Looking at the early history of Crown
NEW BREMEN — Jim Dicke II spoke at the New Bremen New Knoxville Rotary Club meeting to provide members with a history of Crown Equipment Corporation and how it came to be.
Crown got into the material handling industry in 1960 but the history of the company traces itself back to the 1920s.
In 1927, Jim’s greatuncles Oscar and Allen, along with his grandfather Carl, started a company that manufactured thermostatic controls for home coal burning furnaces called Pioneer Heat Regulatory
Company.
At that point, Oscar, who was the oldest, was an electrical engineer at a time when electrical engineering was in its infancy. Allen was a patent attorney and Carl was the youngest.
With starting the business, Oscar designed the product, Allen handled the patent work and Carl, who was 25 at the time, was the one that the two brothers hired for marketing of the company.
“In that era, home coal burning furnaces were sort of a major source of heat. People were pretty lucky if they had natural gas to turn to as an alternative,” Dicke told Rotarians.
“Most homes were coal burning homes.”
The sale of thermostats and motor stokers was very much dependent on new house construction, said Dicke.
“When a new house was built that tended to be when you installed a system like this — that’s where the sales were,” he said.
Two years after the company was founded, the stock market collapsed in 1929 and new houses were no longer being constructed as quickly as before, and the company put business on hiatus.
“They put the company on mothballs,”
said Dicke. “The company had been located in New Jersey. Carl and his wife Irene moved back to New Bremen where they both were raised. For my dad’s fourth grade school year, he went to school in New Bremen. Other than that he had gone to school in New Jersey and later in Dayton, Ohio.”
Following the bust of the construction market, the brothers sold the business to Master Electric, which was owned by Everett P. Larsh, who hired Carl to be the general manager of the company.
Dicke fast forwarded to World War II and talked of the coal situation in the United States. He said that all the coal that was clean burning was diverted to the Navy to use on its warships. The coal used in homes was a dirty coal and “not very pleasant.”
“By the end of World War II, my grandfather had has his first heart attack at the age of 39. He decided to return to New Bremen and retire,” said Dicke.
Dicke said Carl predicted there was going to be another housing boom in the United States following World War II and wanted to get the thermostat business back up and running.
In 1947, Carl announced that Crown Controls Company was to be started and he and his brothers had an open promise that they could all be involved and Dicke’s father, Jim, would also be involved.
Oscar said no and Allen said yes, but it wasn’t smooth sailing.
“Unlike in the earlier venture, Allen and Carl don’t get along this time,” said Dicke. “It’s obvious that the housing market is not turning back to coal because now coal has a dirty reputation. There is a housing boom, but people are beginning to turn to natural gas. They’re turning to fuel oil, propane, electricity. The thermostats just are not selling.”
With lack of sales, Crown turns its attention to manufacturing television antenna rotators.
“We were in the manufacturing business whether we liked it or not,” said Dicke. “A television antenna rotator actually had very similar mechanical characteristics to a thermostat adapter motor.”
Dicke said they thought this would be something that they could use as a bridge to finding another product that could help keep them in business.
“Dad [Jim] really thought that a television antenna rotator would only last, as a need in the marketplace, for about five years because someone would develop an antenna that wasn’t directional. Well that never happened,” he said. “Antennas to this day are directional.”
Dicke said they would go on to manufacture them up until the year 2000.
Allen decided that he wanted out of the company, as he was still practicing law in New York City and the company was just getting by.
Tragedy would strike on Dec. 17, 1952 when Carl died of a heart attack following a hunting trip in Pennsylvania, at the age of 50.
Following Carl’s death, Jim took over the business, buying his mother’s half of the business for $25,000.
“Then the real work began in trying to figure out what was coming next,” said Dicke.
Crown continued to make television antenna rotators and ultimately partnered with a New York company, the Channel Master Corporation.
Dicke said Channel Master was manufacturing television antenna rotators, but it didn’t work very well.
“Channel Master came to my father and said, ‘Make them for us and we’ll distribute them,’” said Dicke.
At first Jim was not interested but Channel Master came back and said they would buy 1,000 television antenna rotators a day.
“Dad said, ‘Oh, I think we can do that,’” Dicke laughed. “We were making 100 of them a day at that point. All of a sudden we had no promotional cost. We were doing nothing but making them.”
Around 1957, Dicke’s father-in-law Warren Webster suggested that Crown make a hydraulic lift table. They had already been making what was called a “bumper-upper” which was a lift truck that you could use to lift the bumper on the car.
“It’s not a good idea to lift a car by the bumper and they all knew that, so it didn’t sell,” said Dicke.
Other items that Crown manufactured included fishing arrowheads, a Crown saw drill as well as tongs.
Nothing was really taking off and then Tom Bidwell, an engineer at Crown, designed the first forklift and Jim I gave Bidwell permission to find a dealer to sell the lifts.
Bidwell traveled to Cincinnati to the Portman Equipment Company, which was owned by Bill Portman, Sen. Rob Portman’s father.
“He was our first dealer,” said Dicke. “The Portman family was really wonderful to us and that’s where we got our first dealer.”
Dicke said that’s when the lift truck business took off and the mission of the company became trying to make new products and find distribution.
“I tell people that growing a company like Crown is like trying to stand in front of an orchestra and not make it play a different tune, but make it play louder and faster,” he said. “As Crown has grown over the years, we’ve needed to grow in lots of ways. We needed to grow in competence, square footage, product offerings, our ability to distribute the products. It’s like squeezing a balloon that’s got water in it. The problem always pops out somewhere else.”
One more interesting detail that Dicke shared was how the name “Crown” came to be.
He said that his grandfather and his two brothers lived on a farm outside New Bremen in the 1920s and they raised mink on the farm to use for women’s clothing.
“The mink that were raised and used for ladies stoles in the 20s, 30s and 40s was a breed of mink called the Crown mink. They had existing invoices and existing purchase order forms that said Crown on them because of the Crown mink,” he said. “They couldn’t think of a good name for the company. Crown’s not a great name for a company; there are too many Crowns out there. But they decided to call it Crown temporarily while they thought of a better name. Every time that subject has come up, we’ve always said we can’t afford to change the name,” Dicke joked.