BIO: Melvin Houston Baker; Buffalo, Erie co., NY

transcribed by W. David Samuelsen for USGenWeb Archives

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History of Northwestern New York: Erie, Niagara, Wyoming, Genesee and
Orleans Counties.
Lewis Historical Pub. Company, pub. about 1947 (?)
Vol. 3 Biographies

MELVIN HOUSTON BAKER

Melvin Houston Baker, president of the National Gypsum Company (building
materials), was born August 11, 1886, in Sevierville, Tennessee, the son of
Joseph and Amanda B. (Fox) Baker. He was a student at the Carson-Newman
College, Jefferson City, Tennessee, for two years. On April 19, 1920, he
married Frances Yeager and they have two children: Melvin H., Jr.. and Jevene
Hope. He is of Scotch-Irish descent and his ancestors came first to Virginia
from England. He is a member of the Newcomen Society of England.

Mr. Baker began his career as a salesman for Miller Manufacturing Company from
1908 to 1912. He joined the Beaver Board Company, as a salesman from 1912 to
1914, becoming sales manager from 1914 to 1922. From 1922 to 1924 he was
vice-president of the American Manufacturers Foreign Credit Underwriters. He
was one of the founders of National Gypsum Company where he Field the position
of vicepresident from 1925 to 1928, when he was elected to his present post as
president.

Mr. Baker is president of National Gypsum (Canada) Limited; and is a director
of the Manufacturers & Traders Trust Company. He is a lecturer on business
administration at the University of Buffalo, and a member of The American
Academy of Political and Social Science.

He served as vice-president of the Buffalo Chamber of Commerce in 1938;
president of the Buffalo Chamber of Commerce, 1939] and 1940; member of the
resolutions committee of the United States Chamber of Commerce in 1940; member
of the committee on post-war planning, National Association of Manufacturers,
1942.

He is chairman (1944) of the Industrial Relations Policy Committee, National
Association of Manufacturers; district chairman of the Committee for Economic
Development, 1944; chairman of the Buffalo Committee for Russian War Relief
since 1943; member of the Buffalo Committee for British War Relief since 1943;
director of the Delaware Avenue Association of Buffalo since 1942; chairman of
the executive committee for Crippled Children's Guild since 5942; director of
the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra Society since 1941; member of the Advisory
Committee for Buffalo United War and Community Fund since 5943; trustee of the
National Safety Couucil, 1944; director of the Buffalo Better Business Bureau,
vice-president of the Buffalc City Planning Association, 1944; director of the
National Association of Manufacturers, 1944; aix director of the Niagara
Frontier Planning Association. 1944.

Mr. Baker is a member of the Westminster Pres byterian Church.

His clubs are: The Buffalo Club, Buffalo Country Club and the Saturn Club of
Buffalo, New York Metropolitan Club of New York City; and the Ogle thorpe Club
of Savannah, Georgia.

His hobbies are golf and hunting.

NATIONAL GYPSUM COMPANY Officers:
Melvin H. Baker, president; Ralph F. Burley, vicepresident in charge of sales;
Gordon H. Tarbell, vicepresident in charge of production; John C. Best,
vicepresident in charge of industrial sales; Dean DeForest Crandell,
vice-president in charge of research; Frank E. Davis, secretary-treasurer;
Charles E. Masters, controller; William M. North, assistant secretary; Harold
Drake, purchasing agent; Robert F. Mackrell, director of transportation;
Daniel F. Hunt, chief engineer. Each of the above is located in the company's
Buffalo office.

Buffalo is the administrative office of this thirty million dollar industry,
and its plants are located in fourteen states from Canada to the Gulf of
Mexico. National Gypsum manufactures more than 550 building products. Its four
hundred sales representatives, operating out of fifteen district sales
offices, serve the public through some ten thousand building materials dealers
in every community from coast to coast. At its wartime minimum the company
employed 3,222 people in its various peacetime plants. This is about one-half
the number expected to be on the post-war payroll in present and projected
operations. In addition during the war 6,109 people were employed in the
government-owned plant - Bluebonnet Ordnance Plant - operated by the company.

This great industry was built around mining, and the production of better
gypsum wallboard and wall plaster. Its organizers knew that fireproof wall
materials were destined to supplement combustible materials then too
frequently used. They also knew it would take efficient manufacturing and keen
merchandising to build the industry envisioned. They also knew that without
ample venture capital the new industry could not hope to survive in the
strongly entrenched competition.

