Jay's photo collection

Jay Patel brought several photos from his collection.          They are both 80's and 90's pictures at the trade shows and get together.        My failing brain does not bring up all the names in the pictures.     Please help me if you can identify them.         Judging from the darkness of hair, the first four photos are probably from the 80's and was probably at the time we were celebrating the Intertech Award for the OPC-B . Laser Scan.          The last two are probably from the 90's when we introduced Quantum 830 laser thermal plate.

Back from left, me, Nick Merchant, Wei Zhu, Mario Rufino, Bob Hallman, Jay Patel

front from left Amando Avancena, Ed Kob, Tore Harms, Jay Hong

from left Jiwan Gandhi, Gordon Jenkins, Jay Patel, Prakash Seth, Ralph Gigi

Jerry Kesselman and Evelyn Patel

Ralph Gigi, AJ Shah, Prakash Seth

Jay and me at a trade show

Jay and MyT Nguyen

These two photo must have been from the mid to late 90's when My developed preheat thermal plate.

mini-mini reunion

Here is the happy mini reunion at the Briar's where we had two reunions in the past.     Jay Patel was in town and the lunch meeting was quickly organized.       Jay's wife Evelyn still works for Sun Chemical in Carlstadt but was in a medical leave until this week and Jay was helping her move around.      He still maintains house in Colorado and reports his two kids have flown out of his house both happily married.          Jenchi Huang reported that his wife is retiring this week and they have been traveling together various parts of the world, South America Cruise , Germany through Rhine River Cruise, etc.      No wonder his knee is hurting and had to leave early for his physical therapy.
Simon looks as good as ever, still enjoys babysitting chores for his youngest son Chris.         I have been warning him that the babysitting job will go away soon as the baby grows up to say around 12 just in case of my wife who is no longer needed by our grandchildren nearby who have grown up to 16 and 12!        So enjoy while he can!        
Happy to see old friends!

from left

Jay Patel, Jenchi Huang, Simon Chu, Ken Shimazu

Financial 1

Financial 1 .         By Mr. Bob Gumbinner

On March 7, 1961, Mr. Halpern sold 30% (150,000 shares) of the Polychrome stock to the public. The IPO was done by Hayden and Stone, a brokerage house in Ohio. The stock was sold at seven dollars a share. Some of the stock was bought by Laird & Co. and Alfred DuPont Dent, one of the principals was elected to the board of Polychrome. The following year, Mr. McNeil of Hayden was elected to the board. Before the public sale, Mr. Halpern had sold at the book value a few share of stock to Bernard Gold, who was Polychrome’s CFO, myself and Kay. He also got back from Myron Doyno, one of Polychrome’s earliest employees the ten per cent of the Polychrome stock he had been given in lieu of salary. Myron for many years represented Polychrome in Canada. In 1963, Polychrome common stock was listed on the American Stock exchange. Over the years, since cash was tight, stock dividends were given. In 1968, a public sale was made of 200,000 shares of Polychrome common stock.

Financial 2

Financial 2                    By Mr. Bob Gumbinner

When we designed the 137 Alexander St. building in 1968, we included a room for a computer. Our first computer was a magnetic drum RAM. Liquid nitrogen was needed to keep the CPU cool. Input was done by punched cards. There was a bank of magnetic tapes to store data and to change the program hard wired boards had to be changed. A few years later we went to an IBM business computer. In 1972, Polychrome bought the 2 Ashburton Ave. property from Mr. Halpern for $910,000.

(KS note      I remember the first electronic calculator purchased at $3000 in late 60' was the opening of the computer era.         When Tore Harms was in the Yonkers production he promoted the use of computer in production.        This early effort met difficulty due to the failing of the computer company he was dealing with (I believe it was called Prime Computer).       He may not have support of the data processing department using Univac and then IBM computer for the financial data processing.)

