Flagpole firm withstands winds of change
Change has swept over San Francisco like a hurricane, but there are bits and pieces of an older city everywhere. You just have to look, sometimes in odd corners of the city.
On Evans Avenue in the Bayview is the world headquarters of L. Ph. Bolander & Sons, which sells flags and flagpoles, a niche business with deep roots in the city. Their products are found atop hotels and stores, and in front of police stations and post offices. Every city hall in the land has at least one flagpole outside, and the top rims of stadiums from Berkeley to the Bronx are crowned with flags snapping in the breeze.
But outside the world of flags and flagpoles, the company operates in obscurity in a nondescript steel building near what used to be Butchertown. It is packed with flags and poles, and the memory of ancient machinery. The American flag outside flies from a flagstaff that dates from the Spanish-American War, and the tradition inside goes back to the company’s beginnings as a wood-planing mill that opened in San Francisco in 1860, the year the Pony Express linked California with the East.
Francis J. Gracier, who came to California from the Azores, founded the firm, turning raw timber into lumber and fine woodwork. After 21 years or so, he turned the operation over to his son-in-law and bookkeeper, Louis Bolander.
Bolander went into the niche business of fine milling, turning Douglas fir timber into masts for ships and flagpoles, using saws and steam-driven lathes. He was an oldstyle man, and called the firm L. Ph. (for Philip) Bolander & Sons. The company has endured through wars (patriotism is good for the flag trade), the Depression and changing styles.
“I am the fifth generation in this company,” said Larry Bolander Sr. He is 73, and his son, Larry Jr., 47, is the sixth generation to work in the family business, a rarity in today’s business world.
“It’s not like working for a corporation, either,” Larry Sr. said. “You want to get it absolutely right because your name is on it.”
There is a pride in the business, and Larry Sr. likes to recite the company’s flagpole hall of fame. “We did the first flagpoles when Candlestick Park opened, we did the flagpoles at the new Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. We did the Oakland Coliseum and the San Jose Earthquakes stadium. We do flags for the Giants, the 49ers, the Warriors,” he said. “You notice all those flags in front of Pier 39? They are ours.”
The Bolanders have business all over. They had a tall order three years ago for a 150-foottall flagpole at a hardware manufacturing company in Montana. But the company’s all-time champ was a 175-foot-tall wooden flagpole that once stood near the railroad station in Palo Alto, set up around the turn of the 20th century.
Years ago, the best flagpoles were made of wood, and the Bolanders turned telephone-pole-size pieces of lumber into slim poles, 8 inches around and 50 and more feet tall.
Jim Phelan, a steeplejack who installs and repairs flagpoles, remembers a childhood visit to the Bolander plant, when Larry Sr.’s uncle, Lou, turned wood on a lathe driven by a leather belt with pulleys and drive shafts. It was an operation that looked like something out of the 19th century.
The Bolanders gave up on wooden poles in the 1970s. “We couldn’t get that grade of timber anymore,” Larry Sr. said. The wood was milled down to its core, and it had to be perfect, no knots, no imperfections.
Now the Bolanders sell aluminum, steel and fiberglass poles. The Evans Avenue plant is full of what they call “blanks,” the raw material — long, round pieces of metal. “We turn them into flagpoles,” Larry Jr. said. That means adding halyards as the flagpole ropes are called, hardware at the top and bottom and, finally, a golden ball at the very top.
Once the flagpoles are sold, they are hauled to the site and set up by contractors, either steeplejacks, like Phelan, or with the aid of large cranes, depending on the complexity of the job. Sometimes the flagpoles are put in place by using a helicopter.
Larry Sr. is not sure about flags and the winds of change in San Francisco. Twenty years ago, he said, the city’s skyline was different. “There were flags flying everywhere,” he said. Now, he said, if you go to new neighborhoods like Mission Bay, there is hardly a flag in sight.
But the flag business is still good, he said. American flags, foreign flags, club flags, banners of sports teams, all sell well. The flagpoles, not so much.
“If it wasn’t for the flag business,” Larry Sr. said, “we would suffer.”