MANUFACTURING: Glue King Dead

Last month, in Gowanda, N. Y., died a man who had made between $18,000,000 and $25,000,000 out of glue. His name was Richard Wilhelm, and few people outside Gowanda had ever heard of him. Except for a few shares of preferred stock, he owned Peter Cooper Corp. outright, and that company makes more animal glue (a $17,000,000 a year business) than all its competitors combined.

Richard Wilhelm’s glue did not make his company famous because the general public never bought it. Stronger than fish glue (LePage’s, etc., for the home) and vegetable glue (for envelopes), animal glue is used by makers of furniture, abrasives, playing cards. And Richard Wilhelm’s wealth did not make him famous because he hated publicity of any sort.

A German immigrant, Wilhelm (then 31) left glue-jobbing for glue-making in 1897, resolved to make a million dollars in ten years. He chose Gowanda (near Buffalo) because it had a tanning industry, and animal glue is made chiefly from the fleshing of hides. He made his first million in seven years and began to expand. First he bought up the old Peter Cooper Corp., whose famed founder, a New York philanthropist (Cooper Union), was a glue pioneer. By 1930 he had bought competitors in Chicago, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, San Francisco, Hammond, Ind., Springdale, Pa. and Brantford, Ont. He hated travel so much that he never spent a night in a Pullman car. So Gowanda became the U. S. glue capital.

Recluse Wilhelm did well by his home town. He built its enormous Hollywood Theatre, its biggest business block after the fire of 1926. Throughout the depression he kept all his employes (800) in all his plants (8) on full pay. When he died, one of them called him “the most wonderful man that ever lived.”

The childless glue king’s will, 19 words written in 1910, left half the U. S. animal glue industry to his widow, Alice E. (Woodward) Wilhelm. Last week, as the sorrow and confusion in the company subsided, she was elected chairman of Peter Cooper Corp.’s board. Chosen president was William J. Gunnell, Buffalo accountant and recently executive vice president. An outdoors man, he has made bird collections for Buffalo’s Museum of Natural Sciences. To newsmen looking for a new glue king, Accountant Gunnell offered a silence worthy of his predecessor. The chairman, it was explained, did not like the idea of anyone’s seeming to fill her husband’s shoes.