History

I have been asked how we have become a Fourth Generation Company and what is our history.  Since we have been honored to win the St. Louis Business Journal’s “Family Business of the Year” award, I thought this might be a good opportunity to explain some of the company history for those that are interested.  I must admit that in researching for this document, I found some of the facts to be pretty interesting.  A great deal of the historic information was compiled in a book by my dad’s brother, Russell Welsch, who spent a great deal of time and effort researching the history of the Welsch family and as a result, the business.

The earliest record of the business as we know it was in the early 1890’s.  While Russell’s book shows a starting date of around 1891, the Company has always advertised 1895 as the starting date, so that is the date we use.  The company was started by Adam Welsch, my dad’s grandfather.  Adam was a “tinsmith” and the early signs indicate that the business did many things including working with metal gutters and downspouts where tin-smithing experience would have been required.  The place appears to be more like a general store with many different items available for sale as can be seen in the early picture.

The business was located at 5601-05 Manchester Avenue, which was in the far west end of the City of St. Louis.  It is important to remember that in 1895 through probably 1915, very few people had automobiles.  At that time, they were only for the very wealthy.  Therefore, people traveled on foot, by horse, horse and buggy or by horse drawn trolleys.  These trolleys were the forerunners of street cars which in turn have evolved into the Metro-Link system.

Adam had come to this country from Germany in 1864, and had moved around some before settling in St. Louis and opening this new business.  Family legend has it that Adam brought some of his “old country” habits with him.  The one thing his son, my dad’s dad, couldn’t tolerate was beer drinking.  It is said that after the horse was hitched to the wagon on Sunday and the family headed for church, “like a milk wagon horse, with regular stops”, the horse would stop at every tavern and saloon along the way.  Supposedly Adam was also,  found in the shop drinking a beer with one hand while cutting or soldering sheet metal with the other.  Adam died in 1898.  He had four children including three boys and a girl.  Two of the boys moved to other cities, while the girl remained in St. Louis but was not affiliated with the business.  The business was turned over to the remaining son, my dad’s dad, George Louis Welsch, (for whom the writer is named).  One of the company’s early features were “pot-bellied” stoves which provided a great deal of the heating in those days.  They are featured predominately in the early picture of the building.

George Welsch worked very hard in the business, while supporting a family which included three daughters and a son.  These children were a result of his first marriage, which ended when his wife passed away from a serious illness.  Proud of his children, George used a picture of a horse drawn wagon with the four children, with signs proudly saying “G.L. Welsch Guttering and Spouting”.  The horse was a favorite of George’s called “Pinky-Dink”.

After his first wife’s passing, George remarried in 1910 to Janette (Jane) Vassalli.  From this marriage, in 1912, my dad, George Vincent Welsch was born.  The main sources of revenue for the company at that time, besides the pot-bellied stoves, were hardware, guttering, spouting, & sheet metal specialties.  George spent a great deal of time at auctions purchasing items to sell at the store.  Shortly after WWI, and during the 1920’s, central heating, as well as guttering and spouting, became the main sources of income.  Gravity and coal fired furnaces were so prevalent during this period that they even had some manufactured with the WELSCH FURNACE CO. name on the fire door.  Although George L. Welsch had operated the business through some difficult financial times, with the new demand for central heating, he had turned things around and the company was in a fairly stable financial condition by the late 1920’s.  Unfortunately, George L. Welsch contracted cancer and passed away in August of 1929. At the time, my dad, George Vincent Welsch, who went by the nickname “Vee”, was a sophomore at Maplewood High School.

