University and Dartmouth College. Dartmouth had accepted him, but Harvard had not. His father, Jacob Albert Brack, who had come over from Germany at the age of four and who had worked his way through an associate degree at Brown University, told my dad, If you’re not good enough to get into Harvard, there is no sense in you going to college. In truth, my grandfather Brack, who had been a teacher of high school math and German, as well as a baseball coach and drama coach, could not afford to send my dad to college. So Dad did not attend. My father did accept Grandfather Barker’s offer to join Barker Steel in 1942, and in 1944 they formed a partnership.¹

After my father left the bank and joined my grandfather’s company, the two men worked together to develop a relationship with the State Street Bank. This relationship lasted until 1999, when the State Street Bank’s commercial banking business was sold to Citizens Bank, with whom we established an ongoing relationship.

After World War II, to supplement a diminishing welding business, my grandfather and my dad initiated a metal wall form business, making the wall forms to rent to general contractors and then refurbishing the forms when they were returned to the shop. The business struggled during this period of time. The construction market was still diminished, and metal wall forms had to compete against wood forms, which were a very competitive option.

Around 1948 while traveling through Pennsylvania en route to Florida with my grandmother, my grandfather caught sight of some piles of used sheet steel from old railroad cars. Upon returning from Florida, he decided to investigate purchasing the sheets and making one-way metal pans for use in concrete floor construction. This was the beginning of the metal pan business.

The metal pans were used to form concrete floor ribs, which were used in a way similar to wood joists used in the basement of a house to support the first floor. The metal pans were shipped out to the construction site and installed on a flat deck before reinforcing bars were placed in the ribs. Either reinforcing bars or welded wire mesh was then placed over the pans before concrete was poured into the ribs and a three- to four-inch-thick cover of concrete was poured over the pans. Once the concrete cured and reached its compressive strength, the deck and the pans were removed. Then they were either reused if needed in another section of the building or shipped back to the shop for reconditioning.

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Metal pan job

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, my grandfather handled the marketing and the product development of the pans. In conjunction with the structural engineering firm CVP, he put together a brochure including tables to show the benefit of the one-way pan system versus a typical flat slab design. The benefit was that the pan system created a voided slab, which reduced the amount of concrete needed for the job and, thus, reduced the weight in the building. A similar system was being used in the Midwest, but this was the first in the New England market. My grandfather was continuously trying to find a better way to clean the concrete off the pans when they came back from the job, experimenting with different chemicals to achieve that goal. He handled the related engineering issues as well as sales and customer relationships.

My grandfather was always trying to find a niche in the construction business with innovations related to the steel business, appreciating innovative uses of steel in other industries. I saw this from a different perspective in the late 1940s when I was ten years old. He had bought a twenty-eight-foot cabin cruiser called a Steelcraft, known for its welded steel hull, a unique feature of some cruisers at the time. I remember going fishing with him and my father for striped bass in Buzzards Bay. The prevailing southwesterly winds increased in the late morning and the water was very rough. They sent me down inside the cabin. I thought for sure that this steel boat would sink! Of course it didn’t. Grandfather’s steel-hulled cruiser was indeed seaworthy.

As my grandfather pursued his often creative interests with product, sales, and marketing, he relied on my father to manage the business details, including operations and accounting/banking relationships. My dad worked long hours, many of them in the shop operation, until a health issue intervened.

I will never forget one rainy April day when I was in the eighth grade. After returning home from a doctor’s visit, my dad walked up the stairs to the second-floor bedroom crying, I have been diagnosed with TB. Before he entered a Waltham sanitarium for treatment, he told me, Bob, you are in charge of taking care of the chores and supporting your mother. My brother was eight years old and my sister was four. My dad remained in the sanitarium for over two years, finally recovering after a seven-hour operation to remove two lobes from his left lung. During this time, my grandfather carried the financial burden for the family and managed all aspects of the company. And I kept busy and did my best to help my mom around the house.

Over time, the business grew to house 700 tons of metal pans in depths of 8 to 14 inches and lengths of 20 to 36 inches. At that time, the metal pan business was flourishing. More help was needed for the labor-intensive pan process. John Murphy was hired in 1948 to work in the shop. John oversaw the refurbishing of the pans when they were returned to the shop after customer use. His explanation of the process, printed many years later in the summer 1985 edition of the Barker Steel Company News, provides insight into the early days of this business:

I guess a lot of people, when they are stopped at a railroad crossing waiting for a long train to pass by, kill time reading the names on the side of the boxcars, but when I see that same train, I think of all the pans I had to make out of the roofs of those boxcars. You see, Mr. Barker would buy the tops of the boxcars and have them shipped to Watertown in gondola cars. They would come into the back of our shop, and we would unload them by hand. Then we would take them into the shop and flatten and cut them to size. Then we would punch the holes and form them into pans. After the pans came back from a job, we had to recondition them—that was one dirty and dusty job! First we had to scrape the cement off the pans. The scrapers were made out of old car springs. We would sharpen one end and scrape the cement with that. We then had to flatten the pan in one of our machines and then reshape them all over again. Then, a couple of men with a dollie [sic] and hammer would touch up the corners and make sure the end caps would fit. Next, we had to put linseed oil on them … to prevent the cement from sticking to them on the job. … When [we] finished the job, they would be sent back to Watertown and the process would start all over again.

