For 200 years,
Apeshaw-Hooman Inc. has been one of America’s companies that has continued to
exist, achieving a record of accomplishment and service that should have
consigned it to the corporate ash heap long ago.
Ape-Man, as it’s
referred to in the hip shorthand of
happy and contended employees lunching in well-lit break rooms today,
began more than 200 years ago, when a modestly talented handyman named Abraham
Skittleman opened a furniture store in Philadelphia in 1810. While other
furniture makers concentrated on making finely-crafted work that could be
displayed proudly by the very wealthiest of East Coast families, Skittleman’s
Furniture instead made average furniture that regular people could afford.
“For it is true
when you say I am not a master furniture maker, but for the meager dollars you
pay, it is fine stuff, indeed,” Skittleman once wrote, a philosophy that lives
on in Apeshaw-Hooman today.
In 1835, after
Skittleman died in a tragic lathing accident, the business passed to his only
child, his beloved daughter Mildred, and her newlywed husband, Ephraim B.
Apeshaw. Ephraim was a longshoreman who knew nothing about making furniture but
took over the business so as not to disappoint his new wife and to honor the
memory of his father-in-law. Sadly, the strain of a young marriage and running
a business took its toll on young Mildred, and in 1837, she suffered a nervous
breakdown from which she would never recover. In 1841, when he was assured by
doctors that she would need to remain institutionalized for the remainder of
her days, Apesahw divorced Mildred and changed the name of the company to the
E.B. Apeshaw Furniture Co.
In 1843, he
married his cousin, the former Eunice Apeshaw, and their union of love produced
five children: sons Carl and Chester, and daughters Constance, Catherine and
Victoria. But the responsibilities of caring for such a large family on the
meager wage of a struggling furniture maker took its toll on Apeshaw and he
sought escape more and more in drink. In 1857, while in a drunken stupor,
Apeshaw unwittingly traded two of his children (Chester and Victoria) for the
Buckworth Gold Mining Works, a barely-solvent mining company in some western
state he had never heard of. Upon regaining consciousness, he remained unaware
he had made the trade, and was not made aware of it until 1859, when he
received a telegram telling him his miners had struck a huge vein of lead. When
he asked what the telegram was about, his business manager told him he owned
the mine, and had for two years.
“Say what?”
Apeshaw said, the first recorded use of that term (although more than 100 years
would pass before it would find its way into popular use in Negro street
parlance). More good luck followed in 1861, when the Civil War began, and the
newly renamed Apeshaw Lead Mining Co. produced more than 80 percent of the lead
shot fired by Union guns during the war. By the time Lee met Grant at
Appomattox, thousands had been killed and maimed by Apeshaw lead, and Apeshaw
was a wealthy man.
“Indeed, it is
true, that my hands are awash in blood,” said Apeshaw. “But my pockets are now
filled with money, and such an exchange is one I find acceptable.”
Following the
war, Apeshaw used that wealth to build his business empire. He started a
shipping company and a railroad that helped to tame the West (the towns of
Apeshaw in Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming are all named in
his honor). The Apeshaw Repeating Rifle was a favorite among Western pioneers
and played an important role in civilizing the west against the savage
brutalities of the red-skinned primitives.
During this
time, Apeshaw became fast friends with Carnegie and Hill and Morgan, and
together, they fought hard to maintain the rights and freedoms of
business owners to do as they please with their own property, as well as
others’. Apeshaw soon expanded his mining company to the British Cape Colony in
Africa, drawn by its supply of abundant and inexpensive Negro labor. Soon, he
was friends with Cecil Rhodes, and twice had the honor of an audience with
Queen Victoria.
“I have a
daughter, the youngest, who bears the same name as you,” he told Her Highness.
“We find this
excellent,” Victoria replied. “And, We wonder, where is she now?”
“Verily, I do
not know,” he said.
Alas, the
inevitable end came in 1885, when, in a fit of dementia, Apeshaw jumped off his
yacht anchored off Cape Cod in pursuit of a mermaid he was convinced wanted to
marry him.
“Nay, I hear the
Siren’s Song,” he insisted to others onboard the yacht, who tried to convince
him there was no mermaid. “Do you not hear the Siren’s Song? She calls for me,
I hear it plain as day!”
His body washed
ashore on Nantucket three days later, and was interred on the grounds of his
Philadelphia estate.
Apeshaw’s death was
just the beginning of the company’s troubles. Shortly afterward, his Western
lead mine was veined out and Apeshaw Mining Co. went out of business. The
company’s six ships were all sunk during the Boer War, when a nearsighted
British squadron commander mistook them for enemy battleships off the coast of
Africa despite the fact the Boers had no battleships. Although not a single British shell found its mark, the Apeshaw
ships, rickety and long-neglected, fell apart from the force of just a
near-miss. The Apeshaw and Western Railroad disappeared when Lorenzo B. Apeshaw, a distant cousin and the railroad’s
president, beat up James J. Hill after drunkenly claiming the robber baron made
a pass at his wife, even though Lorenzo was not married at the time. The
company was sold to Hill and absorbed into the Great Northern Railroad for only $1 to make amends.
By 1914, the Apeshaw Co. had been reduced
to nothing more than a single knitting mill in Massachusetts making average
socks that could be afforded by the nation’s poor immigrants who didn’t have
the time to knit their own. But once again history saved the
company’s backside by delivering a war just in time. The company’s knitting
plant was managed by one Klaus A. Hooman, a German immigrant whose brother
served on the General Staff of the Imperial German Army. Seizing the
opportunity, Hooman secured numerous contracts to knit not only socks for the
growing German Army, but pantaloons, underwear and, later, gauze bandages. The contracts
kept Apeshaw Co. alive until 1916 when, sensing a change in the political
winds, Hooman cancelled his contracts with his brother and sought contracts
with the British, Canadian and American armies.
“Dearest Ralph,” Hooman wrote his
brother. “It pains me greatly to leave you abandoned in a moment of such
distress and need, but I know upon which side my bread is buttered.”
Klaus Hooman was a man with little focus
or patience and he may have suffered from what is known today as ADHD, or it
could be that he was simply a hyperactive pain in the ass. Yet this always
annoying restlessness provided with him a forward-thinking vision that paid off
in 1917, when America did indeed enter the war on the side of the Allies and
the company was rewarded with the largest sock and pantaloon contract granted
by the United States Army (the company also received a contract to manufacture
life vests for the United States Navy but the contract was cancelled after it
was learned sub-par materials allowed the vests to become fully waterlogged in
just minutes).
Hooman used the good fortune to maneuver control of the company away from
Nelson “Nelly” Apeshaw, a distant cousin of E. B Apeshaw’s second cousin’s
grandson who had no interest in running the company and never showed up for
work. On Nov. 11, 1918, Klaus Hooman renamed the company Apeshaw-Hooman, Inc.,
and a new chapter in the company’s history had begun.
No comments:
Post a Comment