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All in the Family
FOUNDERS AWARD
Just the second president (now chairman) of the family firm,
United Aluminum's Robert Lapides sees no reason to end a 106-year
run now — just when it's getting good
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Business New Haven
1/26/1998
By: Michael C. Bingham
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In his self-penned one-page biography, Robert E. Lapides devotes more words - many more words - to his career as a U.S. Navy officer in World War II and the Korean conflict than he does to his 57-year career growing the family business, the United Aluminum Corp. of North Haven.
Maybe that's because Lapides is a destroyer man, one of the youngest ever promoted to commanding officer of a fleet destroyer (for the record, the U.S.S. Dahlgren, in 1943, followed by command of a new ship, the U.S.S. Niblack, in 1945). Even now, at 79, Bob Lapides shares an attitude common to other tin-can men: Let the big-ship boys hog the headlines, fine; but if you want something done, call in a real fighting ship.
The New Haven-born Lapides barely had enough time to call himself an engineer (at least, that's what his Yale diploma said he was) before being called to active duty as a 21-year-old ensign in June 1941 as war raged in Europe and storm clouds gathered in the Pacific.
But an engineer he was, and his posting to the Dahlgren, an experimental engineering ship with a new type of propulsion system, was no accident. Following Pearl Harbor Lapides was assigned to sonar school in Key West; later he would become a noted expert in the vital science (literally so; a German U-boat offensive into the western Atlantic and Caribbean in the months following Pearl Harbor had threatened the lifeline between the U.S. and Britain) of anti-submarine warfare (ASW).
After the war, Lapides returned to New Haven and the family firm, only to be recalled to active duty during the Korean War, where he served on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, advising on ASW training and operations.
That adds up, certainly, to a distinguished military career, particulars of which he recounts with some relish. It's not nearly so easy to get him to talk about his real life's work at the head of a company that is renowned in its field - adhering to its immutable goal of being the best reroll mill in the world - but relatively little-known at home.
Informed that he is to receive this publication's 1998 Founders Award, Bob Lapides' first reaction is, “I didn't found this company.”
No, he did not. Neither did his father. In fact, it was his grandfather, Harris Lapides, an immigrant from Czarist Russia, who in partnership with a man named Carlson founded a scrap metal dealership, Lapides & Carlson, in New Haven in 1892. To complement the scrap operation, in the early years of the new century the pair began a smelting business in Hamden, converting metal scrap into ingots.
Along about that time Harris son (and Robert Lapides' father) Louis Lapides came to work at the firm; not long after, in 1916, the firm was incorporated as the United Smelting & Aluminum Co. In 1914 or '15, Bob Lapides recalls, Louis Lapides made a business decision that would forever alter the company's course.
Stopping at an equipment auction on his way to New York, he purchased a two-high rolling mill for $5,000. “The next day he was offered a 100-percent profit by someone who got to the auction late,” recounts Bob Lapides with a chuckle. “My father said, 'If it's worth $10,000 to you, it's worth $10,000 to us,'” Lapides recounts. “And that's how we started in the rolling business.”
That rolling business, run by patriarch Harris and the precursor to United Aluminum, operated on Commerce Street, in a plant where now stands the Temple Medical building downtown. It became successful enough that in the 1920s, the firm's scrap and secondary smelting operations were spun off as a separate company, Hamden Smelting (later Hamden Steel & Aluminum), which was run by Louis Lapides. Meanwhile his brother, Abe, in the 1920s started his own smelting company, Lapides Metals, on Legion Avenue and Vine Street in New Haven. Thus was born a family industrial empire.
Into that family, and that burgeoning empire, was born Robert Lapides, in 1918. He was a just lad when the rolling business grew as Harris Lapides purchased more mills, installed more equipment and began to melt, cast and hot-roll aluminum down on Commerce Street.