Buffalo was, and still is, central to a vast building market. It was,
therefore, a logical starting point for the new industry. So while plans were
maturing, a quiet but thorough search was undertaken to locate ample gypsum
deposits within reasonable distance from Buffalo, the ideal marketing center.
This search was rewarded by the discovery of a great deposit of practically
pure gypsum in Clarence Center, New York, just thirteen miles outside of
Buffalo.

Land purchases were negotiated covering enough mineral reserves to serve a
mammoth wallboard and plaster plant for approximately one hundred years. While
completing this, Joseph F. Haggerty, a man with unusual imagination, developed
a radically new process for the manufacture of wallboard. Haggerty was a
Buffalo man and former vice-president of Beaverboard Company. Clarence E.
Williams, long experienced in the processing of gypsum, undertook to organize
manufacturing at this first plant. Wilhams was a Chicago man, and formerly
production manager for Beaverboard Company. Melvin H. Baker who had proven a
genius in merchandising, entered the corporation to organize sales, but this
was before the first plant had even been designed. Baker gathered a small
selling organization together, stars from the building materials sales force
which he had previously had. The first assignment in sales was the raising of
two million dollars to build the first mill, now located at Clarence Center,
New York.

Wholly unexperienced in selling securities this group of merchandising men
nevertheless sold the two million dollars worth of stock in a campaign still
referred to as a classic of industrial financing. The needed capital was
raised so quickly that construction could be started long before blueprints
were drawn. In June, 1926. just ten months after the company was incorporated,
wallboard began rolling off the line of what was then the most modern plant of
its kind.

With stock selling over, the sales force could get back into the building
material field they knew so well, to concentrate on selling the new stronger,
lighter, wallboard. But, though they had an exclusive patented product, the
most modern mill in the industry and leases on enough gypsum acreage to
protect production for a hundred years, National was still an unknown company.
Dealers had to be persuaded to switch from old established lines to take on
this new and improved but unknown product.

Those early representatives hammered away at two basic points product and
policy. In one of the earliest pieces of literature turned out by the company
in 1926, Mr. Baker clearly stated the sales policy. "This business,” he wrote,
"is run for the carpenter, contractor and dealer as surely as it is run for
us. Every foot of wallboard we merchandise will pass through a bona fide
dealer. They are the natural people for us to work with. So here's the policy
of National Gypsum Company:

"First of all to produce a product that Is unquestionably the best; second, to
maintain shipping facilities which assure an absolutely satisfactory service;
third, to present to the dealer the clearest-cut, squarest money-making
proposition and to carry out all promises both in the spirit and to the
letter."

National's representatives proved that policy by turning down top-price cash
offers for carloads from other than bona fide dealers. They proved their prod
uct by dramatic, practical demonstrations. And the company backed their claims
by posting a $5,000 bond, an unanswerable challenge to skeptics and scoffers.
National's product became "The Gold Bond Wallboard" and thus was born a
trade-mark that now identifies over one hundred fifty better products for
better building.

All was not easy sailing. Problems were many. Competition was tough and at
times "unconventional," to put it mildly. But hard work, skillfully directed,
brought quick success and in the fall of 1926 it became obvious that expansion
was in order.
 
Tonnage merchandise such as plaster and wallboard cannot be marketed
profitably beyond certain mileage limits. The Clarence Center plant could
maintain a competitive price position only in an area roughly bounded by
Washington, District of Columbia, on the south, Detroit on the west and Albany
on the east. Yet dealers from coast to coast, impressed with National's
"dealer first" policy as administered by Baker, were eager to affiliate with
the newcomer in the gypsum wallboard field. Clearly the time was ripe for a
plant to serve Chicago and the Central States.

National sent prospectors to make test drillings in the Grand Rapids area and
in other acceptable locations where gypsum deposits were known to exist. At a
point about 6o miles north of Bay City, Michigan, in an area generally ignored
by gypsum industry prospectors they discovered a deposit much whiter and purer
than any other in the territory. The visible supply would suffice for many
decades of capacity production and, to top that, the rock could be quarried at
very low cost in comparison with a mining operation.

In May, 1927, less than one year after deliveries had begun from the original
plant at Clarence Center, National opened its second plant at the new location
which was named National City. The new company was now in position to serve
two major markets with the finest quality gypsum wallboard, gypsum lath and
gypsum plaster. National entered this second market, not as an unknown
producer, but as the most talked of company in the building material industry.
Up to this point fortune had favored the new company. It had been launched
just before the peak of a Nation-wide building boom - its superior, patented
wallboard satisfied a waiting need and the discovery of two exceptional gypsum
deposits in choice locations had been little short of miraculous. Just what
part brilliant management had to do with National's phenomenal success was
soon to be tested, first by a disastrous price war that wiped Out many long
established gypsum producers and second, by a decline in building that was not
to be curbed for seven long years.

