1964: Armstrong and Macon

By Corinne H. Smith

1964:  I turned seven years old.  I was in Mrs. Felty’s second grade class at Farmdale Elementary School.  Daddy was 35, and he worked as a research chemist at Armstrong Cork Company in Lancaster, Penna.  Mom was a stay-at-home Mom.  We lived on Hathaway Street in West Hempfield Township.  The #1 song on the radio on my seventh birthday was “Baby Love” by The Supremes.  Mom snapped this photograph.

     Daddy worked for Armstrong.  Didn’t everybody’s father work for Armstrong, back in the Lancaster of the 1960s and 1970s?

     The Armstrong Cork Company, later known as Armstrong World Industries, had its beginnings in Thomas Armstrong’s two-man cork-cutting shop in Pittsburgh in 1860.  Technological progress gradually expanded the business into creating insulating corkboard, fiberboard, ceiling board, linoleum, and vinyl flooring.  In the early part of the 20th century, “a new [flooring] factory rose from a cornfield on the edge of Lancaster, Pennsylvania,” according to the official corporate history on the Armstrong web site.  My father was among the many men (at first, almost exclusively men) who were hired at the company’s additional post-war research and development office on Columbia Avenue.  “It was a good place to work at the time,” he says.  He spent 34 years here.

Armstrong Cork Company, Columbia Avenue, Lancaster PA, in late 1950s

     Daddy graduated from Lehigh University with a B.S. in chemistry in 1950.  He was hired by Penn-Dixie to analyze Portland cement at two of its plants:  first at the one in Nazareth, and then at the one in Butler.  He grew bored with the task.  He was the lone chemist on the site; and it was up to him to run the same tests, over and over, day after day.  During one full month in Butler, he didn’t get a single day off.  “I didn’t think that was right,” he says.  He quit the job and came back home to eastern Pennsylvania.

     For the next four years, he worked for Keasbey and Mattison in Ambler.  Here he devised the formulations for asbestos boards.  He figured out the amounts of necessary ingredients, depending on what kind of binders were to be used for the final products.  With thin paper, it was flour; with the thicker paper, it was tapioca; and with heavy millboard, it was Portland cement.  The boards would be purchased by companies that needed fireproof protection.  “I had to walk through the plant every day, and the air was full of asbestos fibers,” he says.  “At that time they didn’t know that asbestos wasn’t good for you.  When it gets into your lungs, it doesn’t dissolve because it’s inorganic.  It’s magnesium aluminum silicate.”  Much use of asbestos in the U.S. was outlawed by the EPA with the Asbestos Ban and Phase Out Rule in 1989.  While Daddy has benefited a bit from some of the resulting legal proceedings for victims, his lungs have sustained only minimal long-term effects from his exposure.  He is lucky. 

     1955 turned out to be an important year, and one of change.  On a blind date my father met Jeanette Banzhoff, a registered nurse from the University of Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia.  She was in charge of the seventh floor of the Maloney section.  Here she once took care of Alexander Maitland Stewart, father of actor Jimmy Stewart.  She gave Jimmy updates over the phone on at least one occasion.  She had also been a student at Penn at the same time that C. Everett Koop was earning his medical doctor’s degree there.  And like my father, she too was originally from Lehigh County.  She also liked music and dancing.

     My future parents were already engaged by the time Daddy interviewed with Armstrong in Lancaster in May 1955.  He’d seen a recruitment ad in the American Chemical Society’s Chemical & Engineering News.  He knew that Armstrong marketed a line of insulation that Keasbey and Mattison manufactured.  He came over for an interview, and he was quickly hired as a research chemist.  After participating in a week-long training and indoctrination session with 15-20 other new hires (held at the Armstrong Manor, the company estate located north of the city), my father embarked on what would be his life-long career.

     In the meantime, he and Jeanette got married in October 1955.  They bought and moved into the little brick Cape Cod house on Hathaway Street in early 1956.  I would eventually show up in November 1957.

 

M. Jeanette Banzhoff & Lewis K. Hosfeld, married October 22, 1955

      At work, Daddy’s specialty became the development and adherence of paint to fiberboard for the creation of ceiling tiles.  Armstrong employees were then encouraged to be innovative.  Daddy lived up to this challenge and was able to file his first patent in 1963.  It described a “Method for Producing Roller Embossed Warp-Resistant Fiberboard.”  This technique was first used on an Armstrong ceiling tile design called Crestmont.  Eventually he would hold seven U.S. patents and two Canadian patents, all dealing with some portion of the process of making and/or painting ceiling tile.  (Click here to see them: U.S., CA-1, CA-2.) 

     White or off-white ceilings weren’t necessarily universal.  Once, an Atlantic City casino ordered brown ceiling tiles.  Some Europeans seemed to favor colored tiles.  Daddy and his associates had to use formulas to guarantee consistent hues for each batch of each tile design.

     Daddy’s job required a fair amount of traveling, too.  Though he sometimes visited suppliers to check on specifications, he most often went to the places where the fiberboard (or later, the mineral wool fiber) was made.  These included the Armstrong facilities in Pensacola, Florida, and in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.  Once he even flew to Munster, Germany.  But the factory he frequented – sometimes as often as a week each month, when I was growing up -- was located in Macon, Georgia.

     The Macon plant made fiberboard for ceiling tile.  Armstrong owned some nearby forests.  Trucks would bring in logs – “Mainly cottonwood and loblolly pine,” as Daddy recalls – and run them through a de-barker.  Then they would be ground down to little particles of wood fiber.  A slurry was made out of this material, and it proceeded through a big forming machine to make the panels.  The last steps involved the applications of a primer and a top coat of paint.  Voila!  You had ceiling tiles.  Well, maybe it wasn’t that simple.

     When I was in second grade, my mother and I got a chance to travel to Macon with my father on one of his business trips.  I was permitted to miss school, since this was an educational experience.  We flew down to Georgia.  Mostly, I remember the heat – both in the usual southern air, and inside the plant itself.  I stood next to a huge vat of floating wood pulp, the slurry.  I couldn’t believe that my father and these other men willingly worked in such a hot and noisy factory.  He told us that the constant walking on these concrete floors was hard on his feet in dress shoes.  He always took extra cushiony insoles along on these trips.  One visit to Macon was enough for Mom and me.

     Armstrong began to emphasize the creation of even more new products.  Its employees developed such items as floor wax, cleaners, and caulking compound.  But in the long run, these endeavors weren’t worth the special effort.  “After a while, Armstrong decided to make just the floors and the ceilings, and let the little guy do the little stuff,” Daddy says.  “And that’s the way it is today.  They dropped the word ‘research’ from the sign.” 

     The kind of work that Daddy did at Armstrong from 1955 to 1989, no longer exists. Since then, advancements have been made in paint technology.  No one has to use slide rules or logarithm charts in order to insure consistent pigment measurements across the board.  In hindsight, it seems as though Daddy was the right person for his job, and he was in the right place at the right time to do it.

     Maybe his work was another reason why our birthday photos became so special to us.  During my childhood, Daddy was often away in Macon, and we didn’t always spend much time together.  Our commitment to this photo tradition meant that for at least a few minutes each year, we would be able to stand shoulder to shoulder and to be with one another.