Dad had no choice but to drop out of high school and take over the business.  Dad’s mom, Janette (Jane) Welsch, was a very strong woman and we are sure that she had a great deal to do with running the business.  It is likely that she was the domineering force for several years as dad was learning the business.  Another thing to keep in mind is that it was very unusual in those times for a woman to oversee a business, which undoubtedly made it very difficult for her and yet helped dad move quickly to learn the aspects of running the business.  Two things to note regarding Dad’s taking over the operation of the business.  Remember that George Louis Welsch had one son by his first marriage.  This was Clifford Welsch, who went by the nickname, Bud.  For reasons never explained to me, Bud started his own sheet metal business, Welsch Sheet Metal, which was in Maplewood, a few miles west of Welsch Furnace Co.  Dad also had a younger brother, Russell, who was born in 1927.  Russell was only two years old when it was necessary for dad to take over operation of the business.  Over a period of several years, dad allowed Russell to work in various aspects of the business, with very little success. As a result, Russell moved on and became a manufacturer’s representative and was never affiliated with the business after the 1960’s.

Only two months after dad took over the business, in August 1929, the stock market crashed which began the Great Depression.  The company had to deal with the fact that people had no money, the banks had gone out of business and life in general was in a turmoil.  It is truly amazing, and a testament to my dad’s tenacity that the business managed to survive through that period.  Then to make it even more complicated, just as we were coming out of the depression years, in the late 1930’s, and looking forward to better times ahead in the 1940’s, World War II broke out.  Keep in mind that we were predominantly in the “sheet metal business”, and yet, sheet metal as we know it, was not available for businesses during the war.  The raw materials used for sheet metal were being used for war time products in those days.  In fact, even as late as 1948, three years after the war ended, when dad built a new house for us, he was still unable to buy galvanized sheet steel and the ductwork was made from aluminum.

Before and through the war years, and even up until the late 1940’s, those furnaces which we bought and assembled in the home’s basement were all “gravity” furnaces and most burned coal.  A gravity furnace worked on the principle that since warm air rises, if you heat up air in the basement and run pipes at an angle from the top of the furnace to somewhere in the home, the warm air will rise through those pipes and heat the home.  Similarly, since cold air falls, most of those gravity systems had one large return air grille on the floor of the first floor where the colder air would drop through a large pipe down into the furnace heat exchanger to be warmed to rise again into the home.  These gravity furnaces were adequate at best, but in comparison to the previous pot-bellied stoves they were a considerable improvement.

Not long after the war, natural gas started to become more readily available in residential neighborhoods and that created a new business for the company, installing what was known as a “conversion burner” into the old coal furnaces.  The conversion burner was designed and installed rather simply into the coal furnace with the most difficult part usually being that of running the gas line from the new gas meter location to the furnace. Conversion burner installations were an important part of our company’s business for nearly 10 years following the war.  The conversion burner was by far the most inexpensive way for a homeowner to have gas heat.  The fact that the conversion burners were terribly inefficient was not a big issue for people that would have had to worry about loading coal into their coal fired furnace.

Also, following the end of WWII, and the return of all the soldiers who had been stationed throughout the world, there began a building boom which was unprecedented.  New homes could not be built fast enough to supply the demand.  Here in the Midwest, a man’s dream was to have his own single-family home.  That differed from places like New York, where apartments and similar accommodations were the norm.  Of course, each of these new single-family homes required a furnace.  It was because of that demand that furnace manufacturers developed what they called a “gas designed” furnace.  The importance of being “gas-designed” was to differentiate those furnaces from the older coal furnaces which had been converted to gas.  The new “gas designed” furnaces were far more efficient than the converted coal furnaces.

These new furnaces were not only “gas designed” but they also included a blower assembly to push the air into the home, as opposed to their gravity operated predecessors.  These new furnaces with a blower were called “forced-air” furnaces to differentiate them from the gravity furnaces.  Many of our advertisements of the day proclaimed that we could install a “Gas Designed, Forced Air” Furnace. and that is, in fact what we installed in thousands of new homes from the late 1940’s through the late 1950’s.  It is important to note that the systems of that time were heating only, as air conditioning had not become economically feasible for most residences of that era.