The nature of the business was different in many ways during John’s early days at Barker. His starting salary was 55 cents per hour and there was no sick pay. A Christmas bonus consisted of a crisp, new five-dollar bill. Many years later, John recollected getting his first raise when he and his wife were trying to buy their first home. After applying for his mortgage loan, John had been told by the bank that he would need to earn 60 cents per hour to qualify for the loan. He recalled explaining the situation to my grandfather and asking for a raise. My grandfather, after calling the banker for a brief chat, eventually informed John that he would not give him the requested five-cent-per-hour raise but a ten-cent-per-hour raise.

During John’s early years with Barker, the Watertown Arsenal employed approximately 6,000 people, and B. F. Goodrich / Hood Rubber another 5,000. The freight trains carried freight past the plant through Watertown Square all the way to Waltham on a daily basis. The streetcar line, the main mode of transportation for most of these workers, ran from Waltham to Central Square in Cambridge. The Lewis-Shepard Company, our next-door neighbor, stored much of its material at the rear of the shop. During that time, much of the shop work was done by hand. The shop was heated by coal, which everyone helped to shovel. In cold weather when snow fell, the driveway was also shoveled by hand.

John was joined in the shop by Max Gifford, who was in charge of another component to the metal pan business, the end caps. End caps that were returned to the shop after customer rental needed to be scraped by hand, re-formed, oiled, and stored. Although the pan business was labor intensive, John understood how critical this business was to the development of Barker Steel and how important it was to my grandfather. As John reflected on the pan business, he referred to it as the foundation of Barker Steel Company and the pride and joy of Mr. Harry Barker. In the early 1950s, John’s role with my grandfather took on a more personal aspect. It was John who drove my grandfather and grandmother to Florida each fall and returned them to New England in the spring.

In 1953 the company resumed fabrication of reinforcing bars. Dan Minkle, my grandfather’s brother-in-law, came to work for Harry in the bar fabrication business. Dan was given charge of the shop fabrication of the bar. Then in 1962, after a competitor, Concrete Steel, closed its plant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the shop superintendent, Russ Ferguson; a key bender operator, Big John Thomas; and a light bender operator, Al Dwyer, joined our shop crew in Watertown.

I n the summer of 1958 I worked at Barker doing clerical work such as making tags to be put on the bundles of fabricated rebar and running the print machine, as well as performing other, miscellaneous chores. This was my first work experience at Barker Steel. I remember George Childs in a white shirt and tie working on the drafting board doing pan layouts. Ralph Bates, the salesman/estimator, was a friendly guy who always had an egg salad sandwich for lunch. Anne DeCarolis in the front office was like a second mother to me. My grandfather, almost seventy years old at the time, came in late and left early. He sat in the middle office and seemed always to be trying to come up with a better process for cleaning the metal pans. My dad was in the front office working on the books and correspondence. He and I traveled to and from Watertown each day from the home in Natick. On a rare occasion I got down to the shop. It was a dingy, dusty, and hot environment. Going to lunch in a small local diner to get a milk shake to have with my three sandwiches was always a welcome break. On the really hot days, my grandfather would send the men home early.

The following summer, I decided to start my own business painting houses, because it offered me the opportunity to make more income toward my college expenses. During this period I was also focused on enjoying time with Joan, as we were engaged, and thinking ahead to my last year at college. The high point of that summer was getting several paint jobs in the neighborhood where Joan lived and worked, which allowed me on some days to have lunch with her. However, I did enjoy getting to know the people at Barker in the summer of 1958 and gaining a better understanding of the family business.

During this period of time the shop was laid out for the two operations. A strip of land from School Street going westward was used for pans returned from a job. Here, as time moved on, John Murphy’s crew put the pans through an acid bath to strip the concrete and then moved them by a forklift truck into the shop, a long rectangular building. One area of the shop housed presses to flatten the pans and a press brake to reshape the pan forms. The reshaped pans were moved to a small building down a driveway to be oiled and then returned to the yard, where they would be stacked. The shop also included space where pans’ end caps could be refurbished.

The fabrication of reinforcing bar, however, took the majority of the space in the shop. At the rear of the shop, where the railroad tracks entered, the steel was unloaded via overhead cranes into forty- and sixty-foot-long racks. The building had a low ceiling for a steel facility, with only sixteen feet from the underside of the crane hook to the floor. This compounded difficulties with the storage and handling of the steel bundles, especially for the smallest-sized bars. The smaller-sized bars had more pieces in a bundle than the larger-sized bundles, the latter of which were stiffer. As a result, bundles of smaller bars would drape lower, which limited our flexibility on storage rack heights. But this is what we had!

