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Shallcross
family portrait from 1965: (left to right)
in front – Marie, Jason, John Sr.;
in back – John Jr., Jackie, Joan Marie,
Janet.
Industrialist
John Shallcross Sr.
was "a man ahead of his time"
By GARY RIDOUT for the Smithfield Weekly Sun
I moved to
Smithfield in 1985. At that time my father
worked for Carolina Power & Light Company
in Raleigh. CP&L was very interested in
economic development in North Carolina. When
my father heard that I was moving to Johnston
County, he said: "Gary, I want you to meet
this man named John Shallcross. He is an
engine of economic development for that
county."
After I moved to Smithfield, I enjoyed meeting
John Shallcross, his brother Dewees, and some
of his children: John Jr., Janet, and Jason.
The things I learned about John Shallcross
certainly showed me that my father was right.
He was an economic mover and shaker in
Johnston County....
What follows are transcripts of Gary's
recent interviews with key figures in the
John Shallcross story:
John Shallcross Jr. talks about the move to Johnston
County:
My parents got married
in 1948. After the marriage, they went on a nine-month
honeymoon in the continental United States. My father
combined business with pleasure and traveled to all
his customers' businesses across the nation. The last
visit was to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New
Mexico where my father met with some of the people
there. His company in Collingdale, Pennsylvania had
made parts and provided technical advice for the
development of the nuclear bomb used at Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in World War II.
My father was a man ahead of his time....
In 1958, my father moved 300 manufacturing jobs at
Shallcross Manufacturing Company from Pennsylvania to
Selma, North Carolina. The company was shut down for
two weeks and then opened up in Selma without missing
a beat.
Shallcross Manufacturing Company was the second
non-agricultural industry located in Johnston County
(after World War II). The first was The Gerald
Corporation, a company that made raincoats for the
London Fog company. Shallcross Manufacturing was an
electronics company. To ensure that he had trained
employees ready to work, my father made arrangements
to turn the old gymnasium in Selma into a training
facility. This
facility is in Downtown Selma and is now called the
Selma Civic Center.
My father had hired a company to
find a suitable location to relocate to. He was
looking for a favorable labor climate. The company
suggested locations in North Carolina, South
Carolina, and Georgia. North Carolina looked good to
my father because of Pinehurst. While in
Pennsylvania, my father and his buddies would leave
Friday after work, drive all night, play golf all
day Saturday and Sunday, and then drive home all
night Sunday night. When he found out Pinehurst was
only an hour and fifteen minutes from Selma, he was
sold on this area.
Here's the Shallcross Manufacturing plant shortly
after its opening at Selma:
Mike Sutton recalls his recruitment by Mr.
Shallcross:
It was late
August 1958. I was a 29-year-old junior at
N.C. State headed to Kinston for the
weekend. At the placement office on campus I
had learned of a new company in Selma:
Shallcross Manufacturing Company. Arriving
at Selma I found the plant, located on
Preston Street. It was 4:30 p.m. and I was
met with a stampede of cars exiting the
parking lot. I went in the front entrance
and met Ethylene Broadwell at the
switchboard. "I’m looking for a job for the
next year," I told her. "Most everyone has
gone for the day, but let me see who I can
find," she said.
In a
few minutes, an elderly gentleman around 65
named Don O’Halloran came out to meet me. He
introduced himself as sales manager and
asked me what kind of job I was looking for.
I told him I was a junior at N.C. State and
wanted to get a job in industry to learn
from the experience. He told me that I
needed to be talking to John Shallcross.
Moments later, John Shallcross came out and
we talked for a few minutes there in the
lobby of the building. He then led me on a
brief tour of the plant. Afterward he
discussed their need for additional
engineering staff and offered me a job as a
technician which I accepted. I asked when he
wanted me to start: "Tomorrow morning!" he
said. That was my first encounter with the
man.
Some Saturdays a few Shallcross
Manufacturing employees needed to work and
John would occasionally come by the plant
with two or three of his children. He and
his wife, Marie, had four children at that
time. They were Joan Marie(10), Janet(8),
Jackie(5), John Jr.(4). Jason had not yet
been born. He was born later in 1958.
John quickly recognized there was a
desperate need for machinists in the area.
He went to the Westinghouse plant in Raleigh
and hired a man to come to Selma three times
a month to teach the employees the basics of
machine shop. The man came for three years
to teach the Shallcross employees.