Site searches 2

Site searches 2 .          By Mr. Bob Gumbinner

However, we were serious about moving the plate manufacturing operations to Philadelphia. We put an option on a building a few blocks from the North Philadelphia airport. As I was to be in charge of this plant, I spent a number of days looking at houses. Jacobs Engineering was hired to design the line to make the Fotomer presensitized grained anodized plates. We were buying a large amount of an imidazoldine for the solution we sold to develop the plates after imaging. Mr. Halpern insisted that we provide space in this Philadelphia plant for this and also to make the diazo sensitizers over my objections. The site where the building was located, although zoned industrial was not zoned for chemical manufacture. The Philadelphia officials whom we met assured us that there would be no problem getting a variance. These included the gentleman who represented the district where the plant was located. A number of the residents, when they heard the word “chemical” objected. We invited a group to visit our plant in Yonkers. There was an election shortly after that and the incumbent, who supported us, lost. Mr. Halpern would not back down and we cancelled the purchase option which had a clause that we would get the zoning change.

Site searches 1

Site searches 1 .     By Mr. Bob Gumbinner

A number of times Mr. Halpern looked for a site to relocate the presensitized plate production. One year, he and I spent many days traveling over much of Orange County, NY. We met a builder at a site in Newburgh who showed us around the county. We later saw a 200-acre farm with a well built stone barn and house on 200 acres in Columbia County, NY which I said we should buy. We drove to Hazelton, Penn. There the industrial development people “CANDO” made a very good presentation. Mr. Halpern was impressed. We sent our plant manager, Leo Golusinski, to check it out. On returning he said “Don’t you dare go there. The workers are hard cold miners and bitter.” John Brunner who had run the sheeter and the finishing of paper plates came from that are and agreed with Leo. We flew to Raleigh NC and were taken by a NC state plane to Asheville. We saw an excellent site by the Swananoa River. The Governor’s assistant took us to lunch on the terrace of the Grove Park Inn. He also showed us several sites near Durham, NC. Realizing we were Jewish, he said he was not going to take us to the Winston Salem area since our staff might not be happy there. We sent Leo Golusinski to Asheville. On his return, he told us there should not be any problems with workers. There had been a strike by the police but it was more of a personal matter. When we lived in Asheville, very few people knew about it. I did not believe Mr. Halpern was serious about moving. It may have been a ploy for union negotiations. Although not a site visit, after Leo Golusionski’s premature death, the plant manager we hired owned a Mohawk plane. He flew us to Delaware to look at a plant where plates were being made by anodizing with silicate. On the way back we had to stop for several hours to avoid a storm.

Other products

Other products         By Mr. Bob Gumbinner

About 1965, Kenichi (Ken) Shimazu was hired. He developed a paper plate with a rose bengal sensitized zinc oxide coating which could be imaged by the Xerox electrostatic process. By using a ferricyanide solution, copes could be run on an offset press. We installed a coater to make these plates in a room attached to the stencil coating section of 2 Ashburton. Kenichi also worked on making films for proofing using the fotomer negative sensitizer and the pyrogallol acetone positive sensitizer with dyes which matched the basic printing ink colors, cyan, magenta, and yellow. A small room was enclosed in the 137 Alexander Street building to apply these to a polyester base.

KS note:  For a long time I was managing the Specialty Product Laboratory, a catch all description of what my group was doing which is everything outside of main products.         Jay Patel joined me in getting most of the things done like the electrostatic master paper and Chrome Guide Color proofing system.       During Rhone Poulanc participation, Jay worked on the OPC-A and after the DIC take over worked on OPC-B which lead to the use in Wall Street Journal resulting in eventual Intertech Awards for the technology.        Jay was also the main force behind the success of CTX in the field.   Later with the help of My Nguyen we produced Quantum 830, the preheat thermal in direct competition agains the then leading Kodak Thermal 830.           Since the focus of the group was non-main line products, our effort could not end just developing products, we by necessity needed to collect market info, do scale up in the plant and even run initial production, field test the products and promote the products at the customer level.          Polychrome was a small company but our group worked almost like a small company within the company and we all had fun doing it as we were able to learn wide variety of tasks necessary for making a laboratory curiosity into a successful products
I was pretty lucky in that the initial non-main products I was involved in eventually became major products for Polychrome.