Interlake corporate directory (1951)

I came across this item on ebay and watched it for about 10 days. They wanted $35 plus $5 shipping. This is a big price for what I knew would amount to probably 1 page of coke related content. This item does however offer some other info just at face value. It seems to insinuate that Pickands Mather is the parent company of Interlake (or vice versa). This is surely info available with a simple Google search and likely apparent to many other historians. I don’t care that much about Interlake history beyond the coke plant, or operations in Chicago so I never came across it before.

Anyway, after 10 days I decided to bite the bullet. The seller had posted a shot of the TOC on the listing so I knew that this would not be a directory for the entire coke plant or furnace plant – it looked like only one page (highlights were added digitally by myself after scanning).

What kind of idiot spends $40 on a 70 year old ‘pamphlet’ for one page of info? The kind of idiot who ACTUALLY does that for HALF A PAGE of info. Worse yet, Harry Nicklaus was my guess for coke plant super before I even got this thing in my hands, so what little info there is I already (partially) knew.

Well, I was partially right. Mr. Nicklaus is listed here as the #2 guy for both the furnace plant AND the coke plant. Aside from that, I have compelling evidence that he was the #1 guy at the coke plant. But besides the conjecture there are a couple other interesting things here.

1. Mr. Nicklaus lived just east of the RR tracks in Washington Heights.
2. I am not sure what a ‘chief clerk’ does and it is hard to believe that this title would be listed in the top 3 for each facility (I have never come across Mr. Larson’s name in any correspondence before). If you are interested in reading a bit more about Harry Nicklaus, I wrote about him a while back.
3. C.P. Johnson’s name has come up before but I was not clear of his title (more on this below).
4. Note that in 1951 the furnace plant was not yet under the Interlake umbrella. They also must not have had much in the way of an office there (as mail is directed to the coke plant).

A glance at the top dogs at the Toledo plant does not ring any bells. Nor at the Perry or Zenith Plants. Hopefully I can get a badge from the Perry plant one day – I already own the other two!

At this point I was thinking “well, $40 was a good deal of money for half a page of info but oh well”. Then it struck me as I had a look at the list of names at the Cleveland facility, which was not an integrated steel plant like those in Toledo, Perry and Zenith. I have a mountain of memos from the 1950s-60s with correspondence between the coke plant at Cleveland and I realized some of these names were familliar!

It is disappointing that there are no titles to go along with these 16 names, but I already found documents on six of them. I may find more as I certainly will continue to look. (update: I checked some documents at home, which were never scanned for the Document Archive and found five more names, so now 8 of 16!)

• Cleveland
  • T.F. Bell
  • H.W. Campbell
  • C.H. Christian
  • J.P. Fagan
  • J.B. Hazle
  • M.G. Hungerford
  • P.J. Kettler
  • J.H. McDaniel
  • J.A. Mitchell
  • F.L. Ohnesorge
  • K.H. Oliver
  • D.C. Ross
  • F.J. Thelen
  • R.W. Thompson
  • H.E. Weeks
  • H.R. Zoll
• Chicago
  • C.P. Johnson
  • E.C. Larson
  • H.R. Nicklaus
• Toledo
  • Ralph Bihn
  • B.H. Carmichael
  • J.L. Johnson
  • Geo. Cortman
• Perry
  • A.W. Krause
  • B.J. Minier
  • W.C. Portz
• Zenith
  • J.J. Hall
  • C.G. Rigstad
  • Dan Rude
  • M.J. Webb