March/April 2011
Arnold Plant excelled in both his career in the stainless and alloy scrap business and in the industry’s trade associations, leaving a legacy that continues to shine today.
By Jim Fowler
You could say Arnold Plant was single-minded about his career. There was never any doubt whether he’d enter his family’s Baltimore-based recycling business, which was a pioneer in stainless steel and alloy scrap recycling. His professional star rose high along with the growth in those specialized sectors, and at the same time he had what amounted to a second career serving the industry’s trade associations. Throughout his 43-year career, he carried on his family’s scrap tradition while distinguishing himself in the business and association worlds.
Building a Scrap Career
Arnold was born into the scrap business, with recycling connections on both sides of his family. His maternal grandfather, Harry Klaff, left Lithuania in 1897 and settled in Baltimore, where in 1901 he established H. Klaff & Co., an enterprise that handled everything from rags to bones to scrap metal. On his father’s side, the Plant family ran a burlap bag business in Norfolk, Va., and Arnold’s father—Marvin “Huck” Plant—started his own salvage company, buying scrap throughout Virginia. In 1925, after Marvin married Harry Klaff’s daughter, Rena, he joined his father-in-law in the Baltimore scrap business.
H. Klaff was the first company to venture into stainless steel scrap, Arnold Plant asserts. The company’s entry into that business dates back to 1937, when he was just 6 years old. The venture started, he says, when Baltimore’s Rustless Iron & Steel Corp. went bankrupt in the early 1930s. The bank handling the reorganization sent one of its vice presidents, Tom McLaughlin, to become Rustless’ new president and make the company a viable stainless steel producer. McLaughlin and Marvin Plant became friends, playing bridge and golf together. “That’s how we got started selling them scrap,” Arnold says. At the time, he says, Rustless was the only U.S. stainless producer that knew how to make stainless using scrap. “That was the beginning,” he says, “and our family company grew from there.”
H. Klaff’s stainless scrap opportunities expanded when Eastern Stainless Steel, a division of Industrial Stainless (Boston), opened a rolling mill in Baltimore during World War II. The plant initially rolled sheet and plate, then it added a melt shop, Arnold says. Marvin Plant became friends with John Curley Sr., who ran the mill, and later John Curley Jr. Thanks to those relationships, H. Klaff “supplied the mill with all of its scrap in the beginning,” he recalls.
Arnold traces his earliest experiences in the family scrap business to those war years, when he was about 10 years old. He initially accompanied his father to the office on weekends and during the summer, but the real fun came a few years later, when he was allowed out in the yard. Those early hands-on experiences—which Arnold calls “one of the better times in my life”—launched his fascination with equipment and his love of the physical side of the scrap business. “I’d be there when the drivers brought the trucks in,” he recounts. “At 13, I wasn’t able to drive legally, but I made it my job to put the trucks away. I’d park the tractors, trailers, and pickup trucks. It was great.”
Outside the scrapyard, the young Arnold was a “reasonably good” student, strong in math, history, and the sciences, and he loved to play baseball, football, and basketball.
“Playing ball was much easier than studying,” he quips. His sports memories include going with his father and younger brother, Morton (whom he nicknamed “Sonny”), to Baltimore Orioles baseball games and Baltimore Colts football games.
As Arnold continued his studies at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), H. Klaff honed its specialty in not only stainless steel scrap, but also related metals such as nichrome, pure nickel, nickel alloys, Inconel, and straight chromes. Arnold’s love of the scrapyard continued during his summer breaks from college. “I never did anything in the office,” he points out. “You learn by doing, and I learned out in the yard,” by working with the laborers, sorting and baling scrap. The company operated two Logemann balers, and Arnold would persuade one of the operators to go on break so he could take over. “They didn’t mind a break, and I’d run the press for a while,” he says. “Meanwhile, my father and grandfather were watching from the office, pulling their hair out.”
In 1953, Arnold graduated from Wharton with an economics degree. Within four months, he was drafted and assigned to the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen [Md.] Proving Ground in the ordnance technical intelligence group. He assisted the group’s specialists, who analyzed foreign—mostly Chinese—weapons. “I loved my time in the Army,” he says. “It was a blast.”
