Grand Rapids Heroism

Last week one of the oldest and most famed furniture companies in the U. S. came completely to life again after five years of coma. In central Michigan, at the dejected heart of the old line furniture industry, the idle Grand Rapids plants of Berkey & Gay had served many a Depression-worn manufacturer as a symbol of paralysis. Last week Berkey & Gay was counting orders received at its first spring furniture show since 1931 while thousands of Grand Rapids citizens, filing through its show rooms, glowed with prospects of new jobs, new business, new publicity.

Nucleus of the company was formed in 1853 by the two brothers Berkey, Julius and William, one of whom had taken an afternoon off from logging in the Grand River to hew himself a table. Twenty years later the company was incorporated with $500,000 capital, and the great period of Grand Rapids furniture began. The Eastern market was opened to Grand Rapids when a suite (a "suit" not a "sweet," in the furniture business) by Berkey won a gold medal at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876. After that, through the American Victorian, Eastlake, Mission and the Golden Oak periods, Berkey and Gay and the other firms which grew up around it built up Grand Rapids as a home of honest craftsmanship, if not of inspired design.

For the unhappy hiatus in Berkey & Gay's life, the solid citizens of Grand Rapids blame the well-meaning but ill-timed effort of Zalmon G. Simmons, then head of Simmons Co. (beds), to break down the conservative tradition of Grand Rapids merchandising. This was a tradition of virtual subservience to dealers. Beginning with the first Berkey Grand Rapids furniture show in 1878, buyers from widely different localities had been allowed endless caprice. People in the U. S. had formed no assured taste in furniture, and Grand Rapids manufacturers made no attempt to form a taste for them. Berkey & Gay sold its furniture through exclusive dealers who more or less dictated the company's output and prices.

In 1929 Simmons Co. bought Berkey & Gay, put in a new management. At that time Berkey & Gay was doing a business of nearly $10,000,000 per year, making most of Grand Rapids' share (33%) of the fine period reproductions in the U. S. It was Bedman Simmons' belief that if the exclusive dealerships were abolished, the semi-annual furniture shows allowed to lapse and standard Berkey & Gay furniture distributed through Simmons warehouses to a mass market awakened by national advertising, the old name and the new methods would be good for an annual business of at least $20,000,000.

The year that Mr. Simmons decided to build a furniture General Motors, the U. S. furniture industry began to feel Depression in all its joints. In one of the earliest and most resounding Wall Street collapses. Simmons stock plummeted from $188 per share in September 1929 to $11 in 1930. The insolvency record of the furniture industry went from 79 manufacturers with total liabilities of $3,710,000 in 1929 to 143 manufacturers with liabilities of $11,223,000 in 1932. Included in the latter figure was Berkey & Gay, which closed down its plants in 1931, went into receivership in February 1932.

Grand Rapids provisionally accepted the calamity but never really believed it. It was certainly not the fault of Grand Rapids, said its citizens, but of the evil loose in the world and the merchandising policies of Simmons. In 1934 the City of Grand Rapids hired an industrial engineer to survey the possibilities of reopening Berkey & Gay. Grand Rapids businessmen went into a huddle with promoters. Promoter Frank Donald McKay, who had worked in Grand Rapids furniture factories as a boy. had a long string of organizations and reorganizations to his credit. Poker-faced, astute, potent in Michigan politics, he served as State Treasurer (1924-30), says that politics is his hobby, that he gives "95% of his time to business, 5% to politics."

Promoter McKay and his partner, Abe Dembinsky, onetime Detroit auctioneer, bought the $2,000,000 Berkey & Gay property last spring for $75,000 in cash and assumption of tax liabilities amounting to $180,000. They sounded out the old dealers who had held Berkey & Gay franchises, found 124 of them ready to give estimates of a year's requirements. Collecting old-time Berkey & Gay officers for the new company, they hired 300 men to open up one plant last autumn, floated $1,600,000 in new stock, started commercial production last April.

To rehabilitated Berkey & Gay's first showing last fortnight went more than 700 furniture buyers, nearly three times as many as Grand Rapids drew last year, seven times as many as in 1934. Once indifferent to functionalism, Berkey & Gay had recognized the market for modern stuff (27% of all furniture sold last year) by adding to its period reproductions a line of moderns in "softer form, with sweeping rather than boxlike lines." Promoter McKay, now Berkey & Gay's board chairman, became a hero to Grand Rapids. Enough orders were placed to keep his newly-employed workmen busy for five months. Governor Fitzgerald wired congratulations. Beamed Mayor William Timmers: "If it weren't for the fact that hundreds of buyers have come thousands of miles to do business here, I would declare the day a legal holi-day."

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