Then came the most important change to the HVAC Industry – the introduction of central air conditioning at an affordable price for residential customers.  In fact, at the end of the 1900’s, in a pole of scholars, air conditioning was voted as the most significant invention of the entire 20^th century (1900’s).  What it provided for us, was a new business, this business was referred to as the “Add-On” air conditioning business because that was exactly what we were doing, we were adding on air conditioning to the homes where we had already installed all the necessary furnaces and ductwork.

The only part of these installations which became a little tricky was caused because the furnaces we had been installing were designed to move heated air only, not cooled air.  Since cold air is heavier than warm air, it required more push by the blower than was typically available in those “heating-only” furnaces.  This meant that it was necessary for us to change the blower motor on the furnace to a larger sized motor in order for the furnace to provide the additional push to move the cooled air.  As an aside, this part of the job was the dirtiest and hardest.  Since I was the newest, and the boss’s son, I was typically given the job of changing those dirty, filthy, blower motors.  I was given several menial type jobs to perform during the summer of both my high school and college years, but changing these blower motors was the worst.

This “Add-On” air conditioning business lasted throughout most of the 1960’s, but by the latter part of that decade, all of the homes where it was economically feasible to have air conditioning installed, had air conditioning.  Since we had been installing air conditioning in the new construction homes since the early 1960’s the add-on market no longer existed. Therefore, our company shifted focus again to the new residential construction market.  We became the dominant installing contractor throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s, installing complete heating and air conditioning systems in thousands of homes during that period.

Having the need to be extremely efficient in fabricating the ductwork, and merging the ductwork with the purchased sheet metal items and equipment, it was necessary to consider a move from our 70+ year old facility. By that time the offices and shop consisted of seven different building which had been pieced together to make up the entire operation.  Being on the side of a hill meant that there were several different levels with ramps leading from one building to the other.  All in all, not a very efficient way to run the business. As a result, we designed and built a complete new facility on Lackland Road in St. Louis County near Page and Interstate 270.  To say that the new building provided a much more efficient means of operating would be an understatement.  In addition, being only two blocks from the Interstate allowed us to move efficiently in any direction.  It should be noted that we were fortunate to sell our Manchester Building to a company located next door to us there.  They gave us some time to clean out the old location.  You can imagine that having been in the buildings for 70 years, we found several items, including tools, for which there was no one alive, even my dad, which could be identified.

One thing which we noted during those times where we concentrated on Residential New Construction, was that there was a significant downturn in that new residential market every 7 or so years.  We saw it happen in at least 4 or 5 cycles. Being tired of going through those down cycles and finding out about one other fact, brought about a significant change in our business.  That fact was that in 1990, for the first time, more air conditioning units were sold to replace older air conditioners than for new construction.  Those air conditioners which we had begun installing in the 1960’s were beginning to fail.

Those two factors influenced our decision to change our focus and add Service and Replacement of old air conditioning systems to be an important part of our business.  Through a succession of adding personnel we have continued to increase the Service and Replacement portion of our business.  Beginning in 2007, a tremendous downturn in the new construction market occurred so we put even more emphasis on the Service and Replacement portions of our business.  We have continued to place emphasis on those segments.

In a rather ironic turn to the business we perform, because a competing company went out of business, and because we were fortunate enough to have some extremely talented and qualified sheet metal people available, architectural sheet metal started becoming and has continued to grow into a very important portion of our business.  The quality of the beautiful architectural work our crews put out is truly amazing. I say that it is ironic that architectural work has become an important part of our business because, recalling back to the early pictures from over 120 years ago, we are again emphasizing “Guttering and Spouting” as the Pinky-Dink drawn horse cart did in 1909.  We don’t plan to find another horse drawn wagon to advertise that portion of the business.

