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A Man in Full
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Business New Haven
1/7/2002
By: BNH
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“The greatest generation,” Tom Brokaw called them in his 2000 book of the same name. They saved the world.
It's difficult for Americans under age 65 to recall what a perilous place the globe was 60 years ago - or how ill-prepared the United States was to cope with a world gone mad with a medieval blood lust.
December 21, 2001 was the shortest day of a year that taught Americans that they - like Europeans and Asians 60 years before - were no longer safe at home, and that the historic insulation afforded us by two great oceans was now a thing of the past. On that day, United Aluminum Corp. Chairman Robert E. Lapides passed away. He was 83.
No one asked Lapides and the millions of others of his generation whether they wanted to fight World War II. No one had to.It was these Americans who stormed the beaches under withering shellfire at Anzio, were chopped to mincemeat at Omaha Beach and weathered the hard rain of kamikazes at Leyte Gulf. They endured, and prevailed.
Bob Lapides went to sea as one of the Navy's youngest destroyer commanders. Hazardous duty, indeed. Carriers and battleships were protected by armor belts, fighter patrols and heavy defensive guns. Mostly, though, they were protected by rings of destroyers who often endured the first and worst blows of an attacking enemy strike force.
On his second command, the U.S.S. Niblack, he was part of an armada preparing to invade Kyushu, Japan in October 1945, to be followed in the spring by an assault on the main island of Honsho. Some War Department officials predicted a million casualties. Lapides was one of the first Americans ashore at Hiroshima to witness the effects of the atomic bombing that ultimately rendered that invasion unnecessary.
If you had called Bob Lapides a war hero, he would have laughed. It was that same spirit of selflessness that marked his long tenure running his family's company, the former United Smelting & Aluminum Co. Not just selflessness, but dedication and persistence. Long after turning over the top positions to his able sons, John and James, Bob was a daily presence on the shop floor - a voice of calm, reason and wisdom at a small business he had taught to survive, even thrive, in the zero-tolerance pressure cooker of global competition. He went to work every day until shorttly before his death. To observe that every employee at the North Haven company admired, respected and even loved the guy is no hyperbole. That's just the way you did things in Bob Lapides' day.
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