Over the next few years, John had
opportunities to attend meetings in the
Raleigh and Durham areas. Frequently, he
would ask me and one or two others to go
with him. Sometimes, Shallcross
Manufacturing needed to be represented at a
meeting with a customer and I would be
included. I think he relied on me to do
these things because of my educational
background and the fact that I had spent
four years in the Air Force – three years in
Europe. As a staff sergeant and NCOIC, I was
responsible for scheduling 16 radio
operators and 16 radio and radar mechanics,
so I had experience working with people in
technical areas.
On completion of my year at Shallcross
Manufacturing, I returned to N.C. State to
continue my studies for a B.S. degree in
electrical engineering. During that year I
frequently stopped to visit the Shallcross
plant on weekend trips to my hometown of
Kinston. My wife, Annie, and young daughter
were living in Kinston during my last year
in college. Stops were a request of John
Shallcross, who wished me to become a
permanent staff engineer with the company.
In 1960, with degree in hand, I resumed
employment at Shallcross Manufacturing. In
1961, my wife Annie and I bought a lot and
built a house in Smithfield.
U.S. Government contracts
In 1962, the N.C.Department
of Commerce had invited John to attend a
meeting concerning NASA at their
Norfolk-Newport News training facility.
John said to me: "I can’t make that meeting,
I need to be here, how about you going?" I
drove to Raleigh and met the group. During
the meeting, we learned about how NASA was
training the astronauts to understand
physical requirements of flight while being
weightless in outer space. One of the
fellows in the Department of Commerce was
Graves Vann. It turned out that Graves
Vann’s wife was Ross Lampe’s sister so we
immediately had a local connection.
The products that Shallcross Manufacturing
was best known for were wire-wound resistors
and DC instruments. When the company first
moved to Selma in 1958, they had a contract
with the United States Government to build
test equipment for electrical vibrators.
These vibrators would create alternate
connections between electrical contacts to
provide a pulsating voltage. This would
allow use of a transformer to produce the
higher voltage required in vacuum-tube
circuitry. This technology became
out-of-date with the advent of solid-state
devices, transistors.
In 1962 the U.S. Government invited three
companies to develop reliable wire-wound
resistors for use in intercontinental
ballistic missiles. The three companies met
in Anaheim, California at the Autonetics
Division of North American Rockwell. The
three were Ultronics in Grand Junction,
Colorado, The Daven Company in Manchester,
New Hampshire, and Shallcross Manufacturing
Company.
The initial Shallcross representatives who
went to Anaheim included Tom Wright and
Clate Huber. The Shallcross team at the
Selma plant included a host of engineers and
technicians: Clem Sharek, Tom Wright, Lamar
Armstrong, Sam Byrd, Gilbert Rose, Bill
Kimball, Pete Medicks, myself, and others,
all frequently seen in and around
Smithfield.
The newly developed high-reliability
wire-wound resistors were selected for use
in the Minuteman III ICBM, various
short-range missile applications, and
electronic equipment for NASA’s space
program.
In 1964, John Shallcross’s family decided to
sell Shallcross Manufacturing to
Cutler-Hammer. John was promised a job with
Cutler-Hammer but in 1966 he decided to run
for a seat in the United States Senate from
North Carolina. At that point, Cutler-Hammer
terminated the agreement about his having a
job with them. Shortly after this,
Cutler-Hammer sold a discontinued
audio-attenuator product line to John
Shallcross.
Mike
Sutton reviews evolution of the
Shallco business:
Because of the 1964 sale to Cutler-Hammer,
John Shallcross was prohibited from using
the Shallcross name in any business venture,
so in 1967 he incorporated a company named
Shallco to produce these attenuators. He
contacted George Brannan and leased the old
Holt Lake bath house from him to house
Shallco.
John wanted me to join him with the new
business. I told him I needed to continue at
Cutler-Hammer but would help nights and
weekends to assist him as much as I could.
By April of 1968, Shallco was fully
operational and I submitted my resignation
to Cutler-Hammer and joined forces with
Shallco. I told John that I would assume
responsibilities of marketing and
engineering. Jere Thomas was responsible for
purchasing and manufacturing, Lloyd Reynolds
was hired to manage the machine shop. There
were 15 employees at Shallco at that time
and all of us were pulling in the same
direction, wearing different hats as
necessary.
