Moving Metal

in and let it bounce around,” or else say, “You know there’s an opportunity here. What do you think about it?” After a round of raucous debate, in which “we always had fun….we always kidded everybody—we loved to tease,” someone would finally announce, “This is going to be it and I hope you agree.” At that point a decision was made. Afterward the five Board members went out together for a late dinner. Rumer noted that the merriment typically carried over into dinner, “when the conversations were just wild—anything was open for discussion.” Henigson added that “when I joined the Board, I hadn’t seen this fellow Bill Rumer for years, but we became fast friends, of course. Bill was quite a clown.” Henigson’s Caltech buddy sometimes got him into trouble with his merrymaking. “Rumer liked cigars,” Henigson later recounted, and “he usually shared them with me during the dinner. By the time I got home I smelled like a cigar, and my wife wouldn’t let me come into the bedroom. She made me take my clothes off and hang them on the back porch to air out.” All the trouble was worth it to Henigson. “We did have an awful lot of fun on that Board,” Rumer agreed. EMERGING FROM THE PACK In the summer of 1964 the company continued Gimbel’s modernization program. In August, Reliance once again expanded the Los Angeles headquarters, bringing the ware- house space there up to 225,000 square feet. Much of the new area was earmarked for the foreign steel that Reliance had begun purchasing in the wake of the 1959 steel strike. It was Reliance’s first direct involvement with the overseas market, and Gimbel believed that it was necessary in order to remain competitive. The modernization program also

entailed expanding the Santa Clara site by 22,000 square feet and, reflecting Gimbel’s desire to be a technological trail- blazer, installing a closed-circuit video system enabling him to monitor the Los Angeles operations in real time. By the end of the year, Reliance had more than 300 employees moving 70,000 tons of metals—the young company was emerging from the rest of the pack as one of the undisputed industry leaders. In April 1965, Gimbel named Zurbach Vice President and put him in charge of marketing and branch operations. This quick promotion came after Zurbach hired public relations consultant Harold Levy and launched several media cam- paigns which were well received and pleased Gimbel. “Our problem is that we have grown so fast in the past few years that our ‘image’ has had trouble catching up with us,” said Gimbel. He believed that many people still viewed the company as a simple warehouse with only a few tons of bar and sheet for sale and no unique processing capabilities. Zurbach was now beginning to change that perception, much to the sorrow of Reliance’s competitors. A public affairs officer with a compet- ing firm confided to Metal Center News , “Frankly, those guys have given me a whale of a lot of trouble lately. Every time my boss sees a story in the papers or a trade magazine about the latest development at Reliance, he calls me in and gives me hell!” During an open house tour of the Santa Clara division in early 1965, Zurbach observed the keen interest generated by the plant’s latest equipment and operations. Soon afterward, he saw the same excited response among Reliance’s stock- holders when they toured the Los Angeles facilities after their annual meeting. Zurbach described it this way: “The enthu- siasm displayed by those who attended these two events

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