Kirk & Blum Celebrating 100 Years Involved In Industrial Air Pollution Control
Nation's third largest company devoted to industrial air pollution control also fabricated first Crosley auto bodies in early years.
Cincinnati, OH — Long before the public worried about air pollution or being "green," two Cincinnati men partnered up in 1907 with $610 in capital to found Kirk & Blum, one of the nation's first companies dedicated to industrial air pollution control. In May, the company will celebrate its one hundredth anniversary having grown to be the third largest sheet metal contractor in the U.S. with 610 employees, and eight offices east of the Mississippi. The company is still headed by the third generation of the Blum family, but is now part of publicly held CECO Environmental Corp.
Its business is global today, but Kirk & Blum's engineers and craftsmen have been involved in many noteworthy projects at U.S. automotive industry plants, foundries, and other manufacturing/processing facilities. The company's sheet metal craftsmen formed the bodies for prototype Crosley automobiles (a gas miser ahead of its time) in the late 1930's, and built the first machine for cooking Procter & Gamble's Pringles potato chips. And despite credit concerns about the fledgling Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company (now known as ACDelco), K&B built a grinding-dust exhaust system for the new customer in 1918.
Kirk & Blum is a classic example of hard-working Cincinnati entrepreneurs building a business with "sweat equity." Sylvester W. Kirk and Richard J. Blum, both former employees of the Cincinnati Blowpipe Company, opened their business in a rented store front at 232 East Third Street. The company's initial products and services were blowpipe systems, radiator shields, ventilation engineering and industrial dust collection systems. "Blowpipe" is an archaic term for ductwork used to convey dusts from woodworking, tobacco processing, etc. Kirk, the older of the two, was a calloused shop foreman with a volatile temper and numerous missing fingers as a badge of experience. Blum, at 21, was the bookkeeper and salesman whose motto was "Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise."
The company outgrew its rented facility in just four years and built a plant in 1911 across from Redland field, the new ballpark for the Cincinnati Reds. Messrs. Kirk and Blum were both accomplished ballplayers who often worked out with the team in the mornings and befriended many of the players and staff. With its first company-owned plant across from Redland field, K&B's baseball-playing principals gladly produced copper overlays for the counters of the ticket booths, tubes to roll up tarps and any other sheet metal parts needed by their friends at the ballpark.
In 1918, the company moved to 2850 Spring Grove Ave. and acquired several adjoining properties over the next few years. Less-than-ideal for a metal fabrication firm, the three-story facility required that raw material be stored in the basement because of weight considerations. The material would be cut to the needed size, then shuttled to the appropriate floor via an external freight elevator, jokingly referred to as a "vertical aisle" by Blum. Blum's son, Richard Blum Jr., now 92, recalls shuttling the Crosley prototype cars between floors in the building, while working there during his college years.
One of K&B's major "green" projects during this era, which brought a great deal of satisfaction to the owners of the company, was a grinding/buffing dust collection system for Maytag in Newton, Iowa. There were, of course, no OSHA or other regulations governing such "nuisance dusts" at the time. After it was installed, one of the Maytag workers made a lasting impression on Richard Blum when he told him he thought this system saved his life, because he'd previously coughed up blood every night. The dust collection system ended that. According to a testimonial from Maytag, the system collected two tons of dust every nine hours, saving 55 man-hours in clean-up every night and reducing maintenance costs for machinery motors and bearings.
K&B began its regional growth with the establishment of the Liberty Blow Pipe Company in Louisville in 1928, later renamed Liberty Engineering & Manufacturing Company. The company enjoyed good business building ventilation duct for military barracks in the Louisville area, and later for Liberty ships during the war.
During the Depression, all employees of family-oriented K&B agreed to share rolling layoffs to spread the burden but maintain the full staff. The company remains a strong family organization today, holding its annual outing at Cincinnati's Coney Island park on the Ohio River for most of the last 50 years because of the intimacy of the smaller venue.
In WWII, the company was heavily involved in making parts for naval vessels, often visited by touring groups of U.S. Navy veterans and heroes who expressed thanks and encouragement during morale-boosting tours.
Upon returning from his own naval service in WWII, Richard Blum, Jr., became president in 1948, after the deaths of the founding partners in years immediately prior. He jumped on an opportunity to purchase a 90,000 sq. ft. plant near the old Milacron campus in Oakley in 1950. The company has since expanded its footprint to 250,000 sq. ft. on 12 acres with subsequent property acquisitions over the years.
Regional growth for the company continued with K&B's Louisville operation expanding into Lexington and Indianapolis. Today, K&B has operations also in Greensboro, North Carolina, Columbia, Tennessee, Canton, Mississippi, and Defiance, Ohio.
K&B's plants have seen great evolutions in metal fabrication technology that are interesting to note. Prior to the development of arc welding in the 1930's, metals were joined primarily by manual riveting, groove seams or gas welding. Sheets and plates of metal were cut by shearing machines, saws or acetylene torches. Holes and cut-outs were laboriously made by hand or with punching machines. Today, powerful computer-controlled lasers and plasma burners do the same work with extreme precision in a tiny fraction of the time.
Three of founder Richard Blum's grandsons still manage the business today: Rick Blum is president of CECO Environmental, which acquired K&B in 1999. David Blum is president of K&B, and Larry Blum is vice president. Various units of K&B are involved in system consulting and design, metal fabrication, energy management, contracting and component parts manufacture for sale to others.
According to CECO President Richard Blum, K&B is a keystone operation for CECO Environmental, North America's largest turnkey solution provider in the industrial air pollution control and ventilation business. "K&B's extensive resources in fabrication and design, project management, field installation and support complement CECO's other businesses and allow multi-faceted solutions to be fast-tracked by a single entity."
K&B and CECO serve industry leaders in automotive, primary metals, chemical, ethanol, cement, glass, rubber, wood, semiconductor and aerospace markets. The company is enjoying success in China, India, eastern Europe, South America and other developing markets today. CECO is also embarked on a strategy of "horizontal and vertical integration," acquiring companies and technologies to broaden its portfolio of solutions, while strengthening its core capabilities as a sole source. "We have competitors who can do the things we do," says Blum, "but no competitor does all of what we do. This is our strategic advantage as we enter our second century of business."
SOURCE: Kirk & Blum