Memorial Day Travels

Even though Memorial Day weekend is known as a great travel weekend, sometimes the time you spend on the road is all in your head. My trip started when USGlass editor Megan Headley asked if I would rustle up some old issues of the magazine. The June issue of USGlass includes our 25th Annual New Products Guide and Megan wanted to scour the very first New Products Guides for ideas and artwork. Megan knew that I (like so many of you, I am sure) keep a complete set of every issue of USGlass magazine in “archives” in my basement (fear not, we have a true offsite archives as well) and that borrowing the issues wouldn’t involve more than a trip to the cellar for me.

Now Megan is usually spot-on, but when she suggested this would be a quick and simple task, she was dead wrong. Once I’d brought the requisite issues out, I just had to go through them. So I sat down with a cup of tea, and away I went through a time tunnel.

What a trip it was! Names that I hadn’t heard for years kept flowing through my brain: PTI had a new adhesive … Tempglass (long since acquired) was advertising “flat, clear distortion-free tempered glass” (funny, we have an article about this in the June ’08 issue too) and Hordis Brothers was heralding the machinery systems to make it. Vistawall trumpeted its 11 locations round the country … PPG was celebrating Solarcool’s 15th anniversary … Interpane was announcing its first plant in the United States, to be located in Deerfield, Wis.; the company planned to make a little-known, misunderstood product called low-emissivity glass.

I saw the names of companies that had faded away or gotten out of the industry, such as Ateco and Morton Thiokol. Binswanger was hiring “contract management professionals,” and the Flat Glass Marketing Association was selling its Glazing Manual (in this case, the name of the organization has changed, but its Glazing Manual is still going strong). An ad for J. Sussman had a picture of daughter Erin in it—in diapers—and Glass Medic was explaining this thing called “glass repair.” Glastec ’88 (one “s” in it then) was being heavily promoted as attracting 30,000 attendees and being held in Dusseldorf, West Germany. In a few months, more than 60,000 will attend glasstec ’08 (double s) in a unified Germany.

There were some constants too, such as Palmer Mirro-Mastic, C.R. Laurence and USGlass itself. The only primary manufacturer that bridged the time warp was PPG, but I wonder how much longer that will last. Pilkington didn’t own LOF yet, AGC didn’t own AFG, Cardinal wasn’t a manufacturer and Guardian was still a very quiet company, though you can see in the news stories that it was growing fast.

The people in the news gave me pause as well. Don Goldfus had just been named chairman of Apogee Enterprises … a guy named Rick Wright of Hordis Brothers had been appointed chair of the Glazing Committee of the Sealed Insulating Glass Manufacturers Association (SIGMA) … and there was a picture of Rick Cunningham at a trade show …

In 1986, we were just beginning to talk about the idea of the value-added glass products. Well, that’s an idea that took more than 20 years to stick. I don’t think anyone thought then that U.S. manufacturers would finally move toward value-added products because so much of the commodity glass business has moved offshore.

You can see why it was a trip I could take for hours on end. So even though I didn’t use a single gallon of gas this holiday weekend, I went far and away and back again.