Tobe Gets Terrific

"We're big shots now," says Mr. Tobe Deutschmann of Canton, Mass. "But they still send us supplies C.O.D., and I let 'em come that way just to remind myself that I'm not any different now than when this place never even had a drinking fountain."

Tobe's business, which he likes to describe as "the removal of electrical garbage" (noise suppressers to the layman) was never able to support drinking fountains in its old red-brick factory until war came along. Now it's terrific--and a prime example of how a little businessman with unbridled enthusiasm and pixie screwball-ishness can capitalize 14 years of struggle and adversity to make himself invaluable to the war effort.

Tobe talked himself into the radio business on a shoestring after the last war, made $68,000 in 1927 on condensers. But that year an engineer showed him how a filter would eliminate static--and since then Tobe hasn't been interested in anything else. "Everybody was making condensers, but nobody was suppressing noises. That was a real service--and I figure you have no right to be in business and make a profit unless you offer a service."

Trouble was, nobody much wanted him to render his service. Since Tobe's noise suppressers go on everything but the radio, he had to try to sell vacuum-cleaner and hair-dryer and clock and fan and telephone manufacturers on adding it to their products. In the depression most of them had enough trouble as it was, without monkeying with a radio silencer no one had ever heard of.

By 1936 Tobe Deutschmann Co. was down to 40 workers ("all engineers and no workmen"), from 200 in 1928. His machinery was rusting, the floors sagging, windows broken, ceilings cobwebbed. Grass grew in the driveway that led to the Rising Sun Stove Polish factory he bought in plush '28. Tobe's engineers became expert in repairing broken-down equipment with bailing wire and tweezers. The only way they kept alive at all was on small specialty jobsQ+ike keeping the tenants from moving out of an apartment house en masse because of radio static, whose source they finally traced to the thermostat in a goldfish bowl. But they learned as much about static as anyone else in the U.S.

"Then," says Tobe--who looks like a small version of Jimmy Durante, with milder features but just as frenzied a manner--"blood money came along." Tanks, jeeps, etc., with two-way radios had to have noise filters, and the ones available elsewhere were bulky and expensive. Tobe barged into the Signal Corps laboratory at Fort Monmouth, NJ. early in 1940 to try for some business. More to get rid of him than anything else, the Major in charge gave him the toughest problem he had: to make a practical filter for a Diesel generator that so far had rendered useless the radio that had to go in the same car. In two months, Tobe's engineers had the thing licked, and before long they had gone on to develop a new filter for Army cars that cut the old cost from $80 to $15, cut the space it took up by 50 times, saved time, metal, labor.

But it was less than a year ago that Tobe learned he had really clicked. That was the hot August day when he had a phone call from Willys-Overland Vice President Delmar ("Barney") Roos, ask ing "What in hell is this thing we've got to put on our vehicles now?" "This thing" was Tobe's new "Filterette" and the "vehicles" were 18,000 Willys jeeps. Now, by Army specifications, all tactical vehicles, including tanks, must be equipped with his Filterettes--and Tobe Deutschmann expects his 1942 sales to hit $5,000,000, 50 times what he grossed in 1940.

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