BUILDING: Mechanized Marvel

As an ex-Tennesseean turned Yankee industrialist, 66-year-old Melvin H. Baker has not forgotten his Southern hospitality. Last week the boss of Buffalo’s National Gypsum Co. flew out to Medicine Lodge, Kans., to put on a party for the whole surrounding county. Schools were closed, and Baker set up free ice cream, pop and rides on a miniature railroad for 1,200 children, provided coffee, cupcakes and free ashtrays (made of gypsum) for their parents.

In this circus atmosphere, Ringmaster Baker showed off his newest act—one of the world’s most completely mechanized plants. Rock gypsum, mechanically scooped out 20 miles away, is mechanically loaded, hauled to the plant, unloaded, ground, mixed in a paste and sandwiched between paper. Untouched by hand, it is rolled out of the plant as finished gypsum wallboard at the rate of 90 ft. a minute. Total men needed to watch the machinery: 19. In a year, three shifts can produce enough wallboard to build a wall eight feet high from coast to coast.

Beaver Boy. The new plant will help Baker to close the gap in his 26-year race to overtake Sewell Avery’s giant U.S. Gypsum Co. In that race, Baker has already turned in a spring-legged performance. He quit Tennessee’s small Carson-Newman Baptist college after two years, later started selling once-famed “Beaverboard” in the South for the old Beaver Co., rose to sales manager.

Beaver-busy, Baker moved on to Manhattan, was soon vice-president of a credit company. In 1925, when two former Beaver associates came to him with options on rich gypsum ores* near Buffalo, the three teamed up to form National Gypsum, and buck U.S. Gypsum, which then had a virtual monopoly on wallboard. They had $150,000 in capital, and figured that they needed $2,000,000. Baker raised it in four months by sending his salesmen out to sell stock instead of wallboard. In 1926, with a total of 57 employees, he began mining the gypsum and turning out wallboard, mainly by hand. Sales rose to $2,500,000 before Depression crippled the whole U.S. building industry.

The Good Depression. Baker, who had been thriftily putting earnings into reserves, saw the Depression as a fine time to expand. He could not only build new plants cheaply, but buy others at bargain rates. He built and bought, trimmed his costs by constant mechanization, turned up better products, astounded the moribund building trade by selling more materials in 1930 than in 1929. He kept boosting sales throughout the Depression.

Baker was “such a persuasive salesman that in 1938, when he wanted to build a $2,000,000 fiberboard plant in Mobile, he simply gave a dinner in Manhattan for the heads of 10 large investment trusts, raised all the money that very evening.

At World War II’s end, when gloomy Sewell Avery began predicting collapse, Baker set his sights on expansion, began adding more new products. Most recent: rock wool “blankets” for home insulation and a simple roll-on method of refinishing old walls with colored plaster. This year, after spending $41 million on new plants in the postwar years, Baker expects his sales to reach a record $90 million (almost half of U.S. Gypsum), although taxes will trim his net from 1950’s $9,200,000 to about $6,600,000. Despite rearmament’s curbs on building, he expects his sales to keep rising.

*After lumber, gypsum is the single most important U.S. building material. It is used for plaster, lath, walls, ceilings, insulation.