National survived the price war primarily because it was, as the founder of
the business phrased it, "square with the economic law." It could produce a
better product more efficiently than the older companies and it knew its
costs. Its organizers knew at all times exactly how far a price could be cut
to get needed volume without risking actual loss. With a sure knowledge of
fundamental economic conditions, and because of the strong financial condition
of the company due to good management in conserving resources during the two
prosperous years the management was able to expand manufacturing facilities at
the very time when less well managed companies were forced to curtail
operations in order to survive at all. In 1928, National expanded again, not
with another gypsum mill, but into the related building lime field.
 
Every sale of gypsum lath and plaster automatically creates the need for lime
for the finish coat. Since Nationals Gold Bond representatives were creating
the need for building lime it was simply good economics to supply that product
as a service to the dealer and as a source of extra income to Gold Bond
salesmen and profit to the company.

For these basic reasons National decided to process and sell building lime
under the now popular Gold Bond trade-mark. They seized the opportunity to
acquire the Luckey Lime & Supply Company which owned a brand new plant with
modern kilns and machinery in the heart of the famous dolomite region of Ohio,
an area which produces practically all the finish lime for the country. Sales
costs per item were reduced and overall volume increased, both factors helped
to further strengthen the financial position of the company so that it was
able to withstand the shock of the 1929 stock market crash with resources
unimpaired and confidence unshaken. Haggerty died in 1929 and Williams retired
because of poor health. Melvin H. Baker then succeeded as president and the
company continued in the hands of a strong organization.

During the ten depression years National made amazing progress under Baker's
guidance and expanded far beyond the rosiest dreams of its founders. Today
National does about twenty-five per cent of the gypsum business for the United
States. It has shown a net profit for every single year of its operation and
increased its volume each succeeding year as well as its relative part of the
industry's total volume of lath, plaster and wallboard.

From 1930 to 1935 National concerned itself chiefly with consolidating its
position and increasing distribution. Research facilities were increased under
the guidance of Dean DeForest Crandell. The vital cash position of the company
was strengthened in anticipation of the market rise that must eventually come.

In July, 1933, Gold Bond acquired the assets of the Macoustic Engineering
Company of Cleveland, Ohio, manufacturers of the best, as well as the best
known, acoustical plaster in America. Gold Bond research improved the basic
formula and in 1934 announced an improved "Macoustic" acoustical plaster with
a noise reduction co-efficient of 54 per cent, at 512 cycles. No other
acoustical plaster came within striking distance of this efficiency until
1940.

In February, 1934, National acquired for cash the metal lath plant and
properties of the Kalman Steel Company, a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel
Company. John Manofsky, the foremost metal lath engineer in the country, was
hired to design new metal products and lath manufacturing equipment.

National immediately assumed a position of importance in the metal lath
industry and has improved that position every year. The manufacture of metal
lath was too small an item to receive the proper amount of attention from the
big steel companies yet too costly an operation for an independent
manufacturer. With National it became a companion product of gypsum plaster,
moved to market through the same channels and called for very little
additional selling expense.
 
     A thorough analysis of the business cycle convinced National’s
executives that the bottom of the depression was reached in 1933 or 1934.
Building volume for those two years was roughly one-twelfth of the average
annual trade If business went to only one-sixth of the 1925-28 level it would
be double the 1934 figures. Clearly, the more sound properties Gold Bond could
acquire the better it could capitalize on a rising market. Accordingly it was
decided to embark on a program of planned expansion.

In August, 1935, National acquired Universal Gypsum & Lime Company. This added
five excellent plants to its chain, one gypsum plant at Akron, New York, to
supplement the Clearance Center facilities, one at Fort Dodge, Iowa, to serve
the north central states and a third at Rotan, Texas, to serve the southwest.
There were also two chemical lime plants, one at York, Pennsylvania, and one
at Oranda, Virginia, both producing high calcium limestone and lime for
agriculture and industry.

In September, 1936, National acquired The Atlantic Gypsum Company which
included a gypsum plaster and board mill at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a
plaster mill in New York City, the Craftex and Sunflex Casein Paint line and
immense gypsum deposits at Cheticamp, Dingwall and Walton, in Nova Scotia.