After his military discharge in 1955, Arnold went straight to work at H. Klaff. “I had a job,” he reasoned. “I didn’t have to go to law school or the Korean War. I just wanted to get to work. I never looked at anything else.” In addition to his fascination with the scrapyard equipment, he liked the people in the industry, their honesty (most of the time, he says) and “the whole atmosphere of the business.” He saw the fun his father had with industry colleagues such as Mike Helbein, Sidney Danziger, Willy Abramson, Louie Gordon. “I knew that my generation could do the same thing—and we did.”
Arnold spent the first 18 months of his full-time scrap career out in the yard, which suited him fine. When he did move inside, he started buying scrap, and he accompanied his father on meetings with Eastern Stainless, eventually taking over the account. He also purchased scrap for brokerage and oversaw the company’s yard operations, including equipment purchasing. Initially, Arnold also did some business with Rustless Iron (which later became Armco Steel), but his brother Morton took over that account when he joined the business. “It was my dad, Morton, and me in Klaff’s stainless operation, and that was great,” Arnold says. “It was the three of us—nobody else touched it.”
By the mid-1970s, H. Klaff supplied scrap to not only Eastern Stainless and Armco in Baltimore, but also other Armco mills in Butler, Pa., and Middletown, Ohio. As the stainless business continued to grow, “the three of us just couldn’t do it all,” Arnold says. “There just weren’t enough hours in the day to do what we wanted to do.” That’s why the Plants considered an acquisition proposal from Steelmet (Pittsburgh) in 1976. “We figured it would be a reasonably comfortable situation because we were well-acquainted with the guys there, so we did the deal,” Arnold says. The partnership didn’t work out, however, and the companies parted ways about five years later.
In 1982, Bill Wottowa of The Samuel G. Keywell Co. (Detroit) approached Arnold and Morton with a different proposal: They could join forces with Keywell, with their Baltimore scrapyard becoming the firm’s Plant Division. The Keywell and Plant families had a long history together, with Marvin Plant and Barney Keywell being “inseparable buddies,” so this merger sounded like an ideal fit, Arnold says. The Plants joined Keywell, and the partnership became a success. “We were just very compatible,” Arnold says. “We fit together well. It just worked.”
In 1988, Arnold’s youngest son, Larry, decided to join his father in Keywell, continuing the family scrap tradition into a fourth generation. “It seems there’s always a Plant in the scrapyard,” Arnold says.
Doing for Others
Despite his busy professional career, Arnold always made time to serve in industry trade associations. He picked up that habit from his father, who was active in the Institute of Scrap Iron and Steel—an ReMA predecessor—in its formative years, especially during World War II. Arnold’s uncle, Jerome Klaff, and one of his cousins, Richard Klaff, also were involved in the National Association of Recycling Industries, another ReMA predecessor. Arnold later held leadership positions in both organizations and ISRI.
Among his NARI roles, Arnold was chair of the Eastern Division and the stainless committee as well as a member of its national board of directors. In ISIS he was president of the Seaboard Chapter and organized that chapter’s popular oyster roast meeting for eight years. (His father started that tradition, he says, and the ReMA Mid-Atlantic Chapter continues to hold the event every fall at Woodholme Country Club in Pikesville, Md.) Arnold also served for six years as chair of the ISIS stainless and alloys committee and four years as chair of that same committee for ISRI.
His greatest long-term impact on the industry’s associations might have been in his role as ISIS convention committee chair, a position he held for 18 years, from 1972 to 1989. Most notably, Arnold persuaded the ISIS board to hold its convention in Las Vegas. Armed with statistics from Caesars Palace, he made the case that conventions in Las Vegas realize better attendance at meetings and sessions than conventions at any other location because delegates want a reason to get away from the tables. The board agreed to try Las Vegas, and ISIS held its convention there for the first time—at Caesars Palace—in 1973. “We were highly successful,” Arnold says. “The meetings were well-attended, we had the largest breakfast meeting [to date], and our members weren’t at the tables that much.”
To this day, Arnold says he loved his time as ISIS convention chair. In fact, he considers his association service to be his biggest contribution to the scrap industry. “That wasn’t a job—it was fun,” he says. “That was doing for others, whereas business is doing for your company and yourself.”
“A Plain, Old Junk Dealer”
In the early 1990s, Arnold Plant faced some dramatic setbacks. He was diagnosed and treated for lung cancer, and Keywell’s two main mill customers in Baltimore closed. By 1998—43 years after he started working full time in scrap—he figured it was time to retire and “for the next generation to take over.”