My responsibility for marketing and sales
required getting out and "beating the
bushes." Annually, I attended the National
Association of Broadcasters convention,
which met in Washington (D.C.), Chicago,
Houston, and Las Vegas. All of the companies
that used audio attenuators in the
manufacture of consoles for radio and TV
maintained a booth at the convention. I was
able to speak with engineers that staffed
their company’s booths.
During the year we made occasional visits to
customer plants. Included were Gates Radio
of Harris Corporation, Collins Radio of
Rockwell International, Broadcast
Electronics, and others. It was important
for me to show that we produced a quality
product, delivered on time at a competitive
price. We did that and convinced our
customers it was safe and easy to do
business with Shallco.
 Our
staff had grown to about 45 and had become
too cramped for efficient work space and
recognized the need to expand. Shallco
remained at the Holt Lake location until
1980 when Shallco built a 15,000-square-foot
building and relocated to 308 Components
Drive (behind the Outlet Center).
The one thing that really turned a corner
for Shallco and brought John’s son, Jason,
on board was a winning bid at DESC (Defense
Electronics Supply Center) in 1984.
ElectroSwitch had been the sole source for a
200-ampere snap-action switch used by the
Navy year after year. Shallco had been
invited to a product fair at DESC on
specific sole-source items. During my
attendance at the fair I was encouraged to
look at the 200-ampere switch. It was
mammoth compared to Shallco’s low-current
instrument-switch product line. It would be
a challenge for us, but with a full set of
drawings and an offer to sell Shallco a
sample switch, I decided to consider
bidding.
John and I pored over the sample as I
created a set of drawings for Shallco,
enabling us to secure quotes from outside
suppliers. Fingers crossed, we submitted our
bid. Shallco’s bid was 17 cents less than
other qualified suppliers. It was the
turning point in Shallco’s focus to
snap-action power switches as a major
product type to replace the aged
audio-attenuator products and low-power
rotary switches.
I always enjoyed working at Shallco with
John Shallcross, Jason, and all its
employees. At Shallco we were proud to help
provide income and health care for many
families in Johnston County. It is rewarding
to know that the company we started over 50
years ago continues to be a dependable
supplier to national and international
customers in need of quality electrical
switch products. Jason Shallcross has the
leadership qualities to ensure that Shallco
will continue to have a strong industrial
presence well into the 21st Century.
I retired in 1994 after working alongside
John Shallcross almost 40 years. I have
always felt that if you get up in the
morning and can’t wait to go to work, you
have a wonderful job. That’s the way I
always felt when I was working with John
Shallcross. When there was a problem, we
would sit down and discuss it. Sometimes the
solution was John’s and sometimes it was
mine. He was a great person to work with and
I enjoyed an ongoing friendship with him
until his death (on January 6, 2012).
Jason
Shallcross (left) with Mike Sutton in a
recent photo:
Jason Shallcross recounts his professional
odyssey:
I was finishing up my degree in Industrial
Engineering at North Carolina State
University in 1982. My father said "we need
to think about bringing you into the
company." Mike Sutton said to my father: "Jason
needs to bring something to the company. We
don’t need to teach him our bad habits!"
So I went to work for Siemens and moved all
around the country with them. I was in
Atlanta, Dallas, Cincinnati, Wichita Falls
in Texas, New Orleans, and several other
locations. Then I went to work for W.H.
Brady in Milwaukee and Atlanta. W.H. Brady
made membrane switches. After about two
years, I came back to Smithfield and worked
at Shallco.
Mike Sutton was instrumental in making
Shallco what it is today. His work in the
engineering, drawing, and documentation area
has helped the company grow and thrive. Mike
put us in the position to win the U.S Navy
switches bid. The winning of that bid was
huge. It catapulted Shallco into a big
expansion. My father called me and said:
"We’ve gotten a hold of something and we
feel like we need more help, so do you want
to come to Smithfield and help us?”
"Yes, I do!" I said, and the rest is
history.
John
Shallcross
Jr. talks about the Ranch Redwood startup:
For most of
his career, my father had always sold
electronics equipment to original equipment
manufacturers. He decided he wanted to sell
products direct to the consumer, so in 1969
he looked into a company called Redwood
Furniture. It was located in Wayne, New
Jersey. The machinery and the drawings of
the furniture were for sale. As the name
implies, the company made indoor and outdoor
furniture out of redwood.