These amazingly pure deposits were all close to the earth's surface. The
Dingwall quarry, with the purest deposits, was idle because that port had no
adequate harbor facilities. The Canadian Government contracted to dredge and
maintain a harbor at Dingwall and this made available at low cost to the
Eastern Seaboard of the United States a practically inexhaustible supply of
gypsum rock of exceptional purity.

National took advantage of this supply to begin operations in the fast
developing southeastern market. Plans were made for the most modern gypsum
mill in the world to be erected at Tidewater at Savannah, Georgia. The plant
opened in June, 1939, and began operating at 6o per cent. capacity. It showed
a profit from the very first month. It quickly hit peak production but the
demand jumped even faster and it became necessary to increase its capacity in
1940.

In June of the same year National opened a new board plant and a larger
plaster mill in The Bronx, New York. This plant, also supplied with gypsum
from Nova Scotia, eclipsed even the Savannah operation in the advanced nature
of its equipment and methods of gypsum manufacture.

While these expansions of gypsum operations were developing National broadened
its service to the building materials industry by undertaking the manufacture
of wood fibre insulation boards and acoustical board products in a brand new
plant in Mobile, Alabama, close to an unending supply of fast growing southern
timber. This plant, the most advanced in the industry, was built after
intensive research into manufacturing methods and extensive marketing
experience with a long established brand of insulation board.

In 1938 National bought Best Brothers Keene's Cement Company - makers of fine
finish plasters. Their properties included the famous Medicine Lodge, Kansas,
gypsum deposits which produce the world’s finest moulding, dental, orthopedic,
industrial and pottery plasters as well as the famous Best Brother’s Keene’s
Cement which is so far superior to competitive materials that National now
supplies over sixty per cent. of the country’s entire requirements.

In 1939 National filled out its line of sound control products by adding to
its Macoustic plaster and wood fiber products the Acoustimetal System under
the Burgess patents.

National's planned expansion program continued with the acquisition of the
Windsor Paper Mill at Newburgh, New York, to manufacture a lighter, stronger
paper for the liners of its gypsum boards.

The eighteenth plant to be added to National's chain was a new lime plant at
Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. National added the longest rotary kiln in the world
to its already fine equipment, placing itself in position to produce the
finest chemical lime in the industry, as well as a huge tonnage of lime and
limestone products for agriculture and industry.

In April, 1941, National acquired the assets of the General Insulating Company
and almost overnight became a major producer of rock wool insulation.

In 1941 National completed a long term program of expansion and improvements
in its existing plants to capitalize on the building boom of 1941 and in
anticipation of possible wartime requirements. 1941 sales of National Gypsum
Company's products were some twenty-five million dollars - highest in the
company's history.

Then came the war.

The day following Pearl Harbor, Mr. Baker expressed the intention of the
company whole-heartedly to support the President of the United States in the
following telegram:

"The management of this corporation believes that business should go all out
for quick, decisive victory over Japan and to this end, this Company's
resources, technical knowledge and its twenty-one, plants are at your
disposal."

Without waiting for orders from Washington National's research, sales and
production departments redoubled their efforts to find ways in which Gold
Bond's products, plants and organization could be used better to serve the war
effort. The word "redoubled" is used advisedly because large quantities of
important materials were already being supplied to the services of land, sea
and air.

Vastly increased quantities of gypsum boards were required for construction of
cantonments and other buildings for the armed services, for war industries and
housing for war workers. Increased rock wool production was needed for the
insulation of great cold storage plants for the army, navy and air forces and
for similar insulation in cargo transports. High calcium limestone from the
Pennsylvania and Virginia plants went to the steel mills and chemical lime to
the synthetic rubber producers.

Laminated gypsum boards were developed for building fire-safe interior
partitions, exterior walls, and roof decks with important savings of lumber
and steel.

New uses were found for gypsum moulding plasters in the process of
manufacturing self-sealing, rubber liners for airplane fuel tanks and for
faster, more accurate casting of non-ferrous metal parts for tanks and
airplane engines.

The metal lath plant at Niles, Ohio, was equipped for producing the steel
airplane landing mats which have played so important a part in speeding the
air war on all fronts.

The entire capacity of the insulation and acoustical board plant—between seven
and eight million feet per month—was devoted exclusively to production for
government needs.

