Moving Metal

With business good during the early 1950s, Reliance obtained 7.5 acres fronting 26 th Street in Vernon and began building. The new warehouse was completed in January 1954.

Gimbel did not complain, however, and since he had Neilan’s ear he began making his mark. Fresh from the aircraft industry, Gimbel knew that structural components made of lighter metals like aluminum and magnesium were becoming valuable commodities as the Cold War heated up and the U.S. military began contracting for new types of aircraft and missiles from local companies such as Northrop, Douglas, North American, and Lockheed. In 1948 he convinced Neilan to establish new product lines, first in aluminum and then in magnesium. As a result, Reliance became one of the nation’s first distributors of those two specialty metals. By that September, aluminum sales were already outrun-

house rather than in a lecture hall. Neilan made Gimbel an offer: join the company for a year, and if he did not like it, then Neilan would pay for his entire graduate education. It was too good to refuse. Gimbel resigned from Northrop on October 28, 1947, and reported to Reliance to start his trial period. Though he was the company’s first trained engineer, Gimbel still had to pay his dues. Indeed, Neilan intended for Gimbel to learn the business from the ground up, and so he started his nephew out as a trainee working in the warehouse, doing every “crappy job you could imagine,” as Gimbel’s longtime colleague Dave Hannah later put it.

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