15 Minutes of Fame

It was Andy Warhol who once said that in the future everybody would be famous for 15 minutes.

Well, I had my 15 minutes one rather ordinary afternoon in 1967.

For the beginning of this story, though, we have to shift back to the early 1960s. Then, unlike today, price fluctuations in metals were in fractions. If they rose 1 cent a pound, for instance, they were described as “soaring.” One year, in fact, when Kaiser Aluminum announced it would boost the price of its ingots 1 cent a pound to 23 cents, it was like a bombshell. In response, Alcoa countered that it would not raise its price, prompting Kaiser to quickly rescind its increase.

During this period, the price of copper remained doggedly at 31 cents a pound. The price had remained at that level so long that one newsman called the market “monochromatic.” On the other hand, when lead advanced to 111/2 cents a pound and zinc to 121/2 cents a pound, these escalations—though also only 1/2 cent a pound—were looked upon as newsworthy. 

In 1963, President Kennedy was assassinated, creating an emotional crisis not only among individuals but in the commodity markets as well. Earlier that year, the president had toured the western states, carrying a message of “conservation” wherever he went. Writing a newsletter at that time titled “Mr. President, The Conservation of Raw Materials Is Also Vital,” I pointed out that “by using scrap, we lessen our dependence on materials shipped from abroad and we save our own natural resources from depletion.”

An enterprising reader sent a copy to the president. In return, I received a letter from then-Vice President Lyndon Johnson in which he wrote, “Your letter to the President presents in comprehensive and succinct form the facts with which we all need to familiarize ourselves if we are to preserve the great economic assets of our country,” adding that “secondary materials constitute a vast and potential stockpile of resources for the country.”

This is all background to the story of my 15 minutes of fame, which had its start when a young man came to my office asking for help on a doctoral study he was doing at the University of Wisconsin on the world copper market. The name of that university aroused in me a sentimental reaction, in part because my association was conducting seminars there during the summer. Also, I was never one to turn away any student in search of information.

While he had managed to secure a voluminous background on primary copper, the student said he was stumped when it came to scrap, which seemed to him a rather arcane subject whose story was unavailable in public libraries.

What followed was a two-hour lecture, a kind of crash course on the scrap industry and particularly copper scrap—the view from the scrap processor’s vantage, a merchant’s approach to the market, how a brass ingotmaker would look at the copper picture and why, a copper consumer’s assessment, nonferrous scrap specifications, and so on. The young man was enthralled, took lots of notes, thanked me, clutched the statistics I gave him, and vanished.

The copper market, however, did not vanish. It continued to perplex and puzzle the analysts as events marched forward. In 1964, for example, a new name—Zambia—emerged from the old Federation of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland. In 1965, a rash of world strikes (particularly in Chile) hit copper. The war in Vietnam was heating up and the Department of Commerce set export quotas of 30,000 tons for copper and copper-bearing scrap as a defense measure.

Then, one fine day in 1967, a day indistinguishable from any other, a man came to see me.

“Remember me?” he asked as we shook hands.

I searched my memory for a clue to his identity. “Frankly, no, I’m sorry,” I said. 

He smiled. “Remember the young fellow from the University of Wisconsin who was writing his thesis on copper?”

“You’re the chap!” I said incredulously. “It’s been a while.”

“Yep,” he replied with a grin, “and I’m a few years older. But,” he added with some pride, “you can now call me doctor.”

“Well, congratulations,” I said, pleased that he had come back to say hello.

“I brought you my thesis,” he said, “it’s just been published. Without your help, I don’t think I could have made it.” With that he handed me a package as heavy as the telephone book.

“Why, thanks, thanks a lot,” I said, flattered. We shook hands again, exchanged a few pleasantries, and he departed.

In my office, I opened the package and read the imposing title: “An Econometric Study of World Copper Demand.”

Flipping through the maze of mathematical charts and graphs, I was sorry I hadn’t paid more attention to differential calculus in college. Reading the thesis was a daunting intellectual challenge, way beyond my limited algebra.

But there, there on one page devoted to copper scrap, against those shadowy charts and graphs whose numbers swam before my eyes, was a smaller number directing me to a footnote. That footnote listed my name and an article I had written and given to the student, an article dealing with the copper scrap market.

I was a footnote in a Ph.D. dissertation! If anyone needed tangible evidence of 15 minutes of fame (and solitary fame at that), there it was in black and white.•