My father was told that if he was really
serious about buying the business, he needed
to talk to the New York sales
representative, a man named Bert Rosenthal.
They said that Bert had his finger on the
pulse of selling redwood furniture products
in the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut
area and would be an invaluable resource to
learn more about the company. They went on
to say that if Bert would not help in the
sales area, my father shouldn’t buy the
business.
Bert Rosenthal and my father met a few days
later and found out that they were both born
on the same date: November 11, 1919. They
decided that they were meant to work
together because of this connection. My
father bought the assets of the business and
moved it to Smithfield where a manufacturing
company was established and run for 30
years. It was first called Ranch Redwood
Furniture but then was changed to Ranch Wood
Products. Redwood lumber was becoming hard
to obtain so that necessitated the change in
the name.
We substituted pressure-treated pine lumber
for the redwood and sold furniture to stores
such as This End Up, Through the Barn Door,
a Virginia company called Pine Factory, and
a company called Handcraft in Raleigh.
Mike
Sutton adds to the Ranch Redwood story:
All the
equipment for the furniture manufacturing
was stored in two tractor trailers up north.
John leased a building from Frank Holding to
house and set up production of the redwood
furniture. It was the old cotton farmers'
warehouse at the corner of Bright Leaf
Boulevard and Rose Street in Smithfield. As
John was getting that business started up,
he turned to me and said: “Mike, I’m making
you vice president of Shallco and I’m going
into town to establish the redwood furniture
business." Later I was made president of
Shallco – from 1983 until 1993.
In 1993, it became apparent that Shallco
needed to establish relations with European
companies. Jason and I went to an industrial
convention in Hanover, Germany and recruited
two companies to work with. One of the
companies was from Germany and the other was
from Austria. Shallco is still working with
the German company today.
John
Shallcross
Jr. talks about other business spinoffs:
My father was
responsible for a lot of things that went on
in this area. With his help, ADI was begun.
ADI stands for Agents and Distributors,
Incorporated and was begun by Bailey
Swertfeger and Chet Barbour. These two men
were sales representatives at Shallcross
Manufacturing and left the company after
Cutler-Hammer purchased it. ADI represented
multiple businesses. The ADI facility
started at the Brannan restaurant location
and moved to a building behind Holt Lake
Barbecue and Seafood.
Another company that spun off from
Shallcross Manufacturing was ASM, which
stood for Arnstrong, Sharek, and Medicks.
That was Lamar Armstrong Sr., Clem Sharek,
and Peter Medicks. They were engineers at
Shallcross Manufacturing and also left after
Cutler-Hammer purchased the company. ASM was
located in a facility on Highway 301 across
from Underwood Funeral Home. My father also
helped Ace Welding get started and he helped
Norwood Thompson start Thompson Salvage.
From a civic standpoint, my father did many
things. He started the United Way in
Johnston County and the Capital Associated
Industries in 1963 and served on the board
of that organization for 17 years. Among
many other things, he was on a regional
study commission for the planning of
Interstate 40 and on the steering committee
for the North Carolina Zoo. He became a
member of the YPO (Young Presidents
Organization) in 1960, which was an
organization of executives who were under 40
years old and headed up companies with over
250 employees. He also poured his energies
into the Smithfield Kiwanis Club, Boy
Scouts, and the North Carolina Republican
Party.
John
Shallcross
Jr. talks about his father the
aviator:
When my father moved to Johnston County in
the late 1950s, he had to be able to get
back to the Northeast quickly so he could
continue to call on the industries they had
been supplying electronic parts when they
were located in Pennsylvania. His solution
was to become a pilot and buy an airplane.
 My
dad took
flying lessons from Myrtle Thompson, a local
aviation hero from Selma. Myrtle’s brother
was A.Z. Thompson who had a junk yard near
the intersection of Preston Street and
Crocker Street in Selma. Near this junk yard
was a 1,200-foot long grass strip. There
were power lines at one end of the grass
strip and a ditch at the other end. At this
time, the Johnston County Airport did not
exist. My father would fly to the Northeast
several times a month using this grassy
strip as his airport. He kept his plane at
the grassy field in a hangar.
When my father was flying home, he would
call the Rocky Mount Airport on his airplane
radio. He would ask them to make a
credit-card call to our house in Smithfield.
