Presidents listing

There were eight presidents who served Polychrome during the 54 years of activity.     .    Here is the listing of the blog pages describing them.

Mr. Gregory Halpern    There are numerous references about the founder in this blog, HERE is one.
Mr. Wesley Hennessey  HERE
Mr. Enrique Levy         HERE
Mr. Joseph Piot           HERE
Mr. Donald Wheeler      HERE
Mr. Mel Ettinger          HERE
Mr. Thomas Bittner     HERE
Mr. Robert Hallman     HERE

Mr. Halpern

Mr. Gregory Halpern was born in Gdansk, Poland and immigrated to US before the WW 2.       His major source of education was, like his very prominent contemporary Dr. Edwin Land of Polaroid, the New York Public Library.         While Dr. Land was an inventor Mr. Halpern was a marketeer.        I know his first venture was to sell inks for stencil process which he started with $500 borrowed from his wife Freda who was working for a telephone company at that time.  (perhaps $50,000 worth at today's value?).

Although the Polychrome History 1935-1988 HERE (one of the most read post of this blog) does not mention it, the company grew through timely acquisitions such as Chromatone (offset ink manufacture ) and Speidel (diazo paper coating) and others.         As Mr. Bob Gumbinner's memoir points out, Mr. Halpern often seemed to have acted on his hunch and intuition rather than thorough business analysis popular in business schools nowadays.       

He has often overridden objections from his lieutenants to make his business decisions which  caused considerable pain in business but as the history shows his decision turned out to be important for the company's success.       (Although I was not there, formation of German company was mostly out of his vision and poured million of dollars as well as manpower to make it successful.     Film venture is another example.     Hardly anyone was in agreement in getting into the business.       He railroaded through objections as well as pouring millions into the venture.        I am quite sure that the film business was a very important part of later joint venture with Kodak.         If there were no film part of business which brought immediate savings to the joint venture, Polychrome may have seen the same fate as once mighty 3M who quietly sold its plate business to the joint venture later on.)

Although Mr. Halpern lost control of Polychrome he may have a satisfaction of knowing that  Kodak came out of bankruptcy focusing on the business around the graphic arts business Polychrome brought into the joint venture.

Additional memo from Mr. Gumbinner 12 Anodized plate

I brought some chemically etched sheets to a company in Mount Vernon that did anodizing.  After they were anodized we put them through the silicate and coated them with the diazo.  They produced many more copies than the plates that were not anodized.  Therefore when Century Engineering built the next six brush line to process rolls of aluminum  after the brushing section we installed two deep tanks which had lead pipe lining connected to an anodizer cabinet.  There were 4 foot rubber covered rolls in each tank and a copper clad roll to complete the circuit.  While this worked well, there was considerable leakage of the sulfuric acid solution so we could only use the bottom half of the tanks.  About a year later we had Century Engineering build a third line.