Looking back, the two aspects of the business he enjoyed most, he says, were “selling to the mills and parking the trucks.” He liked sales because he viewed it as “matching wits” with his stainless customers, whom he praises to this day as being “straightforward and honest. They stated what they needed, didn’t try to bluff, and were interested in buying scrap at a fair price.” He never lost his fondness for the equipment side of the business, and he can still conjure up stories on that subject. One evening, he recalls, he left the office and found his car had two flat tires. At the time, he was coaching his son Larry’s baseball team, and he had to get to the game. “I looked around,” he says, “and decided to borrow one of the company’s Mack tractors. So I threw the baseball gear in the truck and drove off. The kids loved it.” They kept asking him for a ride, he says, and he kept reminding them to focus on the game.
Arnold marvels at the technological advancements in the industry, some during his time, some after his retirement. In the early days of stainless recycling, he notes, metal identification processes were primitive. Suppliers would sprinkle a 40-percent solution of nitric acid—which reacts with copper and brass—over a pile of stainless scrap. If there was smoke, that indicated that there was “something in the pile that didn’t belong,” Arnold says. H. Klaff also trained its sorters to “develop an eye” for aluminum and other metals that didn’t belong in stainless loads. “You just had to learn by being around it,” he says. Now, advanced metal analyzers are standard in the business, and companies that deal with high-grade alloys need sophisticated lab facilities as well. Armed with this technology, today’s recyclers “do a far better job of identification than we did, which the mills are entitled to,” Arnold says. Though he appreciates such technology, he bemoans the lost art of visual metal identification.
Arnold also still feels the loss of his younger brother, Morton, who died in 2007 from an accidental fall. “It was devastating,” he says. “He was a great guy and bright beyond words.” At Arnold’s 65th birthday party in 1996, Morton credited his older brother for giving him the freedom to do his charitable work and rise to the highest ranks within ISIS, which he served as president. “That’s the way we backed each other up,” Arnold says. “There was never any competition between us.”
Does Arnold miss the business in retirement? “As I knew it, I miss it,” he says, though he maintains he wouldn’t enjoy today’s faster-paced industry. “I’m a plain, old junk dealer, and that doesn’t work in today’s crowd.” He still follows the industry’s developments “a bit,” mostly by talking with son Larry and friends in the business. These days, he divides his time between his homes in Maryland and Florida, spending his days running a golf league, working on the computer, talking with friends on the phone, and reading. “I don’t have a Kindle, and I don’t have a Nook—I have a book,” he jests. He and wife Elaine also spend part of each year visiting their children and grandchildren around the country, from California to upstate New York. In short, he is content to watch the scrap industry from the sidelines, allowing his scrap legacy to speak for itself.
Jim Fowler is retired publisher and editorial director of Scrap.
Arnold’s Archives
Born: June 2, 1931, in Baltimore.
Education: Earned a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1953 from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Military Service: Served in the U.S. Army’s ordnance technical intelligence group in Aberdeen, Md., from 1953 to 1955, achieving the rank of corporal.
Family: Married Rosellen Jacobson in 1956. Three children—Harry, Deborah Sue, and Larry—and 18 grandchildren. Married Elaine Caplan in 1978.
Career: Joined H. Klaff & Co. in 1955 and rose to the position of executive vice president. Later served in that same position for Klaff partner company Steelmet, wrapping up his career as senior vice president of Keywell.
Personal Influences: Marvin Plant, Morton Plant, Bill Wottowa of The Samuel G. Keywell Co. (Detroit), Fred Berman of Berman Brothers Iron & Metal Co. (Birmingham, Ala.), Bernie Landau of M.S. Kaplan Co. (Chicago), Bill Marks and Don Loveless of Armco Steel (Baltimore), and Ed Curley Jr. of Eastern Stainless (Baltimore).
Association Involvement: Served as chair of NARI’s Eastern Division and stainless committee as well as a member of its national board of directors, president of ISIS’ Seaboard Chapter and chair of its stainless and alloys committee and convention committee, and chair of ISRI’s stainless and alloys committee and convention committee.
Community and Philanthropic Service: Served as an officer in his synagogue and in leadership positions for The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore and Sinai Hospital of Baltimore.
Honors: Received the Zeke Afram Award from ISIS and ISRI’s Lifetime Achievement Award, with his brother, Morton, in 2005.
Hobbies: Reading and golf.
Arnold Plant excelled in both his career in the stainless and alloy scrap business and in the industry’s trade associations, leaving a legacy that continues to shine today.