National's cargo vessel operating between Nova Scotia and the seaboard plants
at Savannah and New York was requisitioned by the government for cargo
transport work. After many months of war service it was torpedoed and sunk in
Pacific waters.

National Gypsum Company supervised the construction of the $25,000,000
Bluebonnet Ordnance plant at MacGregor, Texas, and supplied a complete
management staff to operate it for the government. This mammoth bomb-loading
plant employs upwards of six thousand workers, many of whom will likely find
post-war employment in the expanded operations of National's peacetime
business.

National's planned expansion program, so rudely interrupted by the war, will
be resumed as soon as government restriction on building and manufacturing are
lifted. Meanwhile thorough-going research has established a sound foundation
for postwar business.

One new acquisition - made in 1944 - that of the Kimbalton Lime Company at
Kerns, Virginia, is now in operation with limited pre-war equipment. Their
limestone deposits are of tremendous size and exceptional purity. Development
of a high speed rotary kiln plant at Kerns with processes already proved in
the National's operation at Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, will assure a complete
line of limestone and lime products for the numerous chemical industries,
mills, paper mills, water purification and sewage disposal systems in the
southeastern states. There is also a profitable building trade market for lime
for brick mortar and a perpetual and increasing demand in the agricultural
field for soil improvement and plant pest control.

Plans have been drawn for the erection of a mammoth new gypsum plant at
Baltimore to serve the Virginias, Maryland, Delaware, Southern Pennsylvania
and New Jersey and the northern half of North Carolina more profitably than
the same territory has been served heretofore by the company's plants in New
York State and Savannah, Georgia. Every refinement in gypsum manufacture which
National has developed in its twenty-year history will be incorporated in the
new plant's equipment. Gypsum rock will be delivered to this fourth of
National's tidewater plants from its tidewater quarries in Nova Scotia. In
addition to the building trade the Baltimore plant will annually supply
thousands of tons of agricultural gypsum (land plaster) to the peanut growers
of the south and highly processed gypsum stuccos for many industrial uses.

When the Baltimore plant goes into operation National Gypsum will be
manufacturing over 150 different Gold Bond products from twenty-two plants.
They will be serving upwards of ten thousand building material dealers through
a force of some four hundred sales representatives working out of fifteen
district sales offices. Approximately six thousand workers will be employed in
the various plants.

In spite of its far-flung operations the company's headquarters have remained
at Buffalo where it was originally organized. In 1941 a beautiful, modernistic
office building was erected at 325 Delaware Avenue at a cost of $500,000 which
became the company’s administrative office. Purchasing and accounting is all
done at Buffalo. Operations are under management at plants and district sales
offices, but all of its officers are located at the headquarters office.

Starting with only an idea and a small group of courageous men in 1925 this
industry has grown far beyond the fondest dreams of its founders and the
investors whose venture capital brought it into being.

Plant Locations: Portsmouth, New Hampshire; Bronx, New York; Newburgh, New
York; Clarence Center, New York; Akron, New York; Luckey, Ohio; Bellefonte,
Pennsylvania; York, Pennsylvania; Niles, Ohio; National City, Michigan; Fort
Dodge, Iowa; Medicine Lodge, Kansas; Savannah, Georgia; Mobile, Alabama;
Alexandria, Indiana; Dover, New Jersey; Dubuque, Iowa; Rotan, Texas; Kerns,
Virginia; Saltville, Virginia; Dingwall, Nova Scotia (Quarry); Mansfield,
Massachusetts; Kalamazoo, Michigan.

Sales Offices: New York, New York; Buffalo, New York; Chicago, Illinois;
Boston, Massachusetts; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Washington, District of
Columbia; Atlanta, Georgia; Dallas, Texas; St. Louis, Missouri; Detroit,
Michigan; Cincinnati, Ohio; Kansas City. Missouri; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Bir
mingham, Alabama.

Directors:     Melvin H. Baker, president, National Gypsum Company, Buffalo, New
York; Ralph F. Burley, vice-president, National Gypsum Company,
Buffalo, New York; William M. Currie, president, Currie Products, Ltd.,
Hamilton, Ontario; Elmer E. Finck, partner, Finck & Huber, Buffalo, New York;
Edwin F. Guth, president, E. F. Guth Company, St. Louis. Missouri; Lewis G.
Harriman, president, Manufacturers & Traders Trust Company, Buffalo,
New York; Joseph A. W. Iglehart, partner, W. E. Hutton & Company, New York,
New York; Gordon H. Tarbell. vice-president, National Gypsum Company, Buffalo,
New York.