In the late 1950s the interstate highway system was being built, but we were not big enough and did not have the staff to furnish the steel for these projects. Our market was focused on small jobs—schools and churches—and small commercial and industrial building activity, but our vision was to expand into the market for larger projects. The major projects in the Boston market were five years or more in the future. My father, realizing that we had to strengthen our detailing department in order to grow, hired Leo Flibotte in late fall of 1958 to take charge of the detailing of reinforcing bars and the layout of pan drawings. Leo had served in the navy for four years and was very organized and systems-oriented. He had an associate degree in civil engineering from Franklin Institute and experience with structural design firms. Within a year, my father promoted him to be in charge of the shop. Both John Murphy, who managed the pan operation, and Dan Minkle, who managed the reinforcing bar operation, worked under Leo’s supervision.

Leo quickly drew attention to two areas of concern in the shop operations. First he noticed the age of the equipment used for fabricating reinforcing bars. Of even greater concern to him, however, was the labor-intensive nature of the pan business. The pans, which were cumbersome to handle, required a lot of manpower and took up considerable space. Over the next few years, Leo worked with my father, my grandfather, Dan, and John to upgrade the equipment and improve shop safety and efficiency.

The practice of shop upgrade and improvement that Leo spearheaded in the late 1950s and early 1960s became routine. Plans to upgrade the shop equipment were implemented as soon as the equipment could be afforded. This was done usually during the winter slowdown period in January and February, allowing time to train employees on the equipment, with the emphasis on any new safety mechanisms the equipment provided. This meant that the employees were developing new skills, growing in their jobs, and in some cases moving up the ladder. Internal advancement became a company norm.

I n high school I had been most interested in math and science. In those days, students took an aptitude test to indicate a career preference. My results from the test pointed me toward the field of engineering and toward the trades associated with engineering. In the spring of my senior year, my college acceptances left me with three choices: Northeastern University, Tufts University, and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. I chose the University of Massachusetts’s engineering school, not only because it was a reputable school but also partly because I enjoyed the idea of being in a rural setting.

I graduated as a civil engineer on June 4, 1960. A week later, Joan, who had graduated the same day from the State Teachers College at Framingham, and I were married. After our honeymoon I went to work for Barker Steel in Watertown. I had almost gone on to graduate school in soil mechanics (now geotechnical engineering) but instead decided to work for the family company. Joan went on to teach third grade in the Norfolk school system.

When I joined the company in June 1960, Barker had twenty to twenty-five employees, depending on the time of year. My job was to work in the engineering department under Leo. The job consisted of a lot of clerical work, such as making prints of drawings, doing some pan layouts, and occasionally detailing reinforcing steel. (A point of interest is that in 1960 the company shipped 2,267 tons of fabricated reinforcing bars!)

In 1962, during my first work experience at Barker, my grandfather and my father consulted with one of their trusted professional advisers, Whitfield Reid, an attorney in Boston, about the wisdom of changing their business partnership to a C corporation. With my having joined the company and my grandfather’s advancing in age, incorporation seemed a prudent move toward greater flexibility in planning the future ownership. On a cold gray day that February, my grandfather, my dad, and I went into Boston to meet with a law firm, and Barker Steel became a C corporation. It was a very special occasion for me to be included in this process with my grandfather and my father. I was greatly appreciative.

Even so, as time went on in 1962 and early 1963, I just did not feel challenged. On top of that, I was not using my engineering background. Although I had always had an inclination to teach, I was not certified to teach math or science in a public school system. Knowing that my grandfather and my father had wanted me in the company since I was a little kid and that this was one of the reasons they had formed the C corporation, I was conflicted. This made my decision to leave Barker Steel even more difficult.

After many discussions with Joan, in May of 1963 I had an interview with the head of the Strength of Materials Department at Wentworth Institute in Boston and was offered a job to teach strength of materials, engineering mechanics, and surveying to associate degree candidates. Joan was supportive of what I wanted to do, which was to accept the teaching position. But I was faced with a very difficult discussion with my grandfather and father—at this point in my life, the most difficult decision I had faced. I felt bad about having to disappoint them. Indeed they were very disappointed, but they gracefully supported the decision.

M y decision to leave Barker Steel did not stop the company from moving forward. With Leo Flibotte heading the operations and Ralph Bates handling the estimating and sales, the company was slowly progressing. Ralph had some key midsize customers and some small customers with whom he had a relationship and who enjoyed working with Barker Steel. The tonnage of rebar the company shipped increased each year. Both Leo and Ralph reported to my dad, who also handled the financial aspects of the business. In 1962 Leo hired David Horton. A graduate of the Franklin Institute, David worked originally under the direction of Leo doing pan layouts and learning to prepare detailed drawings of reinforcing bars. He started with small projects and graduated into larger projects in the late 1960s. In 1963 Leo hired Jack Moran also to be a detailer. As the company grew in later years, Jack went on to be an estimator.

In many ways the company was evolving. The impact of this rippled through the structure of the business as well as the operations.

Chapter 2

1964–67: Learning the Ropes

I n June 1964, a week after my father