A major market from that time until after World War II was radio condensers (in that pre-transistor age), which required close gauge tolerances to assure accurate tuning. It was United's niche in this market that led to the order of its first Sendzimir rolling mill (or “Z mill”) in 1944. The close gauge forming capabilities of this mill (at the time considered a “Rube Goldberg-type” contraption; United's was the second installed in the U.S.) kept United at the forefront of the precision niche, so much so that in 1961 the company discontinued casting and hot-rolling coils in favor of rerolling larger, higher quality coils on the Sendzimir mill.
Bob Lapides' first introduction to the business came during summer vacations spent working at the plant, doing “whatever needed to be done.” Following graduation from Yale in 1939, he cut his professional teeth working for Corning Glass for a year before joining United full-time in 1940. Then the war intervened.
Returning from the service, Bob Lapides the engineer was instrumental in bringing United into the Sendzimir age, spending nearly a year at another plant to learn the ins and outs of that first Z mill delivered in 1946. “It just kind of fit the niche that we were in,” he recalls. “We weren't in a position where we could compete with the Alcoas and the Reynolds - the big companies. And we didn't want that business. If we'd had to make can stock, we'd go out of business.”
Instead, the company sought to meet the needs of customers demanding painstaking specifications of thickness, width, temper, formability and finish. Typical uses for United products to this day include cosmetics container caps, cable wrap, shoe eyelets, light-bulb screw shells, power transformer windings and the like.
Though he would be slow to acknowledge it, the bulk of that transformation - from mass market to niche market and from low tech to high - was driven by Robert Lapides, engineer and, following the death of Harris Lapides in 1957 (at age 92), when he became the then-65-year-old company's second-ever president, entrepreneur. The remarkable stewardship of grandfather and grandson has lasted 106 years. And counting.
Today, under the leadership of a fourth generation (Bob's oldest son John S. Lapides serves as president, and second son James A. as executive vice president), United is the second-oldest U.S. producer of coiled aluminum sheet products, after Alcoa. In the metal distribution chain, the company occupies the niche between primary mill and distributor. Like a primary mill, United can customize products. Like a distributor, it can deliver small quantities on short deadlines.
For all his vision, Harris Lapides would scant recognize today what he created a century ago.
By the 1960s, the exodus of manufacturing and other businesses from New Haven was in full flight. (From 1947 to 1980, manufacturing jobs in the Elm City declined from 34,500 to 14,500, while suburban jobs of all types skyrocketed from 19,400 to 101,000.)
As the city's economy lagged and the downtown business district deteriorated, then-Mayor Richard C. Lee responding by implementing the nation's first urban renewal program, gutting much of the existing downtown to make way for the Oak Street Connector, the Church Street “big boxes” (Malley's and Macy's) and the Chapel Square Mall.
In the hindsight of many, Lee's gamble was a textbook urban disaster; what it meant to Bob Lapides was that its Commerce Street plant - already obsolete due to the company's growth - would soon face the wrecker's ball.
Since Lee's vision for a downtown filled with shoppers and white-collar workers left no room for smokestack industries, United joined the manufacturing exodus, building a new facility in North Haven that was double the 70,000 square feet it occupied downtown and included additional rolling, slitting and annealing capacity. At the same time, the corporate name was changed to the United Aluminum Corp.
Since then, incremental expansions have increased United's plant size to 200,000 square feet, and the Sendzimir mills today are of course computer-controlled.
Yet among that half-century's litany of accomplishment, the engineering feat Bob Lapides is perhaps most proud of is the least objectifiable: He has engineered a seamless transition from the third generation of owners to the fourth. And, based on family longevity, that ought to be good for at least a few dozen more years or so.
In 1919, decades before anyone had heard of a “mission statement,” United adapted the following “quality policy”:
“Ship on time, ship the quality of goods agreed upon; make every transaction merit a repeat order.”
Nearly 80 years later, that single sentence is remarkable for its unmistakable clarity, its admirable concision - and, of course, its shelf life.
Come to think of it, you could say the same things about Bob Lapides.
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