From the family standpoint, Dad ran the business from the time he took it over in 1929.  I worked during the summer while in high school and college and after graduating from Washington University in Mechanical Engineering, getting married two weeks later and returning from my honeymoon, around June 30, 1963 I began working full time.  During the 1970’s dad turned over more responsibilities to me, as he became more and more interested in Trail’s End Ranch in Steeleville, MO.  We gradually added more and more of the tasks to be my responsibility and in 1982 I became President of the Company.  Since we were never big on titles, this change really meant nothing in the day to day operation of the business.  Since Dad’s passing in 1986, my wife, Carol, and I have been the company’s sole owners.  During my early years with the company we had our share of issues.  Of course, nothing to compare to what dad had to deal with during the Great Depression.

In early 1964, we were informed by four key employees that they were leaving our company to start their own company.  To say this was a shock would be a gross understatement.  These employees were our Custom New Home Salesman, our Sheet Metal Superintendent, and two brothers who were Sheet Metal Foremen, with the one being the shop foreman.  Dad was especially hurt personally by this event because he had helped the Superintendent to purchase some ground on which to develop some apartments and had even given the Superintendent the floor plans from a project he had developed.  It is a great tribute to the loyalty and relationships which Dad had developed among the homebuilding community that we lost virtually no important homebuilders. We were able to move up some other employees and what could have been a disaster, caused some issues, but did not devastate our company.  I never heard and don’t know to this day, if those employees left because I was entering the business.  Interestingly I considered all four friends and the three Sheet Metal Workers had been mentors as I learned the sheet metal portion of the business.

The next major issue to affect the company occurred in 1966.  During the middle of that year, our Local SMACNA Negotiating Committee (I wasn’t involved at that time), and the Leadership of Local #36 had a labor confrontation regarding the issue of a Hiring Hall.  As is usually the case in these issues, the Contractors ended up losing the argument and we now have a Hiring Hall in the contract – but not until we went through a 10-week strike during the middle of the summer of 1966.  I learned a great deal from that labor stoppage, but as long as 10 weeks seemed at the time, we did not really lose a great deal of business because of the strike. However, naturally our overhead continued while we had virtually no revenue coming in.

Following that labor issue, I started to become a little more involved in both the Local and National SMACNA organization.  But it was the next major labor issue which occurred in 1974 that really encouraged me to jump into SMACNA both Locally and Nationally.  That issue had to do with the fund known as SASMI. That is an acronym for “Stabilization Agreement for the Sheet Metal Industry”.  In 1974 we had a strike for the unheard of length of six months.  This strike was detrimental for not only sheet metal contractors but for the entire St. Louis construction industry.  There were buildings under construction which had to declare bankruptcy because the delay was so long.  The facts about this 6-month strike, which I only became aware of later, were actually political.  In 1973, the National SMACNA organization’s Board of Directors had voted to be in opposition to SASMI and to notify all their local chapters.  Unfortunately for St. Louis Contractors, the local Labor Committee Chairman was scheduled to become the SMACNA National President in 1975.  He did not want it on his record that he had agreed to SASMI and then had our contractors in a 6-month strike. The sad fact was that this individual had both a Sheet Metal and Electric company.  While he only employed 6 sheet metal workers who struck, he employed 40 electricians, most of whom continued to work.  In other words, the entire St. Louis Sheet Metal and Construction industry were held hostage in this situation.  Again, as previously, in the end the Contractors lost the argument following the 6-month strike.  When I became aware of the political situations which brought on the 6-month strike, I decided to get involved in the local SMACNA Labor Committee and vowed to make sure that we never went through a situation like that in the future.  I also, became more involved in SMACNA Nationally which culminated in my serving as National SMACNA president in 1988-89.

We have been extremely fortunate over the years to have many very qualified, talented and loyal employees.  Today, our Board of Directors and Management team consisting of, besides Carol and myself are Paul Heimann, Denise Webb and Matt Finch.  While I do not have any immediate plans to retire, I feel very confident that if it were necessary, this management team along with several key employees will insure the success of the company for many years to come.