W.C. (Bill) Denison:
The Man
and
His Company
I am a metallurgical engineer who went to work for Abex/Denison Division in March 1967, about four years after the death of W.C. (Bill) Denison. Mr. Denison began the Denison Engineering Company in 1931 and sold it in 1955 to American Brake Shoe. American Brake Shoe, later renamed Abex, manufactured brake shoes and owned and operated more gray iron foundries than any other company in the world.
I learned from other Denison workers that although W.C. didn’t always pay the highest wages in Columbus, Ohio, his company was well respected as a place to work. One employee said it was considered second in the city only to General Motors’ Ternstedt Division. John Fairchild, an employee for a short time in 1946 and later a sales manager for PPG, told me that a newspaper article in the late ’40s listed W.C. as one of the ten highest-paid executives in Ohio, at $275,000 per year.
My interviews of other Denison workers for this book confirmed my impression of W.C. as a benevolent boss, but one who had high expectations for each and every employee. Once, he called the plant from California, and the young operator answered the phone with a simple “H’lo.” W.C. asked, “Whom am I calling?” “Oh, Denison,” the operator replied. “Who do you work for, young lady?” W.C. asked. “Denison,” she replied again. “Not anymore, you don’t!” Bill said. “I am W.C. Denison. Please go to personnel and tell them I just fired you. I expect our operators to answer the telephone in a friendly, businesslike manner, with ‘Hello, this is the Denison Engineering Company.’ ”
I guess I had repeated that story to a few friends in and out of Denison without being sure that it was true until John Cox verified it for me. “Oh, yes,” John said. “That was a true story. In fact, the company president called me into his office and effectively said, ‘John, I want you to fire so and so,’ ” referring to the operator, who worked for John at the time. John steadfastly refused, but the operator---a good employee, according to John--- was let go.
John, now 96, was close to Mr. Denison because of his ability to execute W.C.’s wishes expediently. Mr. Denison was cosmopolitan and lived well wherever he traveled in the pre- and post-World War II era. Like most successful entrepreneurs, he was an eclectic thinker and did not confine his operations to the United States. John, as export manager, was extremely valuable to him in setting up a network of European distributors and also helped arrange his overseas itineraries. John established such a niche for himself that he was almost immune to direction from the man who succeeded Mr. Denison as company president.
After W.C. was graduated from Culver (Indiana) Military Academy, he worked as a salesman for the Willard Storage Battery Company in Cleveland. He met and married Naomi Wilson of Toledo before returning to his hometown of Delaware, Ohio, as general manager of Cook Motor Co. in 1921. He acquired the company---in which his father was a major stockholder---in 1925 and reorganized it under the name of the Denison Engineering Company in 1931.
Frank Norris, Francis Cavanaugh, Howard Levenhagen, and Eulala Smith were among the the company’s first employees. Frank was W.C.’s first shop foreman. His sons Bob and Paul became manager of the Delaware plant and company president, respectively. Clarence “Ducky” Hughes was an early manufacturing leader for W.C., and Ducky’s son, Jack, was later a plant manager. Among others interviewed for this book, Vic Blasutta was a vice president of Abex/Denison Division; Bill Bohannan was manager of the Marysville plant and later vice president of manufacturing; Vic Preidis was a service center manager; and Bruce Horne succeeded Paul Norris as president in 1970.
One of the company’s first products was a hydraulic pusher rod for propelling cars through ceramic kilns. The application not only solved a long-standing problem for the Denison family’s ceramic company in northern Ohio (which was managed by Bill’s brother George) but became used throughout the ceramics industry.
Bill Denison was an entrepreneur in the pure sense of the word. Beyond the pusher rod, he envisioned the widespread application of fluid power to all industrial needs. He watched hydraulic developments closely and pushed his research department for new products. As World War II began, he obtained contracts from the military and began developing an expanded line of hydraulic presses, pumps, motors, and valves to provide the “controlled muscle” of hydraulics to ships’ steering and a wide variety of military applications. Denison presses, since used by most manufacturers all over the world, were used to load shells for the military. The presses were manufactured at the 1160 Dublin Road facility. The plant and the property it sat on, in Columbus’s “Golden Finger” along Dublin Road, has since been sold and converted to other uses.
Denison’s government work served the war effort and added to W.C.’s wealth. The Denison line of piston pumps became recognized as the “Cadillac of its industry.”
Bill Denison made it a point to get into his factory and become acquainted with each worker. He would converse with longtime employees and address them by their first name no matter where he ran across them, even at the famous downtown Columbus intersection of Broad and High.
Year-end bonuses were given at the discretion of Mr. Denison. Cecil Adams’s bonuses were reportedly among the highest because of the brilliance W.C. recognized in him. Cecil was not an engineer, but he was aptly described by Ellis Born, a graduate engineer, as “an intuitive genius.” Mr. Adams was posthumously named Ohio’s Inventor of the Year in 1976, an honor Ellis himself received in 1992. Cecil held more than 100 patents in the United States and a similar number of hydraulic patents overseas.
W.C. liked to gather the employees and hand out awards. According to Bill Alexander, Art Scott, a dedicated employee, was so moved by one of the boss’s benevolent gestures to his workers that he stood up and said something like, “Mr. Denison, if you aren’t the kindest employer in the world, I don’t know who would be.” As he was sitting down after his declaration, Mr. Scott missed his chair and landed right on the floor.
By the time W.C. sold the company to American Brake Shoe, Denison had three manufacturing plants in central Ohio (in Columbus, Delaware, and Marysville), a Service Center and the Denison Research Center in Columbus, and manufacturing and/or distribution outlets in Europe and Japan. Denison products were marketed through a wide array of distribution channels in the fluid power industry.
Away from work, W.C. loved ham radio operations. Ken Goodman, Bill Bohannan, Bob Clouse, and Dan Umberger provided the ham station at Mr. Denison’s farm with many “voluntary” hours of service. W.C. later donated the station to the original Center of Science and Industry (COSI) in Columbus, itself a great idea that Mr. Denison supported. COSI reopened in 2000 at a new location in downtown Columbus and remains one of the finest facilities of its kind in the world.
W.C. also loved amateur softball of the fast-pitch kind and sponsored a fine team in a highly competitive league in Columbus. Bill “Tink” Taylor, who worked in the Columbus plant and had been a star quarterback and all-around athlete for Grandview Heights High School, was one of the finest second basemen of his day and in the summer of 2000 was inducted into the Ohio Softball Hall of Fame. Mr. Denison used to invite Tink into his office to talk about softball and other interests. Tink was an affable conversationalist and knowledgeable about many things, especially sports.
This book will discuss W.C. Denison’s company from its inception through 1978, when I left it. Although I have borrowed from company histories written by marketing manager Bill Alexander, I’m sure that many of the important contributors to Denison manufacturing and the fluid power business have gone unmentioned. I apologize for that. This book is not a comprehensive history, and much of it must be taken as hearsay, long-ago incidents as remembered by the interviewees, many of them, including me, now in their sixth through tenth decades of life.
Mr. Denison knew how to live well and enjoyed rich living, but he also maintained a sincere respect for those who contributed to the company’s success. I hope that the stories in this book convey that.
Sam Kegley
December 2001
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