He would give out his credit-card number
over the radio. Hundreds of people could
hear the call and the numbers to his credit
card! It was a very different time.
The reason he wanted to call was that he
wanted the lights at Myrtle Thompson's field
to be turned on. There were no lights! There
were four smudge pots at Myrtle's field.
Sometimes they would bring cars up and turn
their lights on, but he didn’t like that
because of the extreme glare caused by the
car lights.
One night, no one answered the call from the
Rocky Mount airport, so he had them call our
neighbor and ask him to call the Selma
Volunteer Fire Department. It was a Tuesday
night so he knew the firefighters were at
the station playing cards and they would go
and light the smudge pots.
When we all got home, the neighbor ran over
and told my mother about the call. Mother
loaded up the car with the five children and
headed to Selma. As she approached the
Myrtle Thompson field, she said fire trucks
and cars parked up and down Highway 95. She
said to us: "OK, he’s finally done it! He’s
killed himself on that airplane!" But then
we looked and there was my father standing
at the airplane having a great time talking
to the firefighters. The firefighters had
decided to bring out all the fire trucks to
the field. When people on Highway 95 saw all
the commotion, they stopped their cars to
check out what was happening. The
rubber-neckers and gawkers had just about
stopped traffic on the Interstate! My mother
summed it up by saying "I’ll never do this
again!"
Janet
Langston recalls her father's interest in
politics and reading:
One day my father wanted to talk to Senator
James Broyhill. We flew to the Broyhill home
in Boone and my father knocked on his door.
He asked to speak to the Senator and we all
went into the Broyhill home while they were
speaking to each other. The Broyhills were
preparing for a gathering that evening and
had food on the table. I noticed some food I
had never seen before. Senator Broyhill said
to me: "Would you like to try that caviar?"
I had heard of caviar before, but never
tasted it. He went on to say: “My wife will
kill me, but we’ll take care of it." He took
some and gave to each of us, then he
smoothed the caviar back and she never knew!
As we have
said, my father was a man ahead of his time.
He was talking about fiber optics before it
was anything that people would talk about.
As far as I ever remember, my father never
read a novel. But he was always reading. He read
trade magazines, newspapers, and other
technical material. In his later years, he
began to go blind. Maxine McFadyen at St.
Paul’s Episcopal Church would come to his
house to read technical material to him.
One day she said to me: "He corrected my
reading! I didn’t know what the words were!
I had never seen some of those words. I
thought when I was going to read to him, I
would be reading a book or an article, not
some deep electronic stuff that I had never
heard of!" Maxine went on to say: "Nobody
ever talked about fiber optics. We talked
about that three years before I ever heard
anyone else mention it."
Added John Jr.: My father had severe
glaucoma which destroyed his optic nerve. He
contacted the Chapin Eye Institute and asked
if he could be a guinea pig for them to do
retinal implants. He wrote back and forth
for several years but he finally realized at
age 80 that they were not going to
experiment on him.
Janet continued: In 1966, my father
ran for the U.S. Senate. He traveled to all
100 counties to campaign. In the summer of
1966, I had just gotten my license, so I
drove him over much of the state. He
received 47% of the vote in November. This
was very impressive because North Carolina
was a heavily Democratic state at that time.
My father was a great letter-writer. He was
always writing letters to members of
Congress, U.S. Senators, and even the
President.
John
Shallcross
Jr. adds to the story about political
connections:
In 1967, my
father took some of the family on a vacation
to California. He took my mother and my
sisters: Janet, Joan Marie, and Jackie.
Jason and I stayed home. While they were
touring California, he told them he wanted
to stop by Sacramento and speak to the
Governor, Ronald Reagan. He wanted to urge
Mr. Reagan to run for President. He was
unable to see him.
In 1968, my father attended the Republican
National Convention in Miami as one of 12
(N.C.) delegates. Richard Nixon and Ronald
Reagan were gathering votes for the
Republican nomination for the Presidency. We
were staying at Fontainebleau Hotel. One day
the Secret Service came to our room and
searched the room. They were turning over
cushions and searching the room. There we
were, the children of John Shallcross,
watching all this. All of sudden, Ronald
Reagan came in and met with my father and
the rest of the North Carolina delegation.
During the convention, the reporter Mike
Wallace interviewed my father.
His motto was: "You don’t hit a home run
every time you go to bat." My father would
swing for the fences